Luck O'The Irish Sports Chowdah Update- C's Not So Lucky @ West Coast Tilt; B's Blow Late Lead, Get Past Philly; March Madness Brackets Busted Already

NHL- After a forgettable road trip and briefly being overtaken in the standings by the Ottawa Senators on Friday night, the Boston Bruins were hoping to snap a 4-game losing streak at home on St Patrick's Day.

For whatever reason, the day games have not been kind to the Bruins this season- last weekend's back to back losses to Washington and Pittsburgh were both matinees. And despite the promising start, Saturday's game seemed to be headed the same direction. Although the Bruins got out to the 2-0 lead in the first thanks to tallies by Chris Kelly and Tyler Seguin, the visiting Flyers were able to chip away at that lead, getting on the board thanks to a Matt Read power play goal in the 2nd and knotting the contest up at 2-2 after a Jakub Voracek goal late in the 3rd.

Nothing was resolved in OT, so the game headed for a shootout. It was starting to appear as though the shootout wouldn't resolve anything either, with both Thomas and Bryzgalov allowing goals from the first two shooters each of them faced. Listening to the shootout on the radio, I had the feeling that whoever stopped a shot first would win, and while Patrice Bergeron was able to get the puck past Bryzgalov for the 3rd goal of the shootout, Thomas was able to stop Danny Briere's attempt to seal the Bruins win.

Through regulation and OT, Thomas stopped 27 of 29 shots faced while Bryzgalov turned aside 31 of 33 shots faced. The Bruins went 0-2 on the power play while the Flyers were 1 for 4 with the man advantage on Saturday.

The win- coupled with an Ottawa loss to Toronto on Saturday night- puts the Bruins back into first place in the Northeastern division. As of Sunday night, the Senators and Bruins are separated by a point.

The Bruins will next host the Toronto Maple Leafs on Monday night. So far, the B's have a clean sweep of the season series. The game will be televised on NESN and gets underway at 7:00 PM ET Monday.

OTHER BRUINS NEWS- The Bruins have signed LW Shawn Thornton to a two year extention. Thornton was slated to be an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season. THe extension is reportedly worth $1.1 million per season.

ELSEWHERE IN THE NHL- The St Louis Blues are the first NHL team in either conference to clinch a playoff berth this season. The Blues 3-1 win over Tampa Bay on Saturday sealed the deal. Currently the Blues have 100 points, which is 8 more than the next closest team in the Central Division- the Nashville Predators.

NCAA HOCKEY- Boston College won the Hockey East tournament with a 4-1 win over the Maine Black Bears on Saturday night. Eagles netminder Parker Milner made 41 saves against Maine and Eagles freshman Johnny Guardeau had two goals and an assist to garner the tournament MVP honors.

Saturday's win would be Boston College's 3rd consecutive Hockey East Championship. The Eagles draw The US Air Force Academy in the first round of the NCAA Men's Hockey tournament next week. The matchup will take place this upcoming Saturday afternoon at Worcester at 4:00 PM ET.

NCAA HOOPS- If you filled out your brackets last week, chances are you probably wanted to rip them up, throw them out and start over again after a couple of first-round upsets knocked out some heavily favored schools in March Madness.

Most noteworthy was the #15 seeded Norfolk State Spartans took down #2 seed Missouri by an 86-84 final. This was Norfolk State's first trip to the NCAA tournament, but their run came to an end when they were blown out by Florida by an 84-50 final.

Not to be outdone, another #15 seed took down a heavily favored program when Lehigh beat Duke 75-70 on Friday afternoon, although Xavier would end Lehigh's run with a 58-70 loss on Sunday night.

UConn, Harvard and Vermont would all qualify for the NCAA tourney [with the Catamounts getting by Lamar 59-71 to get into the tournament- NANESB!] but all three New England schools wouldn't advance past the first round. UConn lost to Iowa State, Vermont lost to North Carolina and Harvard would lose to Venderbilt.

While the UMass Minutemen had to settle for an invite to the NIT tournament, they have managed to advance to the quarterfinals after beating Mississippi State in OT in the first round and Seton Hall in the 2nd round. They will next face Drexel at 7:00 PM Tuesday night in a game that will be televised on ESPN.

NFL- NFL's free-agency began last week with the Buffalo Bills having signed free-agent defensive end Mario Williams. Williams was the Texans #1 draft pick in the 2006 NFL draft. The contract is reportedly for 6 years and could be worth upwards of $100 million.

