It’s always been useful for certain camps to render Tennessee women’s coach Pat Summitt into a bizarro version of John Wooden: indomitable, brilliant, yet unfairly relegated to second-class status. After getting shellacked by Notre Dame, here’s what Summitt had to say after the game:

“I’m very disappointed in our basketball team,’’ said UT coach Pat Summitt, who referred to her group as “soft” in the locker room afterward. “I don’t think we came here with a focus. Don’t ask me why. I look at the junior class and Angie as a senior and I’m kind of lost for words why they wouldn’t come in and already know what they were going to do.”

That’s right: Her team loses and she blames . . . her team. To underscore the point, she even singles a player out by name. What a brilliant leader of women!

I can’t think of a coach in the men’s game–or actually any men’s game–who would throw their team under the bus like that after a loss.

Bonus: Over at the other March Madness there’s all sorts of insane, “If I had told you two weeks ago that . . .” lines. But the craziest has to be this: If, at the start of the tournament, I had told you that Butler would be a 2-point favorite in the national semi-final . . .

People love the Juicebox stuff. Two Galley Friends write in with observations. The first concerns a (playful?) post by Ann Friedman lamenting that her circle of young, liberal, women journalists has been setting the world on fire without ever getting on TV or being featured in fawning New York Times style pieces.

I’m not quite sure I understand Friedman’s complaint. She seems to be saying that she and her clique have been doing amazing, substantial work, winning all sorts of awards and shaping the debate, but that, for whatever reason (sexism) they don’t get the recognition (sexism) that they properly deserve. (Sexism.) But if Friedman and her friends really are doing substantive stuff (and at such a young age!) isn’t that its own reward? You get into journalism because you like the work–reporting, meeting people, finding interesting stories, learning how to tell them economically and to write well. You don’t get into journalism because you want other journalists to write about you.

But maybe Friedman is just being satirical. That’s what I thought, anyway, until she started listing the complaints of sexual harassment from her friends at the end. Whatever the case, I’m sure things will turn out well for the Capri Sun Mafia. Just so long as they don’t accidentally let someone who worked for, I don’t know, the Claremont Review of Books, into their set.

The other note comes from a Galley Friend defending the honor Spencer Ackerman:

Because I’m a squish, I’m happy to see Illinois doing away with the death penalty and I’d be even happier if the rest of the states followed suit. To mark the event, the New York Times ran this lovely story about how Gov. Pat Quinn wrestled with the decision to sign the bill. They note with reverence how, at the final hour, he consulted the Bible and then, ultimately, rested his decision on the rock of argument built by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. The Times finds this theological influence on the public square to be quite wonderful. And it is!

You can only imagine, of course, the treatment they’d give to the story if all the particulars were identical except that the bill outlawed abortion.

Douthat might as well give up his NYT column and retire because he’s never going to top this:

Advertising tonight’s address, the White House opted for “the situation in Libya,” which sounds less like a military intervention than a spin-off vehicle for the famous musclehead from MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”

High-level awesome.

The New York Times has a big piece on Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Dave Weigel, et al. It’s everything you hoped it might be.

Meanwhile, I put together a short complaint about a stray line in Ed Kilgore’s otherwise interesting TNR analysis of Tim Pawlenty’s prospects. For whatever it’s worth, the New Republic is, happily, undergoing a real resurgence in recent months, since Richard Just took over. I think it’s not an accident that the really good stuff at TNR is coming from Ed Kilgore, John Judis, and William Galston–who are basically the antithesis of the Juicebox crowd.

(Richard Just gets no mention in the NYT piece; I guess he’s not part of the posse.)

The NYT carries a story on Microtask, a tech firm which slices really mundane data-entry style work into pieces that can be accomplished in about 2 seconds. The Big Brains at Microtask believe that soon they will partner with game designers to make this work less like a chore and more like a videogame. After which point they won’t even have to pay workers.

Ville Miettnen, Microtask’s CEO, says that “Pure monetary compensation is a 20th-century concept.”

I bet Clay Shirky would agree.

Galley Friend Mike Russell has put together what looks like another fabulous fancomic: Jaxxon’s 11. You’ll have to be pretty steeped in the Marvel-Star Wars lore to piece it all together–remember this stuff?–but even so.

Via Czabe is this awesome video. The whole thing is great, but the real jaw-dropping stuff is at the 1:20 mark.

Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

It’s like a little course in fluid dynamics.