Superconference watch: Breaking news

It has now been confirmed: Pittsburgh and Syracuse have been added as new members of the Atlantic Coast Conference. This is way beyond shocking given that the conventional wisdom was that the ACC was just sitting on its hands as superconference talk heated up again with Texas A&M recently saying adios to the Big XII--which is really the Big XII minus II. (other rumors involved NC State, Virginia Tech, FSU, and Clemson being courted by the Southeastern Conference and that the ACC really wanted UConn and Rutgers)

Texas has been the spark for most of this. There's been talk of the Longhorns going independent. It was that kind of talk last year that prevented the Pac-10 from becoming the Pac-16 coupled with UT wanting their own network, which the now Pac-12 shied away from because it wanted all of its member schools to have a channel more like the Fox-owned Big Ten network.

All I had been hearing for the past month in wake of TAMU's jump to the SEC was that the ACC was in danger of being raided by the SEC and/or the Big East. The talk, as recently as last week, then moved to whether Texas, Kansas, Missouri, or some combination of the three would be added by the ACC. As it turns out, the ACC has once again raided the Big East, which was on pace to become a basketball superconference upon adding Mountain West defector TCU next year.

Another Earth review

The movie was less about parallel worlds than the protagonist Rhoda coming to grips with what she did as a teenager. She killed a former Yale professor's wife, son and unborn daughter and put him in a coma for months while driving drunk after leaving a high school graduation party. She was set to go to MIT. Instead, she spent four years in jail for the deaths. After she leaves jail, Rhoda gets a cleaning job at a high school. She also cleans ex-professor John Burroughs's house. An essay contest is held for people to win a trip to Earth 2. The SETI spokeswoman ends up talking to an alternate version of herself. Rhoda decides to give her ticket to Earth 2 to John.

I was surprised at how little dialogue there was throughout the movie.  I was expecting the filmmakers to do more with Parallel Universe Theory, but there was no view of life on Earth 2, just a view of the duplicate planet in the sky. I would be creeped out by a spitting image of myself (like Rhoda did in the end) as opposed to other intelligent beings from another planet.

Stars: 2.75/4