My NCAA bracket looks like the 12 Apostles.

Check your food products (including, but not limited to potato chips and pancakes), bath towels, steamed-up bathroom windows and worn out (but still useful) shoe soles for images of religious leaders, states or something loosely resembling a well-known public figure. You won't have to worry about attaining that pesky college education or fighting for that big promotion at work. Put your knowledge of abstract shapes to work and earn some big bucks that you can use to pay your big tax bill or fight off those bill collectors. Remember: Somewhere in the world there is a person who has money to spend on junk, and it's up to you to find them and exploit them.

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I got an envelope in the mail today that said "Inside: A one-time money-saving opportunity for you." That's a lot of hyphens. I'd like to save money, so why wouldn't I open the envelope? I felt so special. Inside was an offer to extend my Consumer Reports subscription for another year for $18 "at a savings of 30%". I wondered (a) how this was helping me save money and (b) how I was saving anything if I was spending $18. This is why I drink so much.

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The NCAA Basketball tournament is on the TV now, and people everywhere who aren't the least bit interested in basketball (like me) but filled out a bracket pool (like me) are at once watching the games and cursing the way they're broadcast. The early round games are a great program for people with attention deficit disorder. Every fifteen minutes we're being switched to another game for a live update that lasts just long enough for us to get interested in the game before we're switched back to one of the Gumbel brothers for some more score updates. It's another reason to drink.

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News item: NEW YORK - The X Prize Foundation, best known for its competitions promoting space flights, is offering $10 million to the teams that can produce the most production-ready vehicles that get 100 miles per gallon or more.

$10 million pissed away. Why? Because whatever vehicle is designed will never see the light of day or be accepted by either (a) the consumers who like to cart their fat asses around in mini-houses on wheels and (b) the oil conglomerates who control our transportation options. Sorry to be so cynical, but I have to believe I'm right about this. Otherwise we'd all be riding around in 100mpg vehicles waving the middle finger at the oil fields in the Middle East, but instead we're waving our middle fingers at the people in charge of our lives. Why am I so cynical?

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based X Prize Foundation, which was founded in 1995, gained fame in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the first private vehicle to fly into space. The foundation since has launched a $10 million prize for rapid human genome sequencing and a $30 million prize for sending a robot to the moon.

When is the last time you rode into space or benefited from human genome sequencing? Right. $40 million pissed away.

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I admit to not following the politics very closely lately. I'm hearing that Michigan and Florida were looking at having "Do-over" primary elections. I'm not sure why, but I figure that if something doesn't go the way we want it - even if we made it happen that way - that we are somehow entitled to a Mulligan, or do-over because we didn't get the result we wanted or the result we got isn't satisfying. The last I heard, Michigan wasn't going to get their do-over. That's good, because if they did, it would give the rest of us who have made colossal mistakes some reason to hope that somehow we would get a do-over for our lives. Ain't happening.

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Luckily for me, I have the day off tomorrow. The Christians call it Good Friday, so I'll try to make it a good day so I don't disappoint anyone. The cat has every day off.

He's a beautiful boy. That's one of my favorite photos of him because it shows how he yearns to be outdoors, yet is bound by both the screen door and the wood deck fencing that separates him from a one-story drop to the ground. He's conflicted, but happy somehow to just be looking out the window, and I'm happy to be able to watch him doing it.

It's a win-win.