If You Fill Out 9.2 Quintillion Brackets, One of Them's Got to stick.

I didn't have time to fill out 9.2 Quintillion Brackets, but I did have time to get 4 of them done, thereby increasing my odds significantly from a paltry 1 in 9.2 Quintillion to a much more respectable 1 in 2.3 Quintillion.

So my first bracket was just me shooting from the hip, not really thinking about anything, having only the basketball knowledge I have acquired from listening to sports radio in intermittent  chunks.  I think most of my picks were made based on moments from past tournaments I could remember, uniform color, and....well, probably not much else.  It took me about two minutes:

Now that the the media markets are flooded with braketology, I have learned that this is probably not a very smart bracket.  Syracuse, reeling and limping along, probably won't get as far as I have predicted. Creighton, apparently, is also a poor choice to get to the final.  But I like the name so I stuck with it.  Creighton.  What a great name for a University.  

VCU also is going far, very far, probably too far.  Likewise, personal bias keeps me from having Virginia break into the elite eight.  Should have no problem, though, getting to the thumpin' thirty two.

Next we have a bracket based on a metric I tried to develop.  I basically took RPI, Strength of Schedule, and percent of games won in last 10 (the HF, or Hottness Factor), added a few more mathematical herbs and spices, and came up with the Bracket Optimization Regression Analysis Tool (BORAT), which ranked all teams on a scale of 252.5397 to 253.6406.  I worked my way through the bracket based on the different BORAT scores for the different teams and came up with my purely mathematical entry:

The nice thing about the BORAT is that will actually predict upsets.  Harvard, in particular, seems to be poised for a pretty spectacular run.  Of course the flaw with the BORAT is that, because there is a pretty strong correlation between BORAT and ceeding, the final four is made up of 1 and 2 cedes and past history shows that this is fairly unlikely.  

So I took the first round based on the BORAT and then, reasoning that because any given team can beat any other on any given day from the first round on, I flipped a coin for the rest of the match-ups.  Thus my third bracket was born:

It seems kind of sort of plausible, though I'd be surprised St. Joe's makes it the elite 8 (or is it the great 8?).  Ditto for Gonzaga, the perennial Cinderella Team of my youth.  The University may be Jesuit in make-up but I have lost faith in them when it comes to getting out of the first round (the Sexy Sixty-Four?).  

So, finally, I submitted my "Sheet of Integrity", the one bracket that I would use to enter the office pool.  I basically started with the first round BORAT, made some adjustments, and tried to think through the rest of the bracket with the limited knowledge I had gained after looking at the different teams while filling out the other brackets.  This is what I got:

Clearly, I still love Creighton, for no reason what so ever.  

I had planned to take in my final so called Sheet of Integrity to the Newport News Candy Factory the following day, but I forgot it.  So I once again filled out another bracket, a fifth bracket, a secret bracket, shooting off the hip.  

So we'll see how it goes.  I think that Warren Buffet should probably start writing that check...I hope he gives me one of those giant checks.  I'd like to walk into a bank with one of those.  

Good luck all!  Happy Tournament Time!

In Which I Continue to have Trouble with House of Cards

I couldn't believe my luck.

My car inspection had unexpectedly taken a mere 30 minutes, I didn't have to be at the church for bell choir practice until 5, and my wife and two daughters were at my youngest's 2 month-old check up.

That meant that for about an hour I would have the house to myself, and what's more it would actually be quiet.

Allow me to describe the magnitude of how awesome this is for those of you who don't have children (or three very loud, rambunctious dogs, which is not a bad approximation): it is as if you came home to find a giant pot of gold just sitting on the porch, and on that porch, sitting next to the pot of gold, is your "one", who informs you that they've done all the dishes, folded all the laundry, made the bed with freshly laundered sheets, and they are now ready fucs your brains out.

I'm assuming that everyone also understands the concept of  "the one".  If you don't know, it is the one person with whom you would demand that the sacred bonds of marriage be dropped, the one person, whom, if he or she walked into the living room, you would have to fornicate under the consent of the spouse (fucs).

Typically the one is a person who moves in a parallel universe, so that there is no chance that your world and their world might intersect; as a rule it's good to have 4 to 6 degrees of separation from your prospective fucs buddy.  The cute yoga woman who lives across the street or the Starbucks man with the chisely chin and deep blue eyes are bad choices, as they are within the realm of sexual possibility and such stones are best left un-turned in any marriage.  Mila Kunis, Benedict Cumberbach, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are all, on the other hand, excellent choices for the average person. Even meeting anyone of them is rather unlikely, and if one of them were to walk into the bedroom of a Joe Schumkatelli or Jane Grabowski and inform said average person that they are wearing expensive and rather flimsy french underwear, well, by laws of probability alone one must grab the bull by the balls and just....just go to it.

Of course, if I happened to come home and find that Christina Hendricks was sitting on my porch with said pot of gold and informed me that she had done all the dishes, folded all the laundry, made the bed with freshly laundered sheets and now desperately wanted nothing more than to, as Samuel Peyps would say, "place my Sir Daniel Davidson betwixt her Chumblewuzzlies" I'd probably be more happy about the chores being done then I would about the money or anything else. Those of you with kids understand...if you don't have children imagine your life with 10 rascally rabbits who need constant attention and you'll get an idea of what I am talking about.

