Basketball for the Beflued and Befuddled

I hear a lot of people have been sick lately, so I've become very interested in the problem of winter disease. In an effort to better understand all these different sicknesses going around under the general rubric of "flu," I have decided to try to catch as many different illnesses as possible. Still, I don't think that I've been able to cover the whole spectrum of these maladies--I have yet to experience gut-wrenching stomach aches or muscle stiffness.

If anyone has any of these symptoms and wishes to share them with me, please cough into an envelope and send them to The Crimson, where our master lab technicians will isolate the offending germs and transfer them to me so that I can write a first-hand report on each new agent.

It's been a long time since the last appearance of this column. I had been writing it every day but apparently one of the "editors" had decided that it was just some more crank mail and just threw it out. So you probably missed the column in which I announced the dedication of the Blodgett Pool and my prediction that Harvard would beat Princeton by less than five points in the subsequent meet. You also missed my prediction of a blizzard that would force Harvard to shut down for three days.

(If this column hasn't made any sense so far, please be patient. Help is on the way.)

Anyway, this is going to be a really big weekend in sports around this campus. Let's talk about basketball first. When you say "basketball" and "this weekend" in the same sentence, as I just have done, you also have to include "Princeton" and "Penn." Those are the names of the two schools that are going to be entertained by the Crimson cagers in the penthouse suite of the IAB.

Friday night at 7:30 it's going to be Pete Carill and the Princeton Tigers on the hardwood. A mere 24 hours later on the very same court, Harvard will be shooting against Penn and the hot Keven McDonald.

If you haven't seen the new pool yet, you can get your chance Friday or Saturday. In addition to seeing the pool you can also see the Crimson aquamen take on schools named after states. On Friday at 4 p.m. the visiting swimmers will be from a state in northern New England and whose capital is neither Montpelier nor Concord.

The swimmers who will be challenging Hackett et al Saturday at 2 p.m. hail from an Ivy League school in an industrial state south of New York. Please send your answers to the "Name the State Contest" c/o this newspaper, Anywhere, USA, 02345.

And speaking of a track meet against Princeton and Yale, there is one this weekend. The time is 1 p.m. Saturday and the place is the ITT Hall, which is next to the Watson Rink. Many people are hoping that the snow won't force some of the times to be slower, but since most of the snow fell outside the building, this is a minor consideration.

In women's sports most of the activity is non-existent or outside Cambridge. Thursday at 8 p.m. the women squashers will be taking on Penn at Hemenway Gym.

The next day, across the campus in the IAB, the women's basketball team will battle Southeastern Massachusetts, or SMU as they are fondly called. The opening tap is scheduled for 3 p.m., after which a lot of running up and down the court and shooting of the ball is planned by both teams.

Thanks for all the Valentines. See you next week.

Be there. Aloha.