Here’s What’s Happening

Today my Happy, American friend emailed me an invite into her fancy-schmancy New York Times bracket-picking group*.  At first I was excited!  Ooh!  Brackets!  I love brackets.

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I could do this all day long!

Then I discovered that the brackets refer to some obscure sports tradition known as “March Madness.”  Now, what I usually experience after a long, dark winter is more like March Sadness, but we all express our feelings in different ways, so I was willing to give this a fair shot.  I went to the website and discovered the most upsetting garble of whoseit and whatnot I’ve ever seen.

I hadn’t even heard of half of these teams. I thought Gonzaga was a kind of legume.  What kind of college is called “Play-In Winner?” Does C.S. Northridge even have any scholarly accreditation, or is it fact, as I suspect, secretly a tire manufacturer?   And where the hell is East Tennessee State?

I knew this had to be some kind of joke when I saw that North Dakota State had a bracket but Nebraska did not.  But no, two trustworthy websites (Wikipedia and www.huskers.com) verified the existence of this “basketball” thing everyone was telling me about.  It was time to face the facts.  Basketball is here to stay.

So fine, basketball, if that’s how you want it to be.  I’ll pick your brackets.  But how??????

????

???

?

Answer:  through nerdiness, of course.  I emailed another friend who knows something about basketball and asked him to quickly, and with a modicum of fuss, tell me who was going to win each of the what, 61?, games between now and whenever they put an end to all this mayhem.

He did me one better with the following bit of genius that will guide me as I make my picks over the next day, picks that I will of course share with you tomorrow or the next day and allow you to profit off of because that’s just the kind of girl I am although would it be so much to ask if you sent me just, say, 15% of all your winnings?  And maybe an extra 5% for Mike in gratitude for his brilliant way of explaining the unexplainable in terms we can all (or at least, the more bookish amongst us) understand?:

…assuming you aren’t putting too much $$ on this: go with solid blue chippers:  your John Grishams (Duke) and Stephen Kings (North Carolina) and Sara Paretsky (UCLA) type teams. Respectable brand names. If you’re feeling risky, take a James Frey (Memphis) but I’m warning you right now that’s fools gold.

Don’t be afraid to play a regional preference. Maybe you love Scott Turow (Wisconsin or Illinois) now that you’re in the Midwest. Maybe you’re loyal to Meg Cabot (Butler) because their AD was once head coach at Nebraska (that is true by the way).

OK, the analogy is getting a little woozy.  You see my point.

I do indeed.  Thanks to Mike, my money’s on The University of J.K. Rowling to go all the way.  But only because Nebraska isn’t playing.

*Can you tell this friend is a member of the Liberal Media Elite?  She is.