Starting Five

1. It is BANGladesh, after all. Bangladeshi national’s plot to detonate the Federal Reserve in New York City blows up in his own face when the FBI foils his plot. Ben Affleck has already purchased the film rights.

2. Is O.J. Simpson really attempting to sell the knife that did the deed?

3. Newsweek announces that it is going all-digital beginning in 2013. While that may not be the very first domino to fall, the quote from “Ghostbusters”  “Print is dead” is now true.

4. The woman who A-Hole targeted at Game 1 of the ALCS was identified as a 33 year-old Aussie by the New York Post yesterday (we will give her privacy here in terms of name identifcation, although it’s pretty much public domain by now). This morning she tweeted, “Ha, I’m 27 not 33.”

5. The Cardinals defeat the Giants, 3-1, to take a 2-1 series lead in St. Louis. The Freak, Tim Lincecum, gets the start for San Francisco in Game 5.

Reserves

“Oooh, ooh, Love hurts…”

A request: If you’re tweeting score updates of NBA exhibition contests, please stop.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the SI cover story about Tyrann Mathieu that many of us who don’t live in a parish may not have known — his biological father’s troubled past, for example. But this is the paragraph we found most curious:

Mathieu is also featured on a flyer for a Jan. 14, 2012, party at Club H2O in New Orleans. The flyers and videos may be a violation of NCAA rule 12.5.2.1, which says that anyone who “accepts any remuneration or permits the use of his or her name or picture to advertise, recommend or promote directly the sale or use of a commercial product or service of any kind” is ineligible. A veteran compliance officer with no direct knowledge of Mathieu’s case says that any penalties would depend on how commercial the videos were, whether Mathieu knew what they were being used for and if he received any illicit benefits, which would violate a separate NCAA rule. “If this guy is in the video in an attempt to draw people to the place,” says the officer, “that’s not permissible.” LSU says the school, including coach Les Miles, is unaware of players using their images to promote events or receiving extra benefits.

There is, to us, something slightly unseemly about casting about for a way to link a player to this infraction while featuring a picture of him on the cover of your own nationally sold commercial product against his wishes, no? The Mathieu family are fighting back…

So there was like this huge art heist in Rotterdam (yes, it is obligatory to use the word “heist” when it comes to thievery of paintings) in which works by Picasso, Monet and Matisse were stolen. But it turns out police do have a suspect…

Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby: “We are very close to getting this (playoff) really right.” Ah, HA HA HA HA HA. Lo, what fools these mortals be…