“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”:

Four years ago, I live-blogged the game (let’s count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — fifteen fanatical posts! Mwahahahahaha!) and scared the crap out of my cats in the process of running back and forth from television to computer, screaming at the screens all the while. Last night’s game was a much more laid-back affair, in part because I refused to let myself get invested (the first few minutes of the game seeming to make the case for such reticence, and the Tigers’ long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory making any pre-fourth-quarter excitement ill-advised), and in part because I wasn’t home, and wasn’t alone, but was instead watching the game at a friend’s house, and an Ohio State alumna friend at that.

It was, in the end, a good game — LSU’s defense was as strong as I’ve ever seen it — though perhaps it wasn’t quite as exciting as what I’d hoped for. I do find it utterly astonishing, though, that LSU could be the only team nationally to have won two BCS championships in the nine years of the system’s existence, and yet still seem somehow undeserving of the number one spot. Yes, in 2004 the BCS and the AP poll split the number one spot between LSU and USC (as we heard no end of whining about here in SoCal [and can I just note, while I'm on the subject, that while it was a bit embarrassing for the 2003-2004 Trojans to have lost to Cal, losing to Stanford this year ought to exclude them from any top five lists anywhere]). And yes, this year LSU has become the only two-loss team ever to win a national championship (though this one, happily, not a split decision). But in a season in which, as ESPN reminded me this morning, four different teams held the number one spot and nine at least briefly sat at number two, it’s little wonder that the outcome might seem a bit weird.

In any case: Geaux Tigers. Geaux Les Miles. Now, I gotta get back to work.

There’s much I’d like to post about, but there’s only been steadfast, nose-to-grindstone work today, in part because I’m feeling that last week running through the hourglass mighty quickly, but in part because I spent the weekend with Harry Potter, both in print and on film. No spoilers here, I swear; just two quick non-spoily observations, given that my print experience was the Brit edition and my film experience had French subtitles:

1. The French have translated a lot of proper nouns. Like “Hogwarts,” which becomes, if I’m remembering correctly, “Poudlard,” which at least suggests “hog” through its bacony reference, but within which “poud” doesn’t seem to mean anything. (Unless it’s “powdered bacon,” and then I’m even more bemused.) And “Crookshanks,” which becomes “Pattenrond,” which seems like a sort of Germanified “round feet,” which makes a certain sense, I guess, but, I don’t know, loses something in the translation.

2. There sure seems to me to be a lot more “blimey!” in the Brit edition, despite the U.S. editor’s insistence that “there are virtually no differences in the texts of the last few books.”

And with those utterly beside the point but non-secret-giving-away comments, back to work….

Last night, I have to say, was a heck of a night of television — the second-to-last episode of The Sopranos (EVER, as the trailer for next’s week’s episode informed us, in case we hadn’t been paying attention), followed by the second-to-last episode of the first season of The Tudors. The two episodes make for an interesting pairing; one could imagine Melfi’s dawning awareness of the manipulative uses of talk therapy made by the sociopath just as easily coming from Thomas More, with the substitution of piety for psychoanalysis.

R. and I just started watching The Tudors this last week, however, and went on a fairly minor binge, watching the re-airings of season one’s first eight episodes over the course of the week, leading up to last night’s episode nine. There are some fairly significant tinkerings with the history involved in the series, not least some key deaths that are shifted around for narrative effect. Henry Fitzroy, for instance, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, died when he was 17, but the series kills him off as a toddler. I get the dramatic impact there: just at the point at which Henry is rolling out his “God is punishing me for having married my brother’s wife” argument, his one acknowledged son dies, a harbinger of the plague that follows. But others of the changes are less easily understood. The series’s Margaret Tudor, for instance, dies of consumption in 1533ish (after having killed her first husband, the king of Portugal, and remarried Charles Brandon, the first duke of Somerset) — when, in fact, it was Mary Tudor who married Somerset and died in 1533; Margaret Tudor married James IV of Scotland and bore a line of Stuarts, living until 1541. (So far as I know, none of the Tudors killed the king of Portugal, though I could well be wrong, and wouldn’t be a bit surprised.) Why substitute Margaret for Mary here? Did the producers just like the name better?

Such changes to the historical narrative, however, are relatively superficial; the series strikes me as a compelling reimagining of the period, if through a somewhat presentist lens. That, The Tudors shares less with The Sopranos than with Deadwood, with which series I’d also be willing to swear The Tudors also shares the producers of its opening titles, as well as the composers of its title music, though I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of that hunch.

The Helsinki Complaints Choir:

Thanks to Liz and Lori, I spent a chunk of last night watching a little, tiny version of the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

It was worth all the squinting.  Oh, the joys of once again watching Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme in their element:  backstage, rapid-fire, filled with enough submerged detail that it’s always worth watching again.  I’m really hoping that the series holds up well beyond the pilot, because it’s like the glory days of SportsNight, with a higher budget and a full hour to stretch out in…

I want to call attention to this for ever so many reasons, not least among them that it’s perhaps the first effective trailer for a book that I’ve ever seen.

Okay, (a): Did you realize that Rocky is, and I shit you not, thirty years old, this year?

(b): Did you know that it was possible, tonight, somewhere in the world, to sit outside and drink a bunch of champagne to sorta celebrate your altogether alarming birthday (which was not today; no good wishes yet, damnit; I’ve got something less than forty-eight hours before it’s official) and watch this movie outdoors on the big screen, and wind up making a bunch of guys from Queens right in front of you laugh when you say, in a guttural growl, at an entirely pertinent moment, “Yo, Adrian!”

Neither did I, is all I’m saying.

We’re headed out of town sometime this afternoon, starting down the road toward SoCal.

There’s not that much left to do between now and then, so I’m watching television.

Or not really television. Shows originally broadcast on television, now streaming over the net.

ABC is streaming episodes of four of its series—Lost, Alias, Desperate Housewives, and Commander in Chief, which is what I’m watching, as I never managed to catch it on-air. It’s a pretty decent interface, with limited commercial interruptions.

I’m hoping that this kind of streaming becomes more and more a standard practice, but I fear that there’s soon to be a paywall thrown up around the service—the proud announcement “Watch full episodes online for free!” is followed by the fine print: “May 1 - June 30, 2006.”

We’ll see. More from the road, if I can.

The worst of it is that there’s now no one left to root for in the men’s final.  As I told a colleague of mine via email last week, I am constitutionally incapable of rooting for any team that comes from the state of Florida.  In any sport.  Call it a fault of my upbringing, southeastern sour grapes.

But I also find both of the major Los Angeles collegiate teams to be so relentlessly overexposed, so coddled and pampered, that I cannot pull for them, either.  (Seriously, guys:  get a real conference, and then come talk to me.)

So I officially could not care less—not by as much as an iota—about Monday night’s outcome.  The only thing I could cheer would be if somehow both teams managed to get themselves disqualified.

Which means it’s now all about the women.  Go Pokey!