This blog will be going offline around midnight tonight, so all two of you jonesing for late night arguments for college football playoffs will have to find another internet diversion for the evening. I hear this "pornography" thing is becoming quite popular.

We'll come back up tomorrow, with a shocking change that will blow your mind.

(Unless of course you've read any other SBNation blog in the last two months. In that case, well, you know what's coming. Sorry.)

Back in the new year. Talk amongst yourselves.

You may have noticed posting has been light of late. (You may have not. Frankly, you may only be reading this because a particularly perceptive housepet walked across your keyboard. But we'll assume the former.) The reason posting has been so sporadic is very simple:

I went out and defended my doctoral thesis this week.

So now I'm Dr. Still Doesn't Blog Under His Real Name. And yes, I do appreciate the irony of this occurring while the rest of the internet was calling me stupid for picking UNC over ECU and Duke over UVa. I don't care, I'm a doctor now.

But what does this mean for the blog? Two things:

1. I now win all arguments on the internet. All of them. Playoffs are good, no one cares about the Rose Bowl, and Duke sucks. You have a problem with that? Don't care. Doctor.
2. I'm leaving the friendly environs of the West Coast, and heading back east. Not back to NC, but at least within driving distance of the games. Where? Let me put it this way. Expect a lot more posting about Brendan Haywood.

I've officially turned off anonymous commenting.

The SportsBlog Nation offically banned anonymous commenting a few months back as a spam prevention measure, but I kept in grandfathered in because I'm a fan of it - the energy barrier for me to actually create a login for a blog comment is pretty high. So even though it meant weeding out a couple of spam ads a day, I kept it open.

This weekend, however, another blog with anonymous commenting buckled under an entire database with spam comments, and the word came down from on high that the commenting policy had to be enforced, so here we are.

Signing up to comment is ridiculously easy, and only requires an e-mail address to prove you're not a robot trying to sell the world prescription medication. You won't get any e-mail from us and we won't pimp your address out to anyone. And you customize the look of the site to your liking, post diaries, and wreak havok all over the internet if you so desire.

So goodbye, anonymous comments. From the first (the lyrics to Aye Zigga Zoomba, for which I get a fair number of google hits for to this day) to the last (making fun of Rhode Islanders), they were all appreciated. And Wolfpack fans that only show up after a rare State win, I think I'll miss you most of all.

Next: More misguided ACC ramblings, I promise.

Happy Holidays to one and all. Service to resume around the time of the Rutgers game.

Although everyone's aware former Tennessee quarterback Heath Shuler won his bid for Congress, to the disconcercion of Redskins fans everywhere, the other big sports referendum story went unnoticed. As King Kaufman notes, voters shot down a taxpayer-funded stadium plan in Sacramento, and effectively killed one in Seattle. Public opinion is finally coming around to the idea that wildly successful businesses should pay for their own capital improvements.

Obligitory mention every time an ACC fan mentions taxpayer-funded stadiums: The RBC Center was built for $158 million dollars, for which NCSU and the Carolina Hurricanes chipped in $28 million apiece. The bulk of the remaining funds came from a Wake County hotel and restaurant tax. The Smith Center was funded entirely from private donations, but the state legislature funds all operations shortfalls, at a cost that has reached up to $1.2 million dollars. This is proof positive that the state legislature is fully under the thumb of UNC alumni, who use that power to thwart N.C. State at every and all opportunity, including legislating more money for planning commissions for the future RBC Center than was spent on Smith Center operations the first ten years of its existence.

And everyone agrees Ram Road was a complete boondoggle with a $1 million dollar price tag.

In case you were wondering why the posting volume dropped, I have an excuse. Sunday, I ran Santa Barbara's Pier to Peak half marathon - self-proclaimed "The World's Toughest Half-Marathon." It was also my first, a decision that can be charitably described as incredibly stupid. Allow me to diagram the route for you all:

Portrait of the author after 13.1 miles and 4,000 feet of idiocy.

The time since then has been spent replenishing exhausted alcohol reserves. I'll return tomorrow with content involving actual UNC athletes doing actual athletic feats of actual interest to the world at large.

So. Well. Here we are, then.

This is Carolina March, which was once Tar Heel March - but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. It began in the spring of 2005, when to keep my sanity while living in a household of four rabid Illini alumni, I began to bloviate on the actions of a of a basketball team that I hoped would have a pleasant month of March. (They did. Books have been written about it, actually.) Whether the blog was successful in its original intention remains a matter of debate, but to the surprise of everyone - myself included - I came back to toss out more uninformed commentary on college athletics, and inexplicably came to the attentions of the folks at SportsBlogs Nation, bringing us here.

Making the jump to ad-supported, blogging-for-pay wasn't a particularly easy one. I'm not sure how comfortable I am making money (and I'm fully expecting to be raking in tens to hundreds of cents here) off the work of a bunch of college kids who aren't getting paid themselves, after all. What drew me over was the goodwill the co-owner has built up on his small little niche site and a general curiousity towards where this whole sports blogging will go. Despite the years-long media infatuation with blogging, when I put out my shingle awhile back, the better of the ACC blogs were all a couple of months old, and within a year the major news organizations had jumped into the pool. There isn't the adverserial media relationship you see in political blogging or the walled away self-absorbtion of geek blogging - everythings out in the open. Throw in the rampant image appropriation of most sports blogs, and I begin to wonder whether this will last and where exactly its headed. I might as well have a front row seat when it happens.

Anyway, this is Carolina March. For the moment, you don't have to register to comment, but you're more than welcome to do so and play around with the software - it's the other reason I made the jump. Just think about the kind of person who makes anonymous comments about the lives of college kids, and try not to be that guy. And in return, I'll write more about Carolina athletics and less of this navel-gazing blog crap. Promise.