Almost Famous

As most of you know, Graham and I, along with Chris and Rachel as well as two of the Learfield interns and one of their fiances, trekked back down to St. Louis this past Friday for some more Panther basketball action. First of all, I would like to say thank you to all our friends and family for grabbing ahold of the Panthers along with us throughout the end of this season! It was so much fun having everyone up and down the East coast frantically texting us for score updates and learning the team's strengths and weaknesses along with us. Not a great weekend of basketball--UNI lost and Duke won. Nauseating. Although we were not able to pull off the win on Friday night versus Michigan St. I know the town of Cedar Falls is not hanging their head. This is one proud place to live right now! Every sign up and down University Ave. or Waterloo Rd. has a sign congratulating the Panthers on their amazing season and for the fun it brought everyone involved. At one point I saw a sign on the side of Pepper's Restaurant that read, "Superman wears Farokhmanesh pajamas". Amazing.

Before the game Graham and I discussed the greatness/unfortune that Ali made the Sports Illustrated cover (see above). As everyone knows there is a Sports Illustrated Cover "jinx" that has followed many athletes over the past few decades. In SI's own words, "In investigating virtually all of the SI's 2,456 covers, we found 913 "jinxes"--a demonstratable misfortune or decline in performance following a cover appearance roughly 37.2 percent of the time." In Ali's case, I guess you could say there was a decline in scoring performance on Friday night, but was he hit by the jinx as well? Who knows. I was discussing this with Graham last night and in my opinion, if I was Ali (and who wouldn't want to be?) and made the cover of Sports Illustrated during the NCAA tournament, jinx or no jinx it would be well worth it to take the chance. Let's think about it, sports announcer Dick Vitale couldn't even pronounce his name even after we knocked off Kansas. No one knew who Ali was or even cared to. But because of the win over Kansas and his face on this cover, Ali was able to take the sports fame ride of his life and it all happened overnight.

In other non-basketball related news, Graham and I have become almost famous! A local reporter, Kyle Munson, just happened to stumble across our blog and is now writing a story about Graham and I for the Des Moines Register about our move! Aside for the not so flattering, squinty picture featured on his blog (hopefully we will get a better one for the article on Sunday), it has been a ton of fun getting to re-live the past month and a half with him as we explained life back in NC versus IA. The article will be published on Sunday.