OTHER NFL NEWS- The Washington Redskins have spurred talk that they have their sights on former Baylor QB and last year's Heisman winner Robert Griffin III after trading with the St Louis Rams to get the #2 overall pick in the upcoming NFL draft.

The Redskins get the second overall pick in exchange for giving St Louis three 1st round picks and a second round pick.

NBA- Although the second half of the season has been much kinder to the Celtics than it has been the Bruins, the C's are still running into some trouble on their West Coast road trip.

While they did manage back-to-back wins against the LA Clippers and Golden State Warriors, their western tilt started off with a 97-94 loss to the Lakers at the Staples Center and back-to-back losses against Sacramento and Denver.

The C's are still in 2nd place in the Atlantic Division, only a game and a half behind the 76ers. Their road trip continues on Monday- although it will be alot less western- when they travel to Atlanta to take on the 26-19 Hawks for the first time this season.

Monday night's game gets underway at 7:30 ET and will be televised on Comcast Sports New England.

Today's Train of Thought- A Different Kind of Polar Express: March 18, 2012

If you stop and think about it, so many of the goods and services that we use in out day-to-day lives have been shipped by rail at some point- if not the finished product, then certainly the raw ingredients. Materiel like coal, wheat, oil, acid, iron ore, ethanol, garbage, salt, auto parts, gas, wind turbine components, steel and even sugar beets or orange juice pulp have been known to move in decdicated unit trains- and that's not even taking the advent of double-stacked container freight into account. Companies like Coors Brewing, Foster Farms, Cargill Salt or Anderson Windows- to name a few- utilize their own switcher locomotives at their plants to help ensure efficient offloading of inbound raw materiel or faster interchange of the finished product thats shipped by rail.

With that in mind, I'm a pretty big fan of Polar beverages- particularly their birch beer. The Worcester, MA based company has been selling flavored soft drinks, water and seltzer throughout the northeast and dates back to 1882.

Today's Train of Thought takes us to central Massachusetts, home of both Polar Beverages and the Providence & Worcester Railroad. And although the P&W has expanded considerably in recent years and runs unit coal, ethanol and aggregate trains, it still has customers to serve in Worcester same as it did nearly 40 years ago when it started up service on former New Haven and Penn Central lines in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Here, railpictures.net contributor D.M. Wenc caught P&W B39-8 #3903 with local freight WX-1 at Worcester, MA on February 11, 2009. One of the customers this freight serves is the Polar beverage company, and the conductor can be seen riding the side of the train a few cars back as the big 4-axle GE gets ready to drop off a cut of tank cars- presumably loaded with corn syrup- for Polar as the sun peeks out from the clouds.

Happy St Patrick's Day From Not Another New England Sports Blog!

What can I say? I know what I like.

Sudan Regime Reportedly Issues Ultimatum for Christians to Leave Country or Be Treated As Foreigners

Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir and the ruling National Congress Party has issued an ultimatum for the country's Christians to leave the country before April 8th or be treated as non-citizens.

Sudanese Christians who have barely a month to leave the north or risk being treated as foreigners are starting to move, but Christian leaders are concerned that the 8 April deadline set by Islamic-majority Sudan is unrealistic.

“We are very concerned. Moving is not easy. . . people have children in school. They have homes. . . It is almost impossible,” Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Adwok, the Khartoum archdiocese auxiliary told ENInews in a telephone interview on 7 March.

Sudan in February announced the deadline for the former citizens it had stripped of nationality after South Sudan’s January 2011 vote to secede. The ultimatum will affect an estimated 500,000–700,000 people, who are mainly Christians of southern origin that still live in the north.

Many of them fled north during the long civil war fought between the Government of Sudan and the former rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. They have lived there for decades together with children who were born there. Few have ties with South Sudan.

Refugee and human rights groups have criticized Khartoum's deadline, pointing out that many of the refugees displaced from the South have spent their entire lives in the Sudan and have a legitimate claim on Sudanese citizenship.

After a 2011 referendum, the predominantly Christian South Sudan voted to split from the Islamic north after more than 15 years of civil war. The oil-rich but war-torn and landlocked South Sudan became indepenent from the north in July 2011.

Fly This Up the Flagpole- Florida Veterans Irate Over US Flag Depicting Obama in Front of Local Democrat Party HQ

A version of the US flag depicting President Obama being flown in front of the Lake County, Florida Democrat Party headquarters this week has angered local veterans.

