¢ How much do you love basketball? Enough to spend eternity in one?A Kansas native and hardcore Kansas University fan had his cremated ashes put inside a basketball when he died last year.Don Oliver’s story is told in a column in Sunday’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune._Mary Oliver had made up her mind. And a million incredulous looks from the funeral director wasn’t about to change it.__Her beloved Donald would spend eternity inside a basketball.__Well, what was left of Don. His cremated ashes. Maybe, said the director, as politely as possible, we could imprint the urn with a basketball.__Nope, said Mary. No imprint. The genuine article. Leather and everything. The family had the perfect one available, a ball Don’s granddaughter, Caley Onek, and her brother had given him as a birthday present._¢ Of course, Lawrence and KU are getting tons of media mentions for the Jayhawks’ Sweet 16 appearance. David Brown a columnist for the Kane County (Ill.) Chronicle tried to catch up with KU assistant coach Danny Manning for a 20-question Q&A session._Kansas legend and former NBA player Danny Manning appears to be a no-nonsense sort of guy not necessarily the kind who would sit still for an off-beat Q&A. Famous for winning the NCAA title on the 1988 “Danny and the Miracles” team for Larry Brown (and for having chronically bad knees he’s torn both ACLs), Manning today is a 6-foot-10 basketball statesman. A member of coach Bill Self’s Kansas staff, Manning conducts himself earnestly even in conversation. “No buffoonery now,” he said when approached after a recent Jayhawks practice at the United Center. It was as if he knew all about “20 Questions,” when anything out of left field (or from the 300 level) might be asked. So we’ll never know the answer to, for example, “Is Allen Fieldhouse haunted, and would you haunt it someday if asked by the ghost community?”_¢ A KU professor, Joane Nagel, is studying sex and the military as it pertains to the Iraq war, the New York Times Magazine reports._What she has found, she told me recently, is that “when you take young women and drop them into that hypermasculine environment, the sex stuff just explodes. Some have willing sex. Some get coerced into it. Women are vulnerable sexually.”_¢ A KU professor of law, ethics and medicine at KU, Jerry Menikoff, is quoted in a Washington Post story about a controversial new approach to organ donation. More doctors are removing organs within minutes after the heart stops beating, rather than when a patient is declared brain dead._”The person is not dead yet,” said Jerry Menikoff, an associate professor of law, ethics and medicine at the University of Kansas. “They are going to be dead, but we should be honest and say that we’re starting to remove the organs a few minutes before they meet the legal definition of death.”_¢ A 1987 accident that killed four members of Kansas University’s Chi Omega sorority is mentioned in this Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal story. Five members of the sorority at the University of Mississippi were killed the night before in a car accident._In a twist of fate that must have seemed like double jeopardy, four University of Kansas students died the next evening on their way to a Chi Omega barn party near Lawrence, Kan., when their car was hit by a train._¢ A KU study that found a high incidence of cancer near zinc mines in two Kansas counties is cited in a story in the Nashville Tennessean_While area zinc mines have a good environmental track record, according to state officials and regulatory reports, abandoned zinc mines in the tri-state area of Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri caused one of the worst environmental disasters in the country._¢ Lawrence band The Appleseed Cast got a write-up in the Washington Post as part of a concert this week._The Lawrence, Kan., band got its start in the late 1990s as a California emo band influenced by Sunny Day Real Estate and its ilk. But this decade has seen the band shift to a sound that’s a little harder on the guitars and a little lighter on the emotion, basically something catchy as well as substantial (we think it’s now in the same vein as, say, New York’s the Double or Xiu Xiu)._