I headed down to Richmond yesterday to cover Courtland High School take on Salem in the Group AA Division 4 state title game at Virginia Commonwealth University. Usually these state games make for compelling action and more importantly, reaction pictures. Yesterday, not so much. Courtland pretty much manhandled the Spartans all game long. Plus they started at 9:45pm, adding an undercurrent of stress to make the paper’s deadlines. I got some halfway decent action but the reaction was fairly muted even though it was the program’s first-ever state title. The outcome was apparent by the end of the first half.Here are a few favorites:

Stephen A. Smith was on ESPN a few minutes whining that sports organizations don’t seem to be feeling the effects of the recession. For one thing, he cited the cost of the New Yankee Stadium at $1.6 billion. Well, first, New Yankee Stadium began construction in 2006, a long time before the beginning of this recession. Second, how many jobs did that construction create or maintain?

Smith went on to complain about the salaries being paid to various professional sports players. Uh, out of curiosity, how much does Stephen A. Smith get paid per year and what does he contribute to society? Bombastic whining?

According to one website, ESPN Inc.’s revenue in 2004 was $3.2 billion. That’s double the cost of New Yankee Stadium in case you were curious.

Not to mention that those professional players that make however much money a year with salaries and bonuses; how much do they pay in taxes? How much of that money that they are paid is used to create other jobs? When a player gets a signing bonus and moves to a new city, he has to find a place to live, furnish the new place, and more than likely purchases a new vehicle to drive around the city.

And the funniest part of his segment was after he concluded his whining, he walked down into a subway station supposedly to get on a train. Even the announcers on ESPN had to laugh at this, stating something around the lines of: “the recession must be really bad if he’s taking the subway now.”

I’ve been on night shift this week shooting various regional basketball games. I made the decision to light most of the venues using SB-800 strobes at 45-degree angles to the top of the key. If you can get your lights high enough, you can produce some nice-looking images. However if you’re not careful, you can get some pretty ugly shadows. Sports Illustrated it ain’t but it will do on a budget. For the first part of the season I wasshooting Nikon D3’s with no lights, just the ISO cranked up. It was nice to be able to bang off a bunch of pictures though the downside was that the images looked kind of flat. So, I brought in the lights which give you a little punch but unfortunately kind of limit your movement as you can get some serious lens flare if you are not careful. With the state tournament coming up, I think I might go back to the no-light set-up if only because the pictures all look the same. Well lit maybe but definitely redundant. Anyway, here’s a slideshow of a week’s worth of high school hoops:

Slight language warning:

Richmond Times-Dispatch:

The Washington Redskins will bring in unsigned punters Tuesday to audition for the job currently held by rookie Durant Brooks.

Brooks drew the ire of fans with a short punt from the end zone in the third quarter of Sunday’s 19-17 loss to the St. Louis Rams. After the Rams failed to move the ball, they were still in range for a field goal.

They’ve been mathematically eliminated for the wild-card slot.

They’re 51–85 if you haven’t been paying attention.

What moron schedules a game against #3 USC? How insane do you have to be?

I was predicting a 30 point win for USC — they managed to win by 45! ESPN:

Mark Sanchez threw three touchdown passes in his first game as Southern California’s true No. 1 quarterback and the third-ranked Trojans rolled over Virginia 52-7 Saturday.

The Trojans lead 21-0 after just 11 minutes and weren’t tested, allowing coach Pete Carroll to keep things simple in advance of a home game against No. 2 Ohio State in two weeks.

Virginia had former stars Tiki and Ronde Barber and Chris Long in attendance and a Scott Stadium record crowd of 64,947 on hand, but the Cavaliers had minus 15 yards on their first three offensive series and needed 25 yards in penalties on their lone scoring drive.

In other news, #17 Virginia Tech lost to East Carolina (who?) 22–27.

Maryland beat Delaware 14–7.

Navy beat Towson 41–13.

Apparently, the Olympic village resembles a huge frat party once the athletes are done competing. Thousands of young, incredibly fit people coming off a huge emotional high (or low) like to drink and shag. Who’d of thunk it?

First they schedule their season opener against the USC Trojans (I’m taking bets on how much they get crushed, current odds are the Trojans by 30 points).

And now they ban signs at all their games (Charlottesville Daily Progress):

The University of Virginia has banned all signs at its athletics events, a move that some are construing as an infringement of Cavalier sports fans’ freedom of expression.

UVa students were notified of the new policy in an e-mail Tuesday. “Beginning this year, signs are not permitted inside athletics facilities,” the e-mail said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

The new policy comes roughly a year after UVa student David Becker was threatened with ejection from Scott Stadium during a UVa football game against Duke University. Becker drew the ire of stadium officials for holding up a sign in the front row that read “Fire Groh.”

[...]

However, a Scott Stadium official informed Becker that his sign violated a policy banning any signs, flags or banner that contain “derogatory comments, profanity, impede another guest’s view of the field or cover any stadium signage.”

As of Tuesday, that policy had been changed to: “All banners, signs and flags are prohibited in Scott Stadium.”

[...]

Rich Murray, a spokesman for UVa’s athletics department, said the policy shift came after much consideration and discussion about signs at athletics events last fall. The new policy applies to football and basketball games, as well as all other athletics events.

[...]

Josh Wheeler, a lawyer and associate director at the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, said that although the new policy is a blanket prohibition on all signs, it ironically raises fewer constitutional concerns than did the old policy because it is both content- and viewpoint-neutral.

“The key factor in determining the constitutionality of a restriction on speech in a public place is whether it is directed at what is being said,” Wheeler said. “In other words, does the restriction apply to all speech, and not just the speech you don’t like?”

Fascists.

Moronic fascists.

Hmm…of course, the former is implied by the latter but one has been exact when making hyperbolic claims about someone being a fascist. ;)

A hacker has uncovered cached copies of official Chinese government documents that list the age of 2 of the gymnasts as 14. Of course, government documents can be wrong. They often are. However, somebody has been working hard to make this particular documents disappear from the Internet. They’ve been removed from Google and the Google cache. However, they missed the cache of a Chinese language search engine.