Korean war veteran Don Van Beck said his blood was boiling.

"I can't describe how upset was because you just don't do that to the American flag," Van Beck said.

Van Beck found it flying outside Lake County Democratic headquarters under the stars and stripes. Marine Corps vet John Masterjohn was seeing red.

"Joseph Stalin, pictures of Mao, pictures of Adolph Hitler. The pomp, the ceremony -- the flags like that," Masterjohn said.

The veterans had asked that the offending flag be removed and offered to replace it with a POW/MIA flag. Lake County Democrat Party chairwoman Nancy Hulbert took responsibility for the flag, but reportedly declined the POW/MIA flag.

Two days after the Lake County Obama flag story broke, the director of an Obama campaign film was interviewed on CNN and went on record as saying that the only flaw with his 17-minute film was that it was too short to document Obama's numerous accomplishments.

I figured both the interview and the Lake County Obama flag would are worth mentioning in the context of a continued effort to build up a cult of personality around Barack Obama for the 2012 campaign. While its toon soon to tell how the Obama campaign film will go over- let alone the interview with the director- it's clear that the attempt to modify the flag in Obama's likeness backfired almost immediately.

Today's Train of Thought- First Light, March 14, 2012

Today's Train of Thought takes us to a frigid and snowy Hawkeye State to a line that's changed hands no less than three times since 1996.

In 1985, the Illinois Central Gulf spun off a series of lines throughout the Midwest and Deep South that they deemed redundant. Many of these lines exist today as regionals like the Indiana Railroad or Paducah & Louisville. Around that same time, the ICG's former Illinois Central Chicago to Omaha, NE line went to the newly-formed Chicago Central & Pacific. In addition to the main line across northern Iowa, the CC&P also had a branch to Sioux City, IA and the Cedar River line, which went north from Waterloo, IA to Albert Lea, MN and south from Waterloo to Cedar Rapids, IA.

The CC&P lasted a little more than 11 years when the Illinois Central made the somewhat unusual move of reacquiring the railway lock, stock and barrel in 1996- about two years before the Canadian National would acquire the IC.

Here, railpictures.net contributor R Scott Marsh catches Canadian National local freight L575 with Illinois Central SD40-2 #6201 leading and Elgin, Joliet & Eastern SD38-2 #678 trailing along with a Canadian National GE trailing. The train is seen just outside of St Ansgar, IA with a lengthy cut of grain cars for a customer on the Osage sub north of Waterloo at daybreak on Jan 30th, 2012.

Blue State Graft Watch: One-Time Breitbart Protege Releases Video Alleging Voter Fraud in Green Mountain State

State officials in Vermont are calling for a criminal inquiry after conservative activist and one-time Andrew Breitbart protege James O'Keefe released a video purporting to show people walking in to Vermont precincts and voting under the name of deceased or nonexistent voters. Not surprisingly, state officials have called for a criminal probe stemming from the video- not surprisingly, the Democrat Secretary of State and Attorney General want O'Keefe to be the focus of the probe instead the ease with which the video's participants were able to voter under somebody else's name.

State elections officials are sharply criticizing an undercover video that surfaced Tuesday and purportedly shows individuals using the names of dead or living people in order to obtain ballots for Vermont elections, including this year’s presidential primary.

The video, released via the Breitbart.com website by conservative activist James O’Keefe, shows a series of exchanges at voting precincts where an individual identifies himself as a person whose name is on the voter checklist. The individual, however, is not asked to show identification to prove who he is before being given a ballot.

“You said who you are,” one local voting official tells the individual when asked why no identification had to be shown. “Your name is on there.”

At least seven people, six described in the video as “living” and one as “dead,” are named in the video as the people whom the individual is impersonating as he goes through the process of obtaining a ballot. It’s unclear where all the incidents took place, but two polling sites, in Essex and Winooski, are recognizable.

Secretary of State James Condos, who learned about the video from the Burlington Free Press, said Tuesday afternoon that he hopes the Attorney General’s Office will investigate the video to see whether a crime had taken place.

“My next phone call is to Bill Sorrell’s office,” Condos said, referring to the state’s top prosecutor. The crime of voter fraud is punishable in Vermont by a fine of up to $100 and/or up to one year in jail.

