New Zealand gained an improbable draw in stoopage time with Slovakia earlier this morning.

Now the Group of Death (Group G, Brazil, Portugal, Ivory Coast, North Korea) starts play. The Group of Death is the group that is considered the most difficult for advancing to the next round. Brazil you all know about. Portugal you probably know about. Ivory Coast you may not know about. It is the best team in Africa and a dangerous team. North Korea is not as well known.

I like Portugal, with Cristiano Ronaldo, to find a way.

Maradona and Messi. Drama.

No live blog, but some periodic updates.

15 minutes - Argentina 1, Nigeria 0.

HALFTIME - Argentina 1, Nigeria 0.

FINAL - Argentina 1, Nigeria 0.

Boo France! Boo Henry! Well, at least that's what everyone seems to feel. Me? Not so much. I'm a oontrarian though. I also think France wins.

FINAL - 0-0. Not an advertisement for association football. Just an awful, awful game.

Semi-Live Blog below the fold.

FINAL - South Africa 1, Mexico 1. Overall, lousy game. One great goal by South Africa.

At Sportsleft, I've posted the first of my group previews. This one discusses Groups A and B. Of note, I predict that the best player in the world will not be playing in the second round - Argentina does not get out of Group B and Messi won't be doing this:

A shame really. But Maradona? What were they thinking?

The World Cup opens tomorrow and I will be covering and recapping every game at SportsLeft, starting Friday morning at 9 with the opening match South Africa v. Mexico. But today, I want to discuss our boys, the US team and their chances in the 2010 edition of the World Cup.

The Key Players. You will hear a lot about Landon Donovan ("Donovan is the key to success or failure for the U.S. in South Africa"), arguably the best player the US has ever produced, and Jozy Altidore,the new hope. But for my money, how far the US goes in the World Cup will depend on Clint Dempsey, the most instinctive scorer on the team. More . . .

The greatest basketball coach in history, John Wooden, has passed away:

John Wooden, a staid Midwesterner who migrated to U.C.L.A. and became college basketball’s most successful coach, earning the nickname the Wizard of Westwood and an enduring place in sports history, died Friday at Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since May 26. He was 99.

BP capped the leaking oil well with a containment device referred to as "Top Hat.

BP engineers Thursday night guided a containment dome onto the hydrocarbon geyser shooting from the Gulf of Mexico oil well -- a desperate and iffy attempt to capture the leaking oil and funnel it to a ship on the surface.

...It was not an elegant operation. Furious clouds of oil escaped the "top hat." Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the spill, called the development a positive step but said, "It will be sometime before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment."

[More...]

The Gulf of Mexico oil leak is worse than previously reported.

Oil giant BP conceded Thursday that the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is larger than it originally estimated, adding more worry as portions of the massive spill began trickling ashore for the first time.

In addition to questions about the accuracy of BP's disclosures, there's big issues about the dispersants being used. More here.

I haven't been following this closely, but for those of you who are, here's a place to discuss it.

[NOTE: Yes this should be at Sports Left, but I have to relaunch it and this is on my mind now.]

The NFL Draft is tomorrow night. Or rather the First Round of the NFL Draft is tomorrow. I'm a sports nut so I watch the NFL draft but honestly, it is amazing that it is being turned into some type of must see event. Watching a bunch of middle aged guys put baseball caps on huge guys in suits can not be compelling television to any normal human being.

The most bizarre part is that one of the biggest stories of this draft is Tim Tebow and whether he will be drafted in the First Round This is a big deal because . . . well, I am not sure why it is a big deal, but whether Tebow will go to the draft tomorrow night is a big story now. (Turns out Tebow said no.) As regular readers know, I live and die with the Gators, but the Gators aren't playing tomorrow night. Other Gator fans see it differently:

A new study finds fatty foods and junk foods cause rats to overeat, triggering the same mechanism in the brain as cocaine.

Doing drugs such as cocaine and eating too much junk food both gradually overload the so-called pleasure centers in the brain, according to Paul J. Kenny, Ph.D., an associate professor of molecular therapeutics at the Scripps Research Institute, in Jupiter, Florida. Eventually the pleasure centers "crash," and achieving the same pleasure--or even just feeling normal--requires increasing amounts of the drug or food, says Kenny, the lead author of the study.

[More...]

Dennis Hartley's 10 Best Films list reminded me of Danny Peary's 1993 book Alternate Oscars (his picks here. Anyway, I thought I would add my own 10 favorites:

(1) Chinatown (1974)
(2) Once Upon A Time In The West (1969)
(3) Casablanca (1942)
(4) Annie Hall (1977)
(5) The Godfather (1972)
(6) Dr. Strangelove (1964)
(7) 8 1/2 (1963)
(8) Sugata Sanjiro (1943)
(9) Rear Window (1954)
(10) Bridge On the River Kwai (1957)

So many favorites left off this list. No John Ford? No Peckinpaugh? No Scorsese? No Coen Brothers? No Billy Wilder? No Robert Altman? But you have to pick 10. BTW, I like Avatar for Best Picture tonight. Pedestrian story? Sure. Technical achievement was transformational imo.

Speaking for me only