The Cougar Lounge - Slightly Askew

"Usually, if I throw one out of bounds, it is going to be one heck of a day and I started with one right out of bounds."

- Wazzu women's hammer thrower and discus tosser, McKenzie Garberg, who overcame her boundary issues at the NCAA West Regional to advance to the NCAA championship meet in both events.

"These games are not in accordance with the atmosphere of the nation after the devastation of the earthquake. They are too entertaining."

- Chinese director of state sports television, Jiang Heping, explaining why the government enforced a three-day moratorium on NBA playoff games last month.

"It's an easy word. Nobody could miss it, but the second [-place] girl did."

- The 94-year-old winner of the first National Spelling Bee in 1925, Frank Neuhauser, recalling his win-clinching word of "gladiolus".

"Bacon – I call it "God's currency". Hell, if it could be breathed, I would. Bacon, in any form, is great. Not as an entrée, but in general."

- Unidentified member of the rock band, The Foo Fighters, professing his love for bacon.

It takes a long time to generate excitement, that's why they [whoever "they" are] invented summer vacation. Unless you happen to have a gigantic giraffe handy – that makes it much easier to pass the time. But even if you don't happen to have a gigantic giraffe handy [well, now that the Lounge thinks about it – a gigantic giraffe is redundant, but pygmy giraffe would be an oxymoron, so we are just covering all the bases], there are other ways to make the summer months enjoyable without having to resort to watching overly-pampered athletes engage in so-called professional sports. Why, you could start a fancy kazoo collection. Or, you could memorize all the charges that have been filed against Amy Winehouse in the last 11 months and use that knowledge to impress your family members at the inevitable summer family reunion. Or you could just go to the ocean – which there should be more of with all the glaciers melting and all – and hang out on the warm, warm sand trying not to think of all the gas it required to get there in the first place. On second thought, let's see what the giraffe thinks.

We already know what we think, we think actress Sharon Stone is in trouble after angering China [which really does not take much effort these days…] by implying that last month's earthquake was karmic retribution for their treatment of the Tibetans. Well, now we are faced with the difficult situation of defining "trouble". Seems as though Stone's punishment for the remark was to have her Chistian Dior ads pulled from China and that got us to thinking – is that a punishment or not? Sure, there is the money thing, but it sounds kind of like a reverse karma thing – maybe it is better for Stone not to be shilling expensive watches. Maybe this is a wakeup call that she should be a ramen spokeswoman or celebrity promoter of Tibetan yak buttons [You know, "Yakity-Yak – don't talk back…to China!"] or a Buddhist monk robe model – the opportunities are endless.

All we know for sure is that the Leaning Tower of Pisa is safe for another 300 years and – whew! – is that a load off our minds. Because just the other day, we were talking to our gigantic giraffe about things that were really concerning us about the next 300 years and, wouldn't you know it? – the very first thing to pop up was "what in the hell are we going to do about this Pisa problem!?!" [We put extra punctuation marks in there because it indicates we were genuinely riled up in an authentic emotional Italian kind of way]. Now that engineers have fixed Mussolini's mistake and we're good to go for another three centuries, we can rest easy and concentrate on how to make NBA basketball less entertaining for the Chinese.

But before we get to that, of course, we have to figure out if Wazzu hoops head coach Tony Bennett and staff – who are known and revered for digging around and uncovering diamonds in the rough are out recruiting the planet's last uncontacted tribes. Of course, the contact period is closed up here in North America, but down in South America where everything is upside down and the toilets swirl in the opposite directions, the contact period has just begun [as evidenced by these pictures of the recruits fending off their first offers].

Perhaps they just need somebody to spell it out to them how meaningful it can be to play collegiate basketball in North America. That person would have to be Sameer Mishra, the winner of the National Spelling Bee, who, ironically enough, hails from Indiana. Mishra has probably had his nose buried in books for 14 of his 13 years [not a misprint] and could care less about either the Hoosiers or hoops as any boy who plays the violin and wants to be a neurosurgeon, would be. But if he wanted to research it, we are thinking that he could find a few choice words to describe Indiana basketball of the present and recent past for the Brazilians to ponder whilst they are sharpening their poison-tipped arrows and preparing for the next round of recruiters.

"I'm not much of a row-row-your-boat kind of guy, but I'm proud of the gals for rowing their boats for Wazzu," says Burgermeister Meisterburger, who usually makes an appearance during the football and basketball seasons.

The gals have certainly done their part to make you proud, BM. First, the rowing program had a shot [albeit – a long one] to make school history as the first-ever women's sports program to win a national championship. That did not happen, but they did make their second appearance in three years at the NCAA Championships in what head coach Jane LaRiviere has referred to as a rebuilding year after not making it in 2007 and finishing fourth in 2006. That will likely result [pending today's results] in two Top-10 finishes in three years for the rowing program and to put that in football or hoop terms for you, MB, those are results reminiscent of the Rose Bowl-Holiday Bowl years in football and the back-to-back Big Dance appearances in men's hoop. To add some whipped cream on that pie, the squad boasted nearly half their roster on the recently announced Pac-10 all-academic squad and had the person [sophomore Alex Bond] with the highest GPA. Smart, athletic and likely to be a bit closer to grasping that elusive national title next year.

"Will we have any national champions this year?" asks Miss Understood, innocently, but with that telltale twinkle hanging from her nostril [it migrated there from her eye].

Well, Miss U, we know you have some other things on your mind like possibly giraffes and Amy Winehouse memorizations and did not do this on purpose, but Wazzu already has a national champion in its midst when Swedish freshman high jumper Ebba Jungmark won the high jump title at the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships earlier in the year. Since then, Jungmark has tailed off in the outdoor season, but not so for another frosh – 400-meter hurdler Jeshua Anderson. Anderson just recorded a personal-best and lowered his own freshman school record when he recorded a 49.41 at the NCAA West regional last weekend. Wazzu will be sending a double-digit Cougar contingent to the NCAA Championships in Des Moines, Iowa, next week and if anybody is lined up for a run at a national title, it is Anderson. His regional time is already good enough for the Top 20 in the world and will certainly make him one of the favorites to contend for the NCAA title.

In fact, the Lounge clientele is so excited to see if Anderson can pull it off that they have begun a countdown [yes, some of the clientele do know how to count…we are not vouching for Father Lotto, however] and when it gets to 55 hours, they are going to celebrate by hollering Schfifty-Five! in unison.

Finally, everybody in the Lounge was scarfing down cookies like there was no tomorrow because the Lounge Scientists say that is what people do when they start thinking about there being no tomorrow. A study of 746 college students [admittedly a questionable group] and found that those with low self-esteem [such as one might have when thinking about how long it will take to make the BCS Taliban go away] thought about death and ate many cookies as a response to deal with those thoughts.

"One would hope that companies do not exploit this by putting food ads straight after the news," says Lounge Scientist #6, Dirk Smeesters, a Dutch social psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who claims to like chocolate chip.

With this news, the Lounge has determined there is only one course of action to take – get out the gigantic giraffe, start collecting kazoos and stock up on cookies.

+++++++sponsored by Clark's Restaurant+++++++++

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