Just a Twitter, Really

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Had a martini at Zam Zam yesterday. Met with C., who is looking for work.

It was not clear to me just how many NCAA brackets he had filled out, for money and for fun. It would seem to be several, perhaps in the High Severals.

This year I did ... none.

There would seem to be a correlation between time on one's hands and number of brackets filled out . On the other hand, back in the day there was a fellow with two hands and three apples.

Voila: Juggling was born. But this year my balls were already in the air.

P.S. Damn the way one thought leads to another. The *beginning* of my fading fascination with following the NCAAs was in 2002, when the Duke coach Mike Chiropractic -- or syllables to that effect -- came out in support of senate candidate Liddy Dole, who proved to be just the empty pantsuit I thought she was. He did a a fund-raiser and besmirched used Duke's name to promote the event.

I got my Ph.D. at Duke. I have many pleasant memories -- of the inside of the library. Sports loyalties and bonding with one's alma mater are both tribal, hormonal, at bottom irrational, and all the more powerful as a result. It was always pleasant to "borrow prestige" as Duke moved through the NCAAs, which for a while there they did with great regularity.

But then Coach Kaleidoscope pushed his way into the real world, and I reacted much as I might have if the Cat in the Hat had come out as a holocaust denier. I suddenly felt stupid about having been stupid, which sports loyalties are, as delicious and as stupid as a bowl of ice cream.

I would go on, but, as I said earlier: Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Robertson's balls!!