March Madness

For the past few years, I've been involved in picking the winners of the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament. For the last couple years, my #1 team lost in the finals. The winner of the pool last year was a five-year old boy, who had also won two years previously, when he was three. He picks based on school mascots, nicknames, and geography, which is obviously more successful than reading everything I can from ESPN, Sports Illustrated, USA Today and CBS Sportsline. I suppose I could just WATCH THE GAMES during the season, but truth is, the only game I watched this season was the six minutes of the Albany-Vermont game. That's six minutes more than I watched LAST year.

Anyway, one gets one point for getting the games in round one, two points for round two, four points for round three, etc. Even if NO one picks the ultimate champion, someone will win the pool, which is not for money but for pride. I'll be sharing my progress, but I won't give you the blow-by-blow. I will tell you, out of sheer civic pride, i'm picking Albany to win one game. I also have Georgetown beating Ohio State, Florida beating UCLA and Georgetown beating Florida in the Final Four.

I was playing Internet backgammon with someone this week, and he or she seemed to leave their pieces intentionally vulnerable. Even if you've never played the game, what you need to know is that two pieces on a space are safe and one is not, and that this person seemed to intentionally want to get hit. Strange, and not that much fun, winning handily like that. Reminds me of an old girlfriend who was playing a card game called casino. Aces are worth a point apiece, and she was playing first, but didn't pick up the aces on the table even though she had an ace in her hand to do so, which soon became evident. She did it so I could win; this did NOT make me happy.

Anyway, my posts for the next couple days will be short, because my back's been killing me. I seem to have pulled something trying to right myself on the ice, the old melt-and-refreeze stuff. I didn't fall; almost wish I did. So I stayed home Tuesday and watched the Grammys; yeah, only a month late. The highlight for me had to be Mary J. Blige doing Stay with Me, a song by Lorraine Ellison which I have on vinyl on THE 1969 WARNER/REPRISE RECORD SHOW. I LOVE those LPs, as they were wonderfully eclectic. - I have 32 of the 37 listed.

The Ellison song was the last of a quintet of songs I used to play when romance would go sour:
Remove This Doubt-Supremes
Sweet Bitter Love-Aretha
Gone Away-Roberta Flack
First Night Alone without You-Jane Olivor

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