Anyways,  when I got home to a quiet house my little introverted soul did a few back flips in excitement. It was real quiet, actual quiet, the kind of holy silence that makes you afraid to turn on the lights, lest the sudden movement of electrons through wires and filaments disturb the cosmic equilibrium at which you stand at the center of.  It was awesome.

How did I spend this god given gift?  Did I read a little poetry by John Donne?  Try to work on a short story?  Pour a finger or two of scotch and stare at the ceiling?  Run over some piano scales?

Nope.  While all of those would have been worthy of my time, I decided to dive deeper into Frank Underwood's Machiavellian rise to power.  

I'm well into season two, and find that where before I might have forgotten who certain people were, I now seem to be having trouble remembering the whys and whats at the core of the story, such as as:

What is samarium?

What does this damned bridge have to do with anything? What do the Chinese care if we build it or not?

Why does Frank Underwood hate Raymond Tusk?  After all, Tusk served in the US Marine Corps and raised three beautiful daughters, and managed to hold together his marriage to a liberal journalist who was, in most things, his complete opposite.  He came from the Gulf War, went into the energy business, made billions of dollars.  Major Dad is an American hero.  So what if he has the President's ear?

What is the deal with this Seth Grayson guy?  Is he a double agent, or....

I don't know.  I don't know any of these things.  

I heard it once postulated on NPR that the average IQ of your meat and potatoes American is probably on the rise just because TV shows have gotten more complex, and we watch so many of them we consume a lot of brain power trying to keep everything straight.  I don't know if you can argue that there is causality (i.e. the more complex shows are driving up IQs) or if one thing manifests another (Americans are smarter on average then they used to be, and more convoluted TV dramas are better received), but I can definetly see it.  Compare "The Andy Griffith Show" to "Lost" or "The Americans" and I think it's probably a no brainer that the latter have a more sophisticated audience in mind.  

It is perhaps a sophistication I lack...after all, I don't know if I could consider House of Cards to be particularly brilliant, especially because of all those stupid times that Frank breaks the fourth wall and drops some sort of Sun Tsu Art of War type witiscism on us.  And yet, for its faults, I find myself having a hard time following it.  

I can only conclude that I am one of the below average, stupid people out there who prefer the compartmentalized plots and clever allegory of a Seinfeld to the fast paced, twisty turniness of a current day political drama. I suppose I should also be commended for being able to extract what I have been able to thus far from my rather feeble mental faculties, and get ready for the long but rather pleasant slip into ultimate vapidity as I continue to fall behind the curve.  They say it is quite nice, like easing yourself into a hot bath: hurts a bit at first, but eventually becomes quite delightful.

I'm Almost Done with Season One of House of Cards!

So look:

I was going to write about House of Cards and how I fear that as TV gets more complex I am slowly going to be left out because I don't have the time follow such complex shows.....Not, maybe, that House of Cards is especially complex, but here was my opening move:

...I have a half episode to go in "Season" 1, and in episode 12 (Spoiler Alert?) the indefatigable and fairly well fuckable Zoe Chase has gone back to some trailer park in the deep south to meet with some guy but instead finds some woman working at the "gentleman's club" which of course is full not of gentlemen but rather a few not-clad women dancing about on a stage being carefully watched by a scrag of ruffians. One of them is the woman used to live with the guy that Zoe wanted to see originally and she gave Zoe some information about an editorial that that one guy may or may not have written and for some reason that was incredibly important, as it tied Frank Underwood to the suicide of Peter Russo, I think.  Maybe.  

It seemed like an important moment in the story, and I really only had a vague idea of what was going on.  

In my defense, the man from the trailer park and his rather titillating partner were introduced only briefly very early in the series.  Now here we are, a good 10 episodes later, and the creators of the show are expecting me to remember who these two very minor characters, mere pawns in the game, are with very little preamble.  

I've been in similar situations before.  I call it pulling a Tolstoy."

And then I was going to talk about the number of characters in War and Peace aka War What is it Good For?  and tie it somehow back to the complexity of TV dramas.

But then I remembered that Russia is maybe about to go to war with the Ukraine over the Crimea, and I paused.  If buying a Chik-Fil-A sandwich can be viewed as an act in support of intolerance, than I suppose extolling Russian Literature for its beauty and complexity might be viewed by some as being insensitive to the Ukrainian cause of freedom, a sort of "Pro-Russia" speculative factoid.  That is the world we live in today, where every statement and every act and everything we consume carries with some kind of existential meaning that says something about ourselves even when it doesn't.

I think it's a sad state of affairs, where being a consumer has defined ourselves to such a great extent that the very act of consuming different items gives us meaning, aligns ourselves with a certain story we tell about our values and beliefs.

At any rate, the post blew up, and I don't think it was going to be a very good one anyway.  As to the Ukraine, I am ambivalent, though that does not mean that I do not care.  I'm not a fan of Putin and Putin's Russia by any means, and it sounds like the Ukrainian protesters had good reason for doing what they did.  As to the Russian military intervention, with an ethnic population of mostly Russians and 60% of the the Russian Navy based at Sebastopol I'd have a hard time imagining any nation doing things much differently.  Even our illustrious Republic would have probably at least considered something similar if it found itself likewise challenged.  The only hope is that a deal can be worked out, the tension defused, and further blood shed be avoided.