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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. 3/15/2012 03:29:41 am
George, that was not only a great take on office workers filling out their Final Four charts but funny as well. I just chose my four survivors today. Which can be viewed, along with my recent interview with you on baseball, on our blog at: http://luxuryboxcheapseats.blogspot.com/
George Vecsey
3/15/2012 12:23:59 pm
thanks, guys. I don't do brackets, but I do love upsets. Once saw the Richmond-Syracuse upset, on the tube. some day there will be a 16-1 upset, unless the NCAA adulterates the tournament with a second-tier first round. Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
"Among the things that have long fascinated people about Jesus and explain his enduring appeal is his method of dialogue and teaching. "He asked a lot of questions and told a lot of stories in the form of parables. In fact, parables form about a third of Jesus’ recorded teachings. The Gospels were written decades after he died, so his questions and parables clearly left a deep impression on those who bore testimony to him.... "Some of Jesus’ questions were rhetorical; others were meant to challenge or even provoke. In some cases, Jesus used questions to parry attacks by religious authorities who set traps for him. In others, he used questions to enter more fully into the lives of others and to help people look at the state of their hearts. He asked people about their fears and their faith. Jesus used questions to free a woman caught in adultery from condemnation and to inquire whether people considered him to be the Messiah. He probed deeply into questions not many had asked before him, like “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” ---(Peter Wehner, long-time White House consultant and writer, in the NYT last week about Jesus Christ’s method of teaching by asking questions.) "Would that I could mention all the illuminating details in this biography, for example, why Wells praised Black Americans so highly, saying, 'I took a mighty liking to these gentle, human, dark-skinned people,' and 'Whatever America has to show in heroic living today, I doubt if she can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast efforts hundreds of black and colored men are making today to live blamelessly, honorably and patiently, getting by themselves what scraps of refinement, beauty and learning they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied.''
-- "How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century," Charles Johnson, NYT Book Review, Nov. 19, 2021. ***". ...the monsters arrive." "They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts. "Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry." ---The great Margaret Renkl, from Nashville, one of my favorite NYT bylines, Oct. 26, 2021. (She describes our Long Island enclave to every decibel, every stink.) lwww.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html --- Categories
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