Condos said Vermont and federal law do not require people to produce identification when they show up to vote, and efforts to mandate such identification recently have been rejected or struck down in several states.

“I denounce any type of voter fraud or any assault on the integrity of the voting system,” Condos said. “Voting is a constitutional right and the basis of our democracy. Real voter fraud is preventing people eligible to vote from being able to vote.”

Actually- if I may interject for a moment, Secretary of State Condos- REAL voter fraud is elected officials doing something like systematically something like forging other people's signature on absentee ballots.

The release of O'Keefe's video comes one day after Eric Holder's Justice Department struck down a recently-passed Texas voter ID law on Monday.

O'Keefe filmed a similar video in New Hampshire earlier this year, prompting the State Senate to pass a voter ID law that was heading to the State House last week.

Former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson Crashes Mercedes into Orlando Bus While on His Way to Campaign Fundraiser

Alan Grayson- the boorish lawyer and former Florida Congressman who became a media darling for giving speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives about how Republicans wanted people to die- crashed his Mercedes-Benz into a municipal bus in Orlando after running a red light while on his way to a fundraiser.

The crash took place on Saturday afternoon in Orlando and two bus passengers were taken to the hospital after complaining of minor injuries.

Grayson was traveling to an upscale fundraising event for his Congressional campaign.
Authorities with the Orlando Police Department said the crash happened at Orange Avenue and Livingston Street.

Investigators said Grayson was driving a Mercedes, when he ran a red light and hit the bus.

A news release for Grayson’s campaign event stated it was scheduled from noon until 1:30 p.m. at the penthouse of some local Democrats in The Vue, a high-rise condominium near Lake Eola.

The Orlando Police Department website stated the time of the call to the incident was 12:08 p.m. The Orlando Fire Department dispatched the call at 12:06 p.m.

Featured guests included noted environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and actress Cheryl Hines. The suggested contribution for those attending was $1,000

Grayson served one term as Representative from Florida's 8th District before losing to Republican challenger Daniel Webster during the 2010 midterms. For 2012, Grayson is said to be running in one of the newly-reconstituted Democrat districts in the Orlando area.

Florida received two new Congressional districts after the 2010 Census. The new districts recieved approval from the Florida state Legislature at the end of January.

Today's Train of Thought- Horse Play, March 11, 2012

As predicted back in December by yours truly, snow has arrived in the Jefferson County/Thousand Islands region of Upstate New York. Mind you, this is hardly a bold act of prognostication for a part of the Empire State that annually sees more than 110 inches of the white stuff [imagine how much worse it would be if it weren't for global warming- NANESB!]. There's a reason the US Army's 10th Mountain Division is stationed nearby.

Here, railpictures.net contributor Joe Hance catches CSX GP38-2s #2799 and #2721 trundling north with a short cut of cars at Antwerp, NY with local freight B 778-03 enroute to Gouverneur, NY on a snowy December 3rd, 2008.

The lead CSX geep is showing the the CSX paint scheme known as 'Bright Future' while the trailing unit shows off more utilitarian colors known as 'Dark Future'. As the photographer pointed out- the horse in the foreground simply doesn't care and does its best to go about grazing undisturbed.

One Year Ago Today- Northern Japan Devestated by Quake, Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown

It was a year ago today that Japan got a taste of hell on earth after a massive magnitude 8.9 earthquake off the Sendai region in the northeastern part of the main island of Honshu. Immediately following the quake, a wall of water reaching a height of 70 feet in some places smashed ashore and up coastal inlets, wiping out farms, ports and entire towns.


To make matters even worse, the impact of the tsunami knocked the nuclear power plant at Fukushima Daiichi offline, triggering the worst nuclear meltdown and release of radiation since the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in what is now the Ukraine. To this day, a 20km exclusion zone remains around the site of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.



Cleanup around the nuclear plant site continues to this day. An estimated 18,000 people were killed and another 3100 missing between the quake, tsunami and meltdown. Another 87,000 individuals were displaced in the aftermath of the quake, tsunami and meltdown.



A firsthand account translated into English from a Tohoku University Professor who survived the Sendai quake and tsunami can be found here.



On Sunday, ceremonies were held throughout the country at 14:46 local time to mark the exact moment the quake struck.

Pilot projects to make land inside the Fukushima Daiichi exclusion zone inhabitable have gotten under way, using shovels and chemicals added to high pressure water guns to attempt to absorb the radiation. However, such efforts are considered a longshot.