I once met somebody who worked for a company that designed airplane parts. She said the most dangerous day of the year was the Monday before the college basketball tournament, because everybody in the firm – for that matter, most Americans with access to a computer – was busy filling out brackets.

It was bad enough that the company computers ran slow, she said – everybody ducking low in their cubicles, looking for upsets.

What made it worse, she said, was that she suspected the intricate calculations were affected by the preoccupation with the madness. Mistakes were being made on slow computers, she feared. And what if they affected the curve of a wing, the snugness of a rivet?

It was like the old automotive truism about not buying a car built on Monday. And for that matter, don’t buy a car built on Friday. Now we had to worry about airplanes planned on the Monday of madness?

I have no way of knowing how right she was. (She was not a sports fan, I got that point pretty clearly.)

However, I was reminded of that conversation on Monday when I filed what I thought was a fairly lucid critique of the HBO film about the 2008 McCain-Palin campaign.

The hits for that posting were 300 percent below my normal cadre of staunch loyalists.

Where was everybody? Picking Syracuse to go all the way before Fab Melo was dropped for academic deficiencies?

Maybe nothing will be normal for the next three weeks. Sunspots? Global warming? No, the N.C.A.A. tournament.

I’m watching Napoli-Chelsea on Wednesday, not filing.

Just hope that woman from the aviation company was exaggerating.

 

Even while I’m typing something else, I can hear the electronic ping of the messages, over the transom.

My friends and family post songs and photos, poems and videos. We all know the blessing of having friends in Brazil and Japan, Canada and Mexico.

It’s so easy these days.

My new email friend, Hassan in Yorkshire, writes about soccer and justice and music. There’s a common thread, I am sure.

The other day he sent me a photo from visiting London in snow. I’ve been to London, what, 50 times and have never seen snow. But there it was, Berkeley Square. My wife and I have walked uphill through that square at night, usually around 10:30, after the National Theatre, and we were tired and happy. But never in snow.

Hassan knows I consider Nina Simone one of the great masters. He found a video of her signature piano -- you always know it’s Simone, before she even sings a note. Somehow, she makes bells peal in a riff from Good King Wenceslas before drifting into Little Girl Blue.

In this amazing new electronic age, a gift from Yorkshire, 

 

This web site is a projection of what I know best, from all my fun decades in journalism. I write something and, great googamooga, it gets published. On line, but published.

I do not understand Twitter. I don’t know who is talking to whom. I don’t know the difference between Followers and Following and Followed.

I feel like a bloke who mistakenly wanders into a dark room and becomes aware of an orgy going on. (Plato’s Re-Tweet?) I don’t know who is doing what, and to whom -- and why? But it is most certainly going on.

I know people tweet. In the past year or two, I have sat in baseball press boxes (nobody argues anymore) and watched  my talented young colleagues who do such good work hunched over little devices, twiddling their thumbs in controlled fashion. Occasionally, somebody chimes up: “Good one.”

The other day, my web guru enrolled me in Twitter; she says hundreds of people signed up Tuesday. I am stunned, and honored, and confused. I will try to live up to expectations.

Which are? (Comments welcome)

@georgevecsey