Okay, I admit it.  I may have picked Michigan to win but I didn't really expect them to.  It is simply against my religion to pick against Michigan.

Anyway, some comments on today's game....

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Matt Mille, former Lions President, was the color commentator for the game today.  The Lions have been one of the biggest jokes in football for the last 7 years in large part due to his "leadership".

I yelled "EAT IT, MILLEN" at the TV several times, the first when he said the notre dame guy didn't step out and the review came back and said he DID step out. :)

Millen provided in his tenure with the Lions that he doesn't know shit about football.

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Tate Forcier for Heisman!

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I found this interesting bit of analysis on espn:

Second guessing: Protecting a 34-31 lead with under three minutes left, Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis made a few curious calls. First, he handed the ball to fullback Robert Hughes on first down instead of Armando Allen, who had had a great game to that point. Hughes was stuffed for no gain. Then he threw the ball twice, both resulting in incompletions that stopped the clock and gave Michigan the ball back with plenty of time. The Wolverines also got to keep their timeouts, which came in handy on the final drive.

Now I will grant that if Clausen had made either one of those passes, Michigan might not have won.  But the fact is, those two incomplete passes left us with two timeouts that we probably shouldn't have had.  Michigan called timeout after the fullback run, and would've called timeouts after two more runs probably assuming ND didn't get a first down.  In either case, a first down would've been devastating, so Charlie Weis clearly made the WRONG call with the passes.

Regardless, this loss isn't gonna be good for Weis.  the ND/MSU Game could be interesting next week.  I'll be full on rooting for MSU in that one.

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Noise - I've heard that the new construction is doing a wonderful job of keeping the noise in.  I think that was evident today when Notre Dame seemed to be having trouble hearing and called several timeouts that were clearly caused by crowd noise, as well as a couple of delay of games that I think were probably attributed to crowd noise as well.

Even in 1997, when the crowd was as loud as could be, I don't think it ever really caused problems on the field, so this excites me very much.. maybe we'll know longer be known as the quietest 110,000 people in football.

Door knobs are expensive! 

Our house is full of brass, and we hate it.  We started by replacing all the outlet covers with nice venetian bronze plates that I found at Lowe's.  The darker colors really go well with the decor.

Now, we've decided to replace all the brass doorknobs.  Of course, this also means replacing the brass hinges as well.

We found some inexpensive Kwikset knobs on ebay, 6 passage and 6 privacy knob sets, for $150.  I found 10 matching dummy knobs for our double-door closets in each bedroom and for the french doors to the TV room... about $75 for those.  60 bronze hinges for $0.99 each plus shipping, which also worked out to about $75.  I'm one privacy knob short so I'll probably just pick that up at home depot for $20... which will bring the total cost of this little project to about $320.

Of course, it could've been worse.

There are 20 interior doors.  Home Depot sells the bronze hinges in sets of 3 with screws for $9... that's $192 with tax.  The passage knobs are $15, the privacy knobs are $20, and the dummy knobs are $10... so for my counts, with tax, that's $353.

Total savings by going the ebay route:  $225, or about 41%.

Not bad!