It is an understatement to say that Fool by Christopher Moore is a work of complete deranged genius. Moore “borrows” the story of King Lear, adds the witches from Macbeth, a Halmet-esk ghost, and has quite a story. Lear is told from the point of view of the Fool, thus the name of the book. Moore embellishes the dullest parts of Lear, mostly with bawdy jokes, sex scenes, violence, and ridiculous scenarios. He gives such life to the characters in Lear that appear in the original play as flat and two-dimensional. Lear’s two older daughters are very bright and strong, but also very sexual and murderous. Oswald is turned into a bumbling idiot, and Kent emerges as a prime example of a best friend. Moore takes Lear, who frankly makes bad decisions and complains throughout the Shakespeare play, and puts that into the spotlight. Lear isn’t seen as King; He is viewed as a dotty, whiny, old man. This approach is daring and risky, but it ultimately pays off.

The immediate post-Oscar season is never a good time for movies. Studios halt their mad dash to release Academy Award worthy films and start pumping out movies that will simply make them lots of undeserved money. ‘Knowing’, the new apocalyptic disaster movie starring Nicolas Cage, is just another example of Hollywood’s February-June quality lull.

Catherine the Great, the new biography of the the famous empress of Russia written by Simon Dixon, is too short, too wordy, and too obsessed with minutiae ever to become a piece of interest outside of academic circles. The book is smoothly written and evocatively descriptive in its setting, but it fails at its most basic tasks of being a biography of a person, and of a ruler. While the intriguing setting is enough, almost in the same way that it can be with good fiction, momentarily to distract the reader from the book's flaws, it can never overcome its main faults, the greatest of which is that the book dwells on what surrounds Catherine throughout her life, without ever discussing Catherine herself.

For the first time in the program's history, the Binghamton University Men's Basketball team is going to the National Tournament. Saturday's 61-51 victory over University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus sent a capacity crowd streaming on to the court to celebrate and gave coach Kevin Broadus' squad the first America East Conference championship in school history.

Senior Reggie Fuller led the way for the Bearcats, recording a double double with 19 points and ten rebounds. The 6 foot 6 inch Texan was 7 for 7 from the floor, while Binghamton as a whole shot 42 percent overall while smothering the Retrievers on defense.

DJ Rivera contributed 16 points and 5 rebounds.

Binghamton received a 15 seed in the East region, which sets up a first round match with Duke University on Thursday at 9:40 pm. Duke won the Atlantic Coast Conference with a 79-69 win over Florida State, spoiling the Seminoles' debut in the Conference title game.

Duke finished the season 28 and 6, ranked 9^th nationally in the AP polls. Binghamton finished its first ever 20 win season, currently 23 and 8.

Fuddy Meers by David Lindsey-Abaire is a very clever little play. The plot is as follows: a woman wakes up, and having a form of anterograde amnesia tries to piece together her life through surprising and frightening events, surrounded by people she supposedly knows. Thomas Kremer, an acting professor at Binghamton University, directed this play. I saw the opening night performance on March 6th.

Binghamton University has once again dropped the ball on securing the private information of students and parents. In a titanic breach of security, Binghamton University kept payment information for every student, possibly dating back at least ten years in a storage area next to one of the most trafficked lecture halls on campus, behind a door that was not only unlocked but taped open. The information itself contained social security numbers, credit card numbers, scans of tax forms, business information (including social security numbers and salary information for employees of students' parents), asylum records and more, all kept in a haphazard and disorganized fashion, sprawled out in boxes, in unlocked (yet lockable) filing cabinets and shelving units. And, to seemingly add insult to injury, the university left dollies and a shopping cart in the room, apparently to aid in any attempted theft. (Pictures of the room are beneath the story.)

Ben Meyers of the Sens Army Blog and Peter Raaymakers of the Silver Seven Sens Blog talk about the latest Senators news.

For those of us that enjoyed the football season, and with March Madness winding down there is something for all of us to look forward to: Opening Day for Major League Baseball. The New York Yankees have not won a World Championship since 2000, but that is all going to change this year. As an avid Yankee fan since birth I have witnessed the incredible events and the disappointing moments that have struck this team within the last two decades. However, no matter what scandal or injuries that seem to plagues the Yankees, they always manage to come out stronger than before.

Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph T. Hallinan put out by Broadway publishing. It's rather good and a easy read, and it's main focus is on why people make mistakes. However, it's nothing special, being one of the latest books in a whole string of books on how the mind works in a certain way (Laurence Gonzales' Everyday Survival and Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide being two of the best books from the genre in recent months,) and they all share the same basic strengths and flaws. They're well written, informative, smoothly moving from subject to subject arousing interest in everything they touch on which is an impressive feat because they touch on a whole plethora of subjects. On the other hand, they're all cursory glances at the material at hand and nothing more, half of the material presented is anecdotal and the other half plucked summaries of various and sundry scientific experiments from all over the board with only the barest of ties between them. And within this genre, Why We Make Mistakes is one of the better ones.

Ben Meyers of the Sens Army Blog and Peter Raaymakers of the Silver Seven Sens Blog talk about the latest Senators news, including the recent loss to the Canadiens, the ever problematic Goalie situation and the recent Comrie/Campoli trade.