My Sick Mind

A great burden has been lifted from my life's shoulders. What, you ask? I did not fill out an NCAA tournament bracket this year. No free one online, no five dollar pool at work ... not even a scribble on the blank one that the newspaper published on Monday. Now, I am free. It's just basketball. Sadly, I think it would die a miserable death if greater America couldn't wager on it. Like the lottery, unsuspecting non-basketball fans live with this pre-conceived notion that they can turn five dollars into a hundred by writing the names of colleges that they couldn't find on a map in spaces that they couldn't have imagined three weeks ago. It's like the lure of the Siren's song. Never what it seems to be, but who among us can resist? I can. Not only can I resist, but I can revel in it, and therein lies the charm. I can watch the tournament and laugh that 13 seeds like Morehead State beat big time schools like Louisville. Most bracket-fillers could find Louisv...

Basketball is something like life. Not a lot like life, but something like it. For example, the last 2 minutes take a half hour, because we value last two minutes of something more than the first two minutes. They run up and down the court for two hours only to have the outcome hinge on the last 2 minutes. Why don't they just play two minutes and get it over with? That's why holiday shopping is such a farce. We put off purchases until the last day, thinking that the options will suddenly become clear to us, but they do not. The options are always the same, it's just the time constraint that changes. It's funny to me when a team is ten points down with 30 seconds left, and they call a time out. The options do not change then either, and they are still left wondering. The guys on TV say that coaches don't want to go into the locker room with time out's remaining. That's nice, and it makes their employers think that they have done everything possible to wi...

Face it, if it weren't for the fact that most of us have money riding on this NCAA basketball tournament, we wouldn't give a tinker's damn if Ohio beat Kansas or Purdue beat Pittsburgh. We like lotteries, and this is the biggest one in the country. It's even better because we don't have to declare taxes on the money we win (if) and we get to tell the people at work how smart we are, even though we don't know a wit about whether Kansas State is better than Baylor. All we know are the numbers. A three-seed is supposed to beat a ten-seed and there's no way a 12 seed can beat a 5, unless you're Cornell - then you're a genius if you picked Cornell. However, if Ohio beats Kansas it's some sort of anomaly because there is no way Ohio should have won that game. Unless, of course, the NCAA committee who picks the seeds has made a grievous error, which is what we will claim, since we are too smart to think that Kansas could possibly lose. We get wrapped ...

I was standing in line at the supermarket, in front of a guy talking on his cell phone. His friend had apparently sprung some pearl of wisdom during their conversation, prompting him to reply, "Well, you learn something new every day!" I thought, "No, you don't." It's a nice notion that, no matter how long you've lived or what you've done, you can always stand to learn something. But some days (today included) I didn't learn anything. What do you learn? Your tolerance for alcohol? How late you can sleep and still arrive at work on time? How long you can listen to your cat whine for food (even though he just ate 10 minutes ago) until you give in and feed him again? Why you shouldn't put regular dish detergent in your dishwasher? How many items you can put on the "10 items or less" aisle before people complain? All valuable lessons, but you already knew that stuff. You just forgot. Or that a year at Cornell University costs $52,00...

If all the world's a stage, where does the audience sit? The NCAA tournament continues, and I can't help but wonder what all the fuss is about. From the looks of the TV (which is after all, the final authority) they're playing to half-empty lower-level seating in Detroit. It makes me think that the tournament is the sports equivalent of the lottery. It's popular because people can wager on it, but they don't have to actually watch it to know if they win. All we need to do is check the scores and check our picks to know whether we have a chance to win. It doesn't help that the games are being played in football stadiums, where the worst seat in the house is barely in the house. How many people who play bracket pools actually watch the games? If you buy a lottery ticket do you watch the drawing? Speaking of sports (which I was), it's now more expensive to go to baseball games: CHICAGO (AP) - It will cost a lot more to root, root, root for the home team th...

Mi Mente Enferma . That's how My Sick Mind is translated into Spanish. I had a reader today from Columbia, South America and the link translated the blog to Spanish, via the smart folks at Google. I had no idea. To see your blog translated, click on your Buddy link on the right of the Spanish page. Click here to see Mi Mente Enferma ( Lo que está en mi cabeza, derrama sobre el monitor del ordenador ). The girls are playing golf this weekend at Superstition Mountain, Arizona; outside of Phoenix. Take a minute and wander over to the Golf Channel for the coverage. If only to see the beautiful course and the background. I think I know where next year's vacation is going. The NCAA tournament is back this weekend, where the cream should rise and Cinderella will find that the shoe doesn't fit. By Sunday, we'll be down to the so-called "Final Four" which, although it does contain four teams, it is by no means final. There will still be two games left. Speaking of ...

The final two minutes of the Marquette-Stanford game Saturday night took about a half hour to complete. Why? Because sports, like life, places an undue burden on the final minutes rather than the first. The referees forced several time-out's running to the scorer's table asking for extra time to be put back on the clock because the official scorer started the clock too soon. My question (because I love to ask questions) is, who was watching the official scorer with ... say ... 13 minutes left in the half to make sure he was re-starting the clock correctly? My answer (because I love to answer my own questions) is: Nobody. We don't pay as much attention to things at the beginning as we do at the end, which is why sports emulates life. Last-second field goals are supposedly more important than the one he missed in the first quarter, ninth inning home runs carry more weight than the strike-out with the bases loaded in the first inning and buzzer-beaters beat the 30% three-...

I don't watch NCAA basketball much during the regular season, but for some reason I watch almost non-stop during the tournament. It has nothing to do with wagering big bucks on pools. I'm only in two. One is with 3 other people over bragging rights (and lunch) at work and the other is over on Sparky's blog for some beer. I like to win, but neither of them detracts from my enjoyment of a good game, even if my pick loses. The action is on the TV on CBS, who has brought out their farm of announcers to broadcast the games. I'm guessing that the only reason most of these guys have a job is because there are 32 first-round games to show. Otherwise, they'd be at home watching on TV like I. Yesterday, a player named Young made a key basket, and the color man screamed, "Only the Young survive!" What? That doesn't make sense. They're so anxious to come up with the next big Al Michaels 'do you believe in miracles' quote that they reach (over-reach...