Wednesday Whatever

No hot topic to blog on today, but I guess I am not alone. ESPN.com's lead story asks the burning question, "Did Ali invent rap?"

GW won 79-56 over a subpar UMES team last night. Another strong second half by the Colonials put this one away with solid games from Rice (20 pts, 4-6 3FG), Elliott (13 pts, 7 rebounds, 5 steals), and an excellent performance from Rob Diggs (16pts, 7 rebounds, 7 blocks). Most noteworthy for the future was the first appearance of Cheyenne Moore in a GW uniform. Moore, who transferred from Clemson, had been out with a stress fracture and only played two minutes, but he is expected to be a major contributor this season. Also a nice 14 minutes from freshman Damian Hollis who was 4-4 from the field. The 7-1 Colonials get a better test on the road this Saturday at USC.

The Wizards walloped the hottest team in the NBA Monday night, but I was busy coaching my own cagers and didn't see a minute of the action. Big Stein has some all-access Gilbert material in the Bog today, but I'm more interested to see how the Wiz go at the Knicks tonight. They still haven't won on the road and got embarrassed in their last trip to the Garden, so the pieces would seem to be in place, but you just can't tell with this team yet. I'd love to see them get to .500 by the end of the month and then take a closer look.

The Ravens have had plenty of time to recover from last week's loss at Cincinnati. It wasn't a disaster, and the rest of the games this weekend showed how wide open the league is. New England looked shaky in their win, Indianapolis got dumped, and San Diego escaped from a bad Buffalo team. I know Dallas, Seattle and New Orleans are gathering momentum, but the NFC still stands for Nobody Freaking Cares when it comes to this year's Super Bowl race. Indy probably has a lock on home field for the playoffs, but Baltimore shouldn't have to go on the road until then.

Finally, on a nonsports note, I was walking the dog this morning, and as we turned up the hill for home, I noticed an object about the size of a football lying in the road. As we got closer, Sweet Pea did her usual curious, but easily-spooked, investigation (she was once startled by a bag of leaves). The item turned out to be a piece of meat, some sort of large, gristly roast, lying a few feet from the curb. It was quite red, not rotted at all, so I don' t think it had been there very long, and I guess it was too early for discovery by the turkey vultures that often take care of this sort of thing. There was not a shred of packaging nearby; I have no idea how it got there, and really can't come up with a plausible scenario. All I keep thinking is that if my life were a Tarantino or Coen brothers movie, I would have picked up the meat and set in motion a profanely hilarious and astonishingly violent sequence of events involving a multinational cast of grotesquely idiosyncratic characters. But my life, even with its daily moments of drama and comedy, is not a movie, so I kept the dog away from it, and headed home.