Bravo to the continued dominance of ASU spring athletics. The track and field program remains an elite power in the spot. Women’s tennis is a top-30 program.The defending NCAA champion ASU softball team is in the hunt for a two-peat with a 36-9 record and sits eighth in the nation. Women’s water polo heads to this weekend’s MPSF Championships ranked No. 8 in the nation. The 29-8 baseball team is ranked second in the national polls as it continues conference play tonight. And finally, the women’s golf will play for a Pac-10 crown this weekend as the No. 1 team in the nation, according to both major polls.
Boo to the return of the bugs — the No. 1 negative part of the changing season (you know, other than the copious amounts of cascading sweat pouring out of every poor person’s every pore). You know it’s going to be a terrifying day when you walk to your car at about 10 a.m., only to notice that dozens and dozens of 3-inch grasshoppers have blanketed not only the ground you are currently walking on, but also the driver-side of the car itself. Yes, we realize that they’re harmless and ultimately good for some purpose or another, but they’re also petrifying, especially when they whir up at your face. And we can’t forget the particularly abundant bevy of mosquitoes that decided to rear their ugly heads (and blood-sucking beaks, for that matter), no thanks to last week’s cooler weather and the growing numbers of pools (aka mosquito breeding grounds) because of foreclosures. Yes, springtime is here — but can we please go back to the time when grasshoppers were simply the name of delicious mint cookies?
Bravo to the 13th annual ASU Art Museum Short Film and Video Festival. Held outside the museum last Saturday, the festival attracted about 1,300 people to watch 19 submissions by independent directors hailing from Arizona to New York to Germany. The films screened were selected at large from 405 entries sent in from a staggering 35 states and 27 nations. The most redeeming part of the festival, however, was best summed up by one winning local director, Sean Christensen, who said the weekend “just points to this growing fascination with film in Arizona and is just a beginning of what’s to come.”
Boo to the heat. This is neither a condemnation of the Miami Heat for taking home-court advantage away from the Atlanta Hawks in their first-round NBA playoff series nor a denunciation of the 1995 action drama film “Heat” starring Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer and Al Pacino. Instead, it is a gripe about Mother Nature giving us a not-so-generous gift this week: The first 100-degree day of 2009. Though we’re eternally grateful to have avoided the all-time Phoenix record of earliest occurrence of triple digits (in 1988, the mercury cracked 100 on March 26, according to the National Weather Service), we were still earlier than the May 13 average, so that’s a bummer. But at least there’s some silver lining to the heat: The longer the temperatures hover around the 100 mark, the more often we’ll get to revel in our favorite holiday — 98 Degrees Day, a celebration of one of the greatest boy bands in music history.
