Hail Festival Day!

Today is my favorite non-federal holiday non-family birthday day of the year: the first day of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. On many years, one of the conferences I go to is usually held this weekend, and I just got into the groove of the fun of sitting in the hotel coffee shop or diner down the street the morning of the tournament, going slowly through the USA Today Sports section, and the continuity provided by a steady stream of multiple basketball games on the tee-vee. It's definitely gotten better over the years, in inverse relationship to the noxious suckholization of college football courtesy of the evil Bowl Championship System.

Anyhoo, The Dear One has always let me put in a bracket or two into her office pools (which, cheater-cheater-egg beater that she is, she has a nasty habit of winning). Tradition has it that I submit one based on my primary ordering of determining outcomes by:

1. Quality of the college or university's political science program, particularly in American politics
B. Coolness of their mascot or name
III. Inverse suckholiness of the school.

Needless to say, this usually puts me near the bottom, but never at the bottom itself.

So last night I tried to remedy this by coming up with my "Bearded Evil Spock Parallel Universe" bracket, which, of course, has all four #1's going out in the first round. Now, eventually one of the top seeds will go out in the first round (if anything, so we can stop reading the same farking article every year about how Alonzo Mourning stole the ball from Princeton and made the inbound pass to a cutting Larry Bird who laid it up over Issiah Thomas. No wait, Mourning threw it the length of the court hitting that rat bastard Laettner at the top of the key who caught it, pivoted, and caught nothing but net with no time on the clock. No, that's not it either) Now, the fact that I'm submitting a bracket that has all the #1's dropping is beside the fact: call it the DayTrader Lunch Room Braggart strategy.

EVIL BEARDED SPOCK: Captain, sensors indicate a major upset by Central Connecticut State. Also, we have Dick Vitale in the torture chamber. Orders?

CAPTAIN KIRK: Set phasers on "For the love of Gawhd will you shut him up!"

Anyhoo, the Evil Bearded Spock Parallel Universe bracket has UVA beating Villanova in the championship game by a score of 68-66.

THE "WHERE ARE MY MANNERS?" UPDATE: Pajiba is running their pool. Top prize: fifty bucks and a Pajiba t-shirt. I guess that means when the NCAA polo tournament comes around we'll need to offer a million dollars (confederate) and a LLamabutchers thong as the grand prize.

THE OFFICIAL "AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT" UPDATE: Kelly at Kelly's Green is holding a "name that song" contest, intermixed with an essay about gardening in the Great North Woods and the most expensive out-of-print book in America (and oddly enough, it doesn't feature time-traveling Klingons beating Davidson in the Final Four or anything cool like that).