DBD 2.17.12 Which CGBear is this?

Cal (270-286 – 556, -20) held onto the four-stroke lead they began the day with at the conclusion of the second round of action Thursday at the John A. Burns Intercollegiate hosted by Hawai’i at the par-72, 7,218-yard Arnold Palmer Course at the Turtle Bay Resort on Oahu’s North Shore. The Golden Bears are attempting to defend the team title they won at the event last season and also tie a school record with their third victory of the 2011-12 regular season.

Cal had led New Mexico by four shots at the end of Wednesday’s first day of action but now SMU has moved into second place behind the Bears after the Mustangs fired the best round of the day with a 10-under par 278, eight shots better than Cal’s two-under par team score under challenging windy weather conditions.

Hawt

California junior second baseman Tony Renda, who as a sophomore was the 2011 Pac-10 Player of the Year and helped the Golden Bears to the College World Series, has been selected for another preseason honor. Renda – who was tabbed as a first-team preseason All-American by Baseball America and a second-team All-American by Collegiate Baseball and the National Collegiate Baseball Writers – has now been picked as one of 50 athletes on USA Baseball’s Golden Spikes Award Watch list as the nation’s top amateur baseball player.
Last season, Renda was instrumental in Cal enjoying its best season in 31 years, culminating in a fifth-place finish at the 2011 College World Series. He became only the fourth player in Cal baseball history to earn conference player of the year honors, and was a member of the Houston Regional All-Tournament Team. Renda finished the 2011 campaign batting .332 and a team-best .348 versus Pac-10 competition, with 14 doubles, two triples, three home runs and a team-leading 44 RBI. He also led the Pac-10 with 88 hits and was third in the conference with 115 total bases.

Tony Renda is sooooo hot right now

If one All-Star weekend snub turned Klay Thompson into what we’ve seen the past four games, just imagine what might be in store following a couple more cold shoulders.

Last week, Thompson was left out of the original 18-player pool for the Rising Stars Challenge between rookies and sophomores. On Wednesday, the league’s fourth-best three-point shooter was deemed unworthy of a spot in the Three-Point Shootout, and on Thursday, Jeremy Lin and Norris Cole were added to the Rising Stars Challenge.

Klay is pwetty good?

The Tampa Bay Lightning are a long shot to make the playoffs and are sellers as the trade deadline nears.

None of that mattered Thursday night.

Martin St. Louis scored his second goal of the game 4:27 into overtime, Steven Stamkos had two goals — his NHL-leading 38th and 39th — and two assists in his 300th career game, and the Lightning beat the San Jose Sharks 6-5.

No luv for Sharky

Despite a former TCU player claiming that drug use was widespread on the team, only five players tested positive for marijuana in a Feb. 1 test, a source told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Thursday.

Another 11 players had trace amounts of marijuana in their systems, a quantity that is within the margin of error for the test, the newspaper reported. Marijuana was the only drug detected, and 86 players tested clean, according to the report.

Four players — junior linebacker Tanner Brock, junior safety Devin Johnson, junior defensive tackle D.J. Yendrey and sophomore offensive tackle Tyler Horn — were among 17 TCU students arrested on Wednesday in a drug sting.

Only 5 TCU players test positive instead of rumored 80

Gary Carter, the Hall of Fame catcher whose single for the New York Mets in the 1986 World Series touched off one of the most improbable rallies in postseason history, died Thursday. He was 57.

Carter was diagnosed with four brain tumors last May, two weeks after finishing his second season as coach at Palm Beach Atlantic University. In recent months, the family hoped that, with chemotherapy and other treatments, the tumors were in check. But in January, the family revealed that doctors found several new tumors on Carter’s brain.

Gary Carter, No bueno

The Egyptian Football Association says the nation’s league could resume in empty stadiums after the mourning period ends on March 15 for the 74 people killed in the country’s worst soccer violence.

Association spokesman Azmy Megahed said Wednesday that the final decision lies with the prime minister and security officials.

Egypt might start playing again

FC Dallas midfielder Brek Shea and New York Red Bulls forward Juan Agudelo are among 23 players picked for the U.S. under-23 roster for a training camp before Olympic qualifying next month.

Shea and Agudelo were among five newcomers selected Thursday by coach Caleb Porter. The group will practice for 10 days in Frisco, Texas, then play an exhibition game there Feb. 29 against Mexico’s under-23 team.

