by John Walters

A Medium Happy 58th to Sharon Stone, who once married a print journalist.

Starting Five

She may be the Owen Meany of distance running, but don’t be fooled by her size. She’s a demon.

1. Allez, Allie!

Let’s just provide the resume of 19 year-old Allie Ostrander of Soldotna, Alaska, a freshman at Boise State:

–10-time state champion in track and field and cross country

–state record-holder in the 1600 and 3200

–Nike National High School Cross Country champion, 2014

–Six-time winner of the Mount Marathon Junior Race, and runner-up in her first try at the Senior edition of the race last July 4th.

–In her past two Mount Marathons, she has broken the existing records in the Junior race (2014) and the Senior race (2015).

–Runner-up at last fall’s NCAA Cross Country Championships.

–Straight-A student.

That’s joy, not pain

Ostrander will compete in the 5,000 (Friday) and the 3,000 (Saturday) at the NCAA Indoor Championships in Birmingham, Ala. No freshman has ever won either race. Her only real competition is Notre Dame senior Molly Seidel, who beat her at the X-Country Championships last November. Consider, for example, in the 5,000, that Seidel (15:19) and Allie (15:21) are the only two women who have gone below 15:30 this winter.

2. Let Bees Bee

Finally, someone displays sanity and humanity in dealing with wild creatures

A spring training game between the Kansas City Royals and the Colorado Rockies in Surprise, Arizona, was disrupted on Tuesday when a swarm of bees decided not to pay for tickets.

Fortunately, Lowell Hutchison, a retired bookkeeper, was also in attendance (wait, what? Oh, he’s a retired beekeeper. My bad).

A year ago, on the same day (March 8), bees disrupted a Royals game and they were all exterminated. At the time Royals manager Ned Yost (my new favorite manager) was pissed at the action that was taken: “They’re just honey bees, man. There’s a decline in honey bees. We need ’em.”

This year Yost made sure that the bees were not killed.

“I told (vice president of communications Mike Swanson), we ain’t killing those bees,” Yost said after the game. “We better figure something out. But we’re not killing those bees. Luckily, we had a beekeeper from St. Joe, I told Swanny, ‘Just get a bag.’

“They had already devised that plan by the time I called them over. Just get a plastic bag, take ’em out and let them go.

“There’s not enough bees in the world, boys. We can’t be exterminating them. I’m telling you, they are dwindling, and they’re so important to our environment, because they pollinate everything. It doesn’t make any sense for me to panic and kill bees.”

3. Chestnut Hill Street Blues

The men’s basketball team at Boston College finished its ACC season 0-19  with an 88-66 loss to Florida State in the first round of the ACC tournament on Tuesday. Coupled with the football team’s 0-8 record in ACC play, the Eagles became the first school since TCU in 1976-77 to lose all of its conference games in both football and men’s basketball. And I’ll be happy to take their entire Sports Information department out for a drink later this spring.

If you are wondering, B.C. lost by 1 to N.C. State on March 3 and by 3 to North Carolina, a possible No. 1 seed next week, in February. All of its other ACC games were blowouts.

The video above is both painful and hilarious to watch. That’s senior Dennis Clifford. The irony of Clifford’s answer is that this is a season when the men’s basketball team got sick after eating at Chipotle.

4. Fake Wobegon Days

It IS close to Canada, which could soon be a benefit.

Red Lake County is an unassuming spot in northern Minnesota, and yet a  place that Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham last August, in a story ranking every spot in America by “geography and climate,” referred to as “the absolute worst place to live in America.”

A few weeks later Ingraham visited. And he decided he’d been too harsh.

So now Ingraham is moving his family to Red Lake County for two years.

Sorry, Chris, not buying it. I mean, I buy the original story. But this sounds to me like a very canny and savvy journalist who knows a good book deal/film deal/NPR-worthy story when he reads one. So now he’ll write one.

Good luck, Chris. Minnesotans are nobody’s fools. I don’t doubt Ingraham will stay. I doubt the sincerity of the reason for his relocation.

5. Now That IS a Smart Phone

What will this do to the Ziploc bag industry?

I’ve done it; have you done it? Lost a phone to a careless interaction with H2O? Extra points if you’ve dropped yours in a toilet.

Well, as you may already know, Samsung has come out with a Galaxy S7 that purports to be waterproof. Yesterday on CNBC they placed one in a goldfish bowl on the studio desk to demonstrate.

Meanwhile, Apple had a water-resistance patent accepted last November by the U.S. Patent office.

For the longest time, phones not being water-resistant was actually a boon to business for Apple and Samsung (See: “Planned Obsolesence”). But we all knew this day would eventually arrive. I’ll call you from my shower later.

Music 101

The Long and Winding Road

In honor of Sir George Martin, the genius behind the Beatles’ studio work who whose death was announced….yesterday….at age 90, we present this mournful but hopeful Beatles classic. This was the Fab Four’s 20th and last No. 1 hit, topping the charts in June of 1970.

Remote Patrol

GOP Debate

8:30 p.m. CNN

How can you not love this man?

Yes, another one, this time from Miami. It’s either No. 11 or 12, we’ve lost count. Donald Trump, part-time resident, and Marco Rubio, part-time senator, will vie for home-court advantage as Ted Cruz tries to persuade voters that you can do an effective job even if everybody despises you (look at us, after all). After the last debate (hands & glands), will anything be off the table? And how well would a Don Rickles in his prime do in this format? I think he’d be leading.