This very sad story about an Australian citizen arrested and executed in Singapore for smuggling 400 grams of heroin has a bizarre bit at the end:

A survey by Morgan Poll conducted on Wednesday night showed 47 percent of Australians believed Nguyen should be executed, 46 percent said the death penalty should not be carried out, and seven percent were undecided.

Australia abolished the death penalty decades ago.

This doesn’t quite compute. If Australia reached a real consensus on capital punishment, then who do more people want to see their fellow citizen executed by a foreign government for a reasonably minor drug offense? Is the poll faulty? Do Australians actually favor the death penalty as an institution?

Have you seen the trailer for The Producers? It’s a movie, based on a play, based on a movie, about a play.

You know, that Mel Brooks is such a hack; thank goodness someone is finally going to do this film right. Now, if only Bret Ratner would remake Casablanca to tighten the story up, get better f/x, and fix the ending.

A funny and somewhat devastating slide-show from Wonkette.

It’s not entirely fair to the administration–but it’s not so unfair that it doesn’t leave a mark.

This time from Hugh Hewitt, with a Matus-like riff.

Get Religion has a serious post about Stanley Fish and Intelligent Design, but I didn’t read it because I was distracted by the accompanying photo of . . . Arvin Sloan!

Who knew Fish was such a dead ringer for Ron Rifkin?

Amy Welborn is making with the big funny. Don’t miss it.

Uncle Grambo has a great little Martina Hingis riff:

Alas, I suppose I can take solace in the impending comeback of Martina Hingis. Has there ever been a better female tennis player ever? You can keep your Fraulein Forehands, Chris Evert-Lloyds and Tracy ‘I’d Like To Fuck Her On The Tennis Court, If You Get My Meaning’ Austins of the world — your Uncle Grambo has never EVER seen anyone with a sicker groundstroke game than The Swiss Miss. And I’ll kindly have you remember that she would regularly whoop on Venus and Serena before her feet went wonky in 2000 or thereabouts. And come on, 14 Grand Slam titles? Redonk, especially for someone who was forced to retire at the tender age of deuce deuce. Welcome back, Hingis!

I don’t know that I’d go that far–for my money, Steffie Graff is the greatest women’s player I’ve ever seen. And I wonder what would have become of Monica Seles if she hadn’t been cut down in her prime. But it would be nice to have a resurgent Hingis back in the game, none the less.

Driving to work this morning, Tony Kornheiser argued, if only briefly, that Christian Laettner is one of the 10 best college players ever. Could this be? Laettner was an amazing, dominating college player. But if you’re making a list of the 10 best college players ever, you really only have 6 openings to argue about, since 4 of them–Walton, Kareem, Bird, and Magic–are locks.

So who would round out those other 6 spots? Off the top of my head, I’d say:

Patrick Ewing
Grant Hill
Steve Alford
Danny Manning

Those guys all deserve high consideration. Certainly Laettner does, too. But who else?

Update: Commenters pointing to Pistol Pete are dead-on; I don’t know how I left him out. Maravich averaged–averaged!—44.2 ppg in at LSU.

Others have suggested Grandmama Johnson. I don’t buy it. Johnson was a man among boys and here, I’ll say it: The ’91 UNLV team which lost to Duke by a bucket in the Final Four was the best college team I’ve ever seen play. They were defending national champs, had an ungodly record, and lost to a Duke team playing the game of its life. They replay that game 100 times, UNLV wins it 99 of them. That said, Johnson only played two years and averaged 21.6 points and 11.2 rebounds per game. Great, awesome numbers, but not Top 10 All-Time material.

Does anyone have stats for David Thompson?

PS: This CBS Sports link has all sorts of good NCAA tourney stats and Basketball Reference has everything else you’ll need for this discussion.