Also new to the group are defenders Perry Kitchen of D.C. United, Ike Opara of the San Jose Earthquakes and Alfredo Morales of Germany’s Hertha Berlin.

Olympic qualfying starts soon

The Gaels and Murray State sure have managed to toss a few wet blankets over their BracketBuster showdown, which no longer qualifies as a showdown.

In the 2+ weeks since the matchup was announced, Murray State has lost its first game of the season and SMC has dropped two — the latest defeat being that 15-point implosion Wednesday night, at home, to Loyola Marymount.

The result from Moraga doesn’t quite qualify as a shocker: The Gaels probably had one eye on the BracketBuster, and LMU’s no pushover.

Ranks Cal #1 among local teams

In terms of jackpots, Las Vegas gets all the attention. But anyone looking to make
GALottery.comtheir fortune on a gamble might be better off trying Georgia: Three people have won the lottery in Georgia multiple times in the past year alone.

“Georgia is a very lucky state,” Georgia Lottery spokeswoman Tandi Reddick tells Yahoo News. “There have been quite a few repeat Georgia Lottery winners who have Lady Luck on their side. It’s fantastic for our players and very exciting for us.”

Even more amazing, Reddick provided Yahoo News with no less than 15 examples of repeat Georgia lottery winners.

Lady wins lottery twice in 3 months. Bitch

The three Iranian men detained for allegedly plotting bomb attacks in Bangkok on Israeli diplomats had more than terror on their minds in Thailand. Police said Friday that they had also cavorted with prostitutes at a beach resort.

The news comes as Thai authorities announced they were searching for two more suspects in the botched bomb plot, including a possible explosives specialist who may have been training the Iranians.

Good to know

A Bangladesh court has outlawed the use of English slang known as “Banglish” on television and radio stations, a move welcomed by experts who worry about a foreign invasion of their language.

The High Court issued the order on Thursday “to uphold the sanctity of our mother tongue” and stop the “rape” of Bengali and its 1,000-year past, a state prosecutor said.

I’m sad I never learned Banglish

Amanda Knox has agreed to a nearly $4 million book deal about her trial and imprisonment in Italy for the murder of her British roommate.

The Seattle woman, who is now 24, signed the deal with HarperCollins and the still-untitled book is due out in early 2013.

“Knox will give a full and unflinching account of the events that led to her arrest in Perugia and her struggles with the complexities of the Italian judicial system,” HarperCollins said in a statement.

Nothing like a little profit off the death of another

And then of course there was the infusion of religion that probably earns the series a fair number of looky-loos (ahem). Michelle Duggar, the broodmare who gave birth to this baseball team, was invited to speak to a ladies group at a nearby church, and though what we saw of the speech was mostly a series of platitudes about family and children and all that, there was a single shot that said much more — the camera panned over a handout that Michelle brought to the event, and the content was pretty unsettling. TLC maybe included this shot for people like us, who of course paused it and advanced the frames to read as much of it as we could, and, whooo boy, was it unpleasant. It was all about how to make your husband happy in a marriage, which is of paramount importance to patriarch-dominated Quiverfull families. There were things about how wives shouldn’t refuse their husbands’ sexual advances, about how self-reliance is what kills marriages, about not stepping out of bounds in terms of what your responsibilities are as a wife (do too much and you emasculate him, you see).

Everyone luvs the Duggars!

Photographs of women posing sexily as nuns at an exhibition in Spain sparked outrage and complaints of blasphemy from Catholic and conservative groups on Thursday.

“Obscenity”, an exhibition of 50 photographs by the Canadian artist Bruce LaBruce, includes a portrait of Spanish actress Rossy de Palma in a black and white habit and see-through corset with a rosary between her teeth.

Another shows Alaska, a singer well known in Spain, dressed as a sexy saint in black with a communion wafer on her tongue.

Someone is going to hell!

Western schoolchildren are up to three years behind those in China’s Shanghai and success in Asian education is not just the product of pushy “tiger” parents, an Australian report released Friday said.

The study by independent think-tank The Grattan Institute said East Asia was the centre of high performance in schools with four of the world’s top systems in the region — Hong Kong, South Korea, Shanghai and Singapore.

“In Shanghai, the average 15-year-old mathematics student is performing at a level two to three years above his or her counterpart in Australia, the USA and Europe,” Grattan’s school education programme director Ben Jensen said.

Prelude to Asian world domination?