Virginia Commonwealth's Eric Maynor drives on UCLA's Darren Collison It's tournament time: UCLA almost -- but not quite -- blew yesterday's opening-round game against Virginia Commonwealth, ultimately winning by one point. But what's one point, really? Jim McIsaac/Getty Images Sport
 

by Linda Holmes

Read:

• Tonight is the Battlestar Galactica series finale, so it's a good time to look back -- as with Alan Sepinwall's list of the show's best episodes. (Spoilers, obviously. But you knew that, right?)

• If you're among the many people currently glued to NCAA basketball, check out the intensive nerd explosion going on at the Freakonomics blog, where they're discussing research that seems to show that teams behind by one point at halftime win slightly more often than teams ahead by one point at halftime. (Note to #16 seeds: This does not apply to being, say, 25 points behind at halftime.)

James Franco against the world and putting your temper on a five-second delay, after the jump...

Note:

• Here's a hint for interpreting stories about Facebook groups like the one created to protest the selection of James Franco as the UCLA graduation speaker: if your group is open to everyone (not just students) and is centered on an extremely famous person, 300 members (what they had before they were written up in EW, apparently) is really not a whole lot.

• Fans of the Fug Girls will want to check out Fug Madness 2009, the annual sartorial-disaster bracket in which a single celebrity rises to the top as the most badly (or, often, weirdly) dressed person of the year.

• Sure, Gmail Labs is offering a five-second delay on sending your e-mails in case you change your mind, but...five seconds? That works for "I accidentally hit the button," but I need the one for "Hey, that was probably a bad idea." Which thought generally takes more than five seconds to form.

• There's a tendency these days to open only one or two big movies each weekend; this weekend is different. As this story notes, the Paul Rudd-Jason Segal comedy I Love You, Man, the Julia Roberts-Clive Owen bantering caper Duplicity, and the Nicolas Cage supernatural thriller Knowing are all opening today. The escapist hypothesis would suggest that the comedy and the caper will do better than the thriller, so this weekend should be another data point.

Ignore:

• CBS is starting production on a game show called The Whole 19 Yards (yes, that's apparently 19 yards), in which you complete an obstacle course and then answer trivia questions. Why? That is a very, very good question.

categories: Read/Note/Ignore

7:50 - March 20, 2009

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