Dear Diary: Ce Matin, Pas de Lapin Comment Count

Seth

UM_VS_SDSU

Wallpaper by jonvalk.

Before we dip into this week's user content, go draft your FreeRoll team! You've got until noon. Draft Street kindly sponsored yesterday's liveblog.

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Kids who were my age in France all grew up with this song Ce Matin, un Lapin (this morning, a rabbit…) about a hare who turned the tables on a hunter and thus commenced the bunny revolution. The singer is a lady named Chantal Goya who spent years trying to carve out a niche in pop music by being ironically jejune, then found her calling by dropping the irony and singing kids songs on the French Disney Channel.

Kids my age who went to Michigan might remember a band called Tally Hall who have followed a similar career path. In 2005 I earned my Level 5 music cred badge by sharing a booth at a New York bar with the Atlantic Records people while Tally tried out for them. The music folk tossed around fancy adjectives like "jejune" to capture how fresh and cool it was to find a rock band that can occupy the antipode of metal the Beatles brushed with An Octopus's Garden. They signed them, but after one album the label forgot about them and that lapsed into that. Recently my best friend reported via Facebook that his three-year-old is a huge Tally Hall fan.

All this week Michigan fans shared a booth with all the really cool basketball people while they circle-talked themselves into the South Dakota State Jackrabbits as the hipster upset pick and Nate Wolters as the best point guard in the country (though you've probably never heard of him).

Nine minutes into the second half the rabbits were finally starting to lose pace with the Wolverines when Burke and LeVert* went up for a rebound and Wolters ran in to give Trey a 'Wisconsin Special' undercut hip check that sent Michigan's own pretty good guard crashing to the floor. As Burke clutched his head the panic claxons went off in yours. There was no foul (of course), the ball was awarded to the Jackrabbits (of course), and they of course went right down the court and scored.

burkefallen

Bryan Fuller|MGoBlog

You could imagine the Disney ending from here, a Cinderella advance amidst the cheers of Spartans in brand new turquoise tees. All it would take was 11 minutes of indifferent D, refs that hate us, threes that clang, twos that shouldn't have been shot, and Spike Albrecht running around with the ball like a mad chicken, to end the career of Michigan's greatest player since _____(?) with the prostrate pose above.

Here's how it really went:

  • Stauskas drove hard (NJAS!) to the basket and through hard contact to make a layup and collect a rare and-one, which he made. 52-43.
  • Wolters forced to take a long two, missed, rebounded by Albrecht
  • Albrecht does his running around thing, gets the ball to Hardaway, TIMMMAYY makes a jumpshot. 54-43.
  • Wolters misses a three, Horford MANBALLS the rebound out of another contestant's hands.
  • Trey Burke returns, drives inside collecting ALL THE DEFENSE, then kicks out to wide open Hardaway for three, buried. 57-43.

That was enough for the Wolverines to finish off the rascally rabbits, final score 71-56.

As it turns out the audience for simple cutesy catchy formulaic music is little kids, rabbits tend to lose to hunters, and Michigan is better at major sports than those guys you've probably never heard of. Who could have imagined? Also as it turns out this little game column was all a prelude to the Diary of the Week by saveferris, who looked at the performance of past 4 seeds and found, well, the higher seed you are the better your prospects for tourney success. File all of this under the kind of duh that takes occasional reminding.

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* His surname is French for "The Green" but a "leveret" is a baby rabbit.

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Etc. Every goal from hockey's WMU sweep plus a few bad puns of blue/blew from MGoBlueline. The basketball game is at noon on Saturday so you can watch that then still make it to the Joe. LSAClassof2000 looks at run vs. pass balance over recent Big Ten history, finding Wisconsin and Ohio State run a lot. Need to get the 4th quarters and blowouts out of there though if you want to find the meat. Blockhams was drawn before Ryan was hurt, isn't funny anymore.

[Jump, Best of the Boards]

THE MICHIGAN DRILL

mgovideo: on the board | on his site

Pipkins made a pretty nice play against Bosch and Rawls starting at about the 2:25 mark, directly followed by Quinton Washington against Braden in which Q completely halts some poor guy wearing 18 (I think) with just his arm.

