Hi Rip

Remember Nutmeg, the dog TigerBlog saw in the lobby of the hotel before the Princeton field hockey team played at Harvard this past season? 

Here he is. What a great face, right? TB doesn't need that good of a reason to bring back Nutmeg.

What did people do before they could simply take a picture on a phone and have it immediately? Or a video for that matter? 

For those too young to know this, there was a time when you had to have an actual camera and load it with actual film and then take it to an actual photo shop (not PhotoShop). They used to have one-hour photo places, though the majority of places you'd take your film to be processed used to take a few days. 

Can you imagine that, young people? You'd take a picture and then you couldn't see it for several days? Or longer, actually, since there were 24 or 36 pictures on a roll of film and you had to take all the pictures before any could be developed.

On the one hand, it's been a great addition to life to be able to immediately document moments that are gone in a blink. On the other hand, how many times do you see something interesting happening and instead of enjoying the moment, every observer has a phone out, filming?

TB will leave it to the philosophers and poets to decipher that.

Meanwhile, TB offers you a picture of another dog, one he saw yesterday: 

And what is this guy's name? It's "Rip." This was the conversation that TB and the owner had:

The Owner: "This is Rip."
TigerBlog: "Rip? Like the guy ..."
The Owner: "... the guy from Yellowstone, yes."

If you have watched the show, then you can understand why someone would want to name a dog Rip. TB did suggest to the woman who was walking the dog that her Rip needed to get a doggie-sized cowboy hat and dark shades to complete the look.

If you haven't been watching Yellowstone, you need to go back and binge. And, if you didn't already know, the character of Beth is played by Kelly Reilly, who is married to former Princeton men's lacrosse player Kyle Baugher, Class of 2002. 

And, given that tonight is the last night in the calendar year of 2024 that there are two home Princeton events and that after tonight there will only be three more events in the next 19 days, you'll have plenty of time to catch up on Yellowstone.

There are two games tonight at Princeton, as the women's hockey team hosts LIU at 6 and the men's basketball team hosts Monmouth at 7. 

As TB wrote yesterday, the two Princeton hockey teams are on a good roll. So too is the women's team at LIU.

The Princeton women have won four straight and seven of eight. The LIU women are 10-5-2 and are 5-0-1 in their last six and 7-1-1 in their last nine, with the only loss during that time a 1-0 setback to the same Quinnipiac team Princeton beat 2-1 in overtime this weekend. 

Monmouth comes to Jadwin Gym tonight with a record of 1-9. Against whom is the lone win? How about Seton Hall? 

The Princeton men's basketball team is back from South Carolina after its 69-63 loss at Furman Saturday. Despite the loss, it was still a big week for Xaivian Lee, who had the first official triple-double in Princeton men's basketball history in the win over Saint Joseph's a week ago tonight with an 18-point, 13-rebound 10-assist outing and who averaged 17.0 points, 10.0 rebounds, 7.5 assists and 1.5 steals for the two games. 

As a result? He was the Ivy League Player of the Week. 

TB's natural curiosity led him to wonder who the last Princeton player was to average those numbers across two games. For the first time in his entire life, therefore, he consulted ChatGPT, and this is what he found out:

The last time a Princeton men's basketball player averaged 17.0 points, 10.0 rebounds, 7.5 assists, and 1.5 steals across two games was Tosan Evbuomwan during the 2022-2023 season. In back-to-back games on March 18 and 19, 2023, in the NIT Tournament, Evbuomwan put up impressive all-around numbers in wins over Kent State and UNC Greensboro.

This performance helped highlight Evbuomwan's versatility and his pivotal role in Princeton's success that season. He was a dynamic force, contributing not just as a scorer, but also as a playmaker and defender. Would you like to dive deeper into those games or discuss another player from Princeton's history?

Well, that's certainly not what TB was expecting. He really, really, really doesn't want to get too into the AI world and would never use it to write anything, but maybe, just maybe, this will help with research. Hey, it took TB a long time until he got his own smartphone — and now he's going around taking pictures of dogs.

Is that progress?