Opinion: Courtney Love plays detective, Warren Buffett promotes March’s madness

Jacob Hollar
Thu, 20 Mar 2014 02:55:32 +0000
Campus, basketball, courtney love, flight mh370, gravitational waves, march madness, warren buffett

Warren Buffett visits the Creighton Bluejays prior to their game with Providence at the CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Neb., March 8.
Credit: Courtesy of MCT

This is part of a weekly series called “Pop Opinions” where The Lantern offers its take on the week’s pop culture news.

Courtney Love, Super Sleuth

A flight carrying 239 people went missing March 8 — and the search is still ongoing.

Theories have spread wildly as to what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: A hijacking, a malfunction, an alien abduction — you name it, someone’s put together a conspiracy theory on it (even though it looks as though it might have been an intentional turn off path now).

Thankfully, one of the super-est sleuths of a generation is investigating: Courtney Love is on the case.

With just a satellite image of a nondescript patch of ocean and Microsoft Paint, the who-knows-why-she’s-famous 49-year-old says she’s solved the case.

Or not. But she thought she did, and that was enough to spark a new Internet meme of defacing pictures with crudely drawn red lines and painfully obvious comments.

Maybe Love shouldn’t give up just because the Internet is making fun of her, though ?— she could totally be onto something.

The real story here is that we lost a plane, and nearly two weeks later we’re no closer to finding it.

Gravity Still Makes Headlines Without Sandra Bullock

“Gravity” is getting a lot of press this year: It won seven of the 10 Academy Awards for which it was nom — oh, wrong gravity?

Monday, a group of researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced the discovery of the first direct evidence of gravitational waves.

This has important ramifications I’m not smart enough to explain for our working theories of why the universe exists and what it was like when it was less than a second old.

If confirmed, the evidence of the waves will be another strong support for the Big Bang theory (no, not that awful show on CBS).

Nobody tell the Biblical fundamentalists who believe the world is only 6,000 years old — I’d hate to ruin their fun.

March Madness

The Ides of March have come … and gone, meaning it’s that time of year again. March Madness is back.

With it comes the usual buzz of impaired office productivity and the pseudo-science of “bracketology” — or, if you’re the president of the United States, “Barack-etology.”

President Barack Obama might have Michigan State winning it all in this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, but Warren Buffett might pay out for a different winner.

The Oracle of Omaha teamed up with Quicken Loans to offer $1 billion to anyone who correctly picks the winner of all of the men’s tournament games.

Fifteen million people can enter at Yahoo.com for a chance to win, but the chance to win is very slim.

Very, very, very slim: USA TODAY reported the odds at about 9.2 quintillion-to-one.

Having some knowledge of college basketball can improve the odds, though. With the right historical data, you can build a bracket with odds closer to 128 billion-to-one, according to USA TODAY.

May the odds be ever in your favor.