Hello everybody, as we Americans are about to light up 232 candles on our birthday cake on Friday. But before you blow them out, there's always tons of territory to cover.

First up...two signs that our economy continues to be in life support thanks to those damn rising gas prices: The big three U.S. automakers and Toyota have reported major drops in vehicle sales for June. General Motors' fell 18 percent; Ford, 28%; Chrysler, 36%; and Toyota among the Japanese companies? 21%.

Another is one that hits home: The Top of the World Classic, the four-day college basketball tournament in November that annually draws seven teams from across the country to play the Alaska Nanooks, is no more thanks to a 2006 rule change imposed by the NCAA that increased the number of pre-season tournaments. Prior to that change, there were ten of those; now, it's 45.

Now that the Carlson Center is without a major sports event, the only way now to get your Division I men's college basketball fix here in Alaska is the Great Alaska Shootout over in Anchorage.

But from those 11 years, the one memorable moment from the Classic that stood out for me was when the Nanooks (under the direction of then-coach Al Sokatis) won the tournament. And of course, I had a little something to say about that on the November 30-December 1, 2002 "Plain Truth" which I dug yet again from my archives as the ten-year anniversary of The Allen Report/AllenBlog continues:

We start, of course, with last weekend and the Top of the World Classic. And what an historic one it was. No other NCAA Division II basketball team has ever won a Division I tournament until last Sunday, when our UAF Nanooks clobbered UW Green Bay, Nebraska (by three points), and later Weber State (77-65) to win the seven-year-old tourney...and they did it in our own backyard. Sophomore Brad Oleson was the tournament MVP.

Additional tickets for the championship game between UAF-Weber State immediately went on sale at the Carlson Center box office after they beat Nebraska. And you know the old saying about not wearing white after Labor Day? Well, many diehard Nanook fans ignored it and did so to create another indoor blizzard...or make that flurries.

For those who didn't have white sweatshirts like myself (okay, so I have an Oklahoma Sooners sweatshirt), they brought in white face towels from home. 800 of those rally towels the fans got during Saturday night's semifinals ran out, and they couldn't make any more on the fly for Sunday. To my estimation, about 45% of the packed crowd on Sunday wore white, which was largely compared to mid-March when the college hockey playoffs came to us for the first time.

Now, unlike that carnage in Ohio State, we celebrated our win very peacefully. And why not? It all continued with a brief victory parade through downtown on Tuesday night followed thereafter by a public reception at the Westmark Hotel. The team and its coach Al Sokatis got a proclamation from the three mayors (Borough Mayor Rhonda Boyles, Fairbanks Mayor Steve Thompson, North Pole Mayor Jeff Jacobson).

So yes, thanks to UAF history was made here twice this year, with both the college hockey playoffs being played in Alaska and of course the Nanooks being the first Division II team to win a Division I tournament. Could the UAA Seawolves be next with the Great Alaska Shootout now underway? We'll find out.

The University of Alaska Anchorage Seawolves have played in every Great Alaska Shootout since its first one in 1978 (they moved from the Buckner Fieldhouse on Fort Richardson to the new Sullivan Arena in 1983) and have yet to win that tourney.

And last but not least...YouTube is of course home to billions of videos from around the world including game shows from the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe...and even Japan. That's right, Japan!

The Land of the Rising Sun have one-upped the Westerners over the decades when it comes to producing the most outrageous game shows in the world, and if you've been watching the summer reality series "I Survived A Japanese Game Show" on ABC lately, you know what I'm talking about.

The show pits ten Americans who are selected to take part in a reality competition show similar to "Survivor" or "Big Brother", but what they didn't know is that they were going to be on a Japanese game show called "Majide" ("Seriously?") and that they'd be split into two teams (Green Monkeys and Yellow Penguins). The winning team gets a nice reward like a helicopter tour of Tokyo or Japanese spa treatments, while the losers' punishment is pulling rickshaws or something as well as picking two of their members for a second game head-to-head. And since it is Japan, the losing contestant is given its final words to go along with "The tribe has spoken" and "You're fired" in the long list of parting lines: "Sayonara!"

Americans poking fun at Japanese game shows is not new. There was a "Saturday Night Live" skit from 1994 that had Chris Farley as an American tourist from Wisconsin being a contestant on one of those shows, but with only one problem: He doesn't understand Japanese! It's on the "Best of Chris Farley" DVD if you want to see the whole deal.

And on the "Simpsons" episode "Thirty Minutes over Tokyo", the family took a trip to Japan until Homer used his last million yen to make an origami crane for Lisa...only to lose it in the wind. The only resort was to go on a Japanese game show to win plane tickets home.

So far, I'm liking "I Survived a Japanese Game Show", but trust me...I'm better off surviving an American game show instead! So long, stay strong, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!!!!