HOT NEW MEME: VCU EQUALS TURNOVERS

Our second round opponent if you haven't heard likes to force a lot of turnovers. Nice work by Gordon Berenson to break down the TOs in each of VCU's games this year. Money shot:

In wins VCU sports the following:
VCU TO: 11.3 per game
Opp TO: 21.7 per game
TO Ratio: 1.92

In losses VCU does this:
VCU TO: 12.1 per game
Opp TO: 14 per game
TO Ratio: 1.16

Michigan averages 9 turnovers a game to opponents' 12; we lead the nation with a 1.55 assist-turnover ratio. Trey Burke plus all the points.

SOLAR SYSTEM RECRUITING

According to the latest maps of the universe, matter is a slightly bigger deal (4.9% versus 4.5%) than was previously thought. This is good news for Michigan State recruiting, via 5th and Long:

tumblr_mjw2ghv8IN1rgqy3eo1_500

That was his response to the thread for Facebook's cool rooting interest maps. Turns out life on other planets is all just a bunch thugs who wish they lived on Earth. It also appears Russian Spartan fans have discovered a new land bridge. #NEVERENDINGWINTER

ETC. The football t-shirt designs for this year are for the kids; my vote's with #2. I can only take this kid saying "GONZAAAAGAAAAH" like twice. Spring roster discussion.

This is the Sort of Thing Your Moment of Zen Was Created For:

Oh Les-xy you so SEC-xy.

Comments

momo

March 22nd, 2013 at 10:50 AM ^

That's not what jejune means. People think it means something like "young" or "childlike" because of the closeness to "jeune", but in fact it means something closer to "jaded" or "insipid", which is not what springs to mind when I think of the music of Chantal Goya.

Seth

March 22nd, 2013 at 11:16 AM ^

Insipid I think has a whinier connotation. Jejune I meant as the opposite of sappy, the point being that jejune doesn't really exist--it's just sappiness masquerading as "ironically childlike."

momo

March 22nd, 2013 at 11:23 AM ^

But jejune doesn't (originally) have anything to do with "childlike", sappily ironic or not. It comes from the Latin for "fasting" and, used in a non-literal sense, means "dull", "insipid", or similar. Used literally it simply means "empty", or possibly "hungry".

 

I will grant you that it has a recent usage of meaning "something like childlike", because it sounds and looks a bit like "jeune". But when people use it this way they usually have trouble defining exactly what it means, which I think is not unrelated to the fact that there isn't an established historical usage to fall back on. In this case, people are essentially saying "it means what these other recent writers have thought it means".

 

All words are like this, of course, it's just that when the pool of references is small, meaning is harder to pin down.

Icehole Woody

March 22nd, 2013 at 10:54 AM ^

I thought Burke pulled a muscle in his neck when his head went pretty far to one side while falling down.  I guess those silly neck stretches the coach made you go through over the years before practice are important afterall.

samsoccer7

March 22nd, 2013 at 11:17 AM ^

I couldn't tell from the replay if Burke hit his head ANYWHERE.  I didn't see an elbow or forearm, and it didn't seem like he hit his head on the court.  It was a small TV so I might have missed it, anybody wanna chime in?

UMQuadz05

March 22nd, 2013 at 12:17 PM ^

We're all six degrees from Kevin Bacon, but on this blog I'd bet we're all, at most, two degrees away from the best Ann Arbor based rock band of the mid-mid-2000s.

I say this as a guy who just hosted Grey Tie on one of his grad school interviews...

gwkrlghl

March 22nd, 2013 at 12:18 PM ^

I mean, Burke is rebounding and then Wolters comes in late and knocks Burke's feet out from under him while he's in the air and the refs only thought is "....SDSU BALL!"

Seth

March 22nd, 2013 at 10:01 PM ^

Canter? I didn't know you were playing in the band now. That's awesome.

I heard you were back in school. I distinctly remember you guys traipsing in an army of Andover girls to end Oblivion's battle of the bands streak. [shakes fist] Had to be one of your first shows circa early '03. I still have that 4-song sampler with Good Day, Dreamer, Banana Man and Ruler of Everything.