The Dance Neareth
We're not a big TV family so we have only two, but the NCAA Tournament requires maximum screens, so Max and I used the first night of our bachelor weekend to do a dry run. By placing the screens an inverse distance from the couch based on size (largest screen furthest away, smallest screen closest), we got a pretty good multi-TV effect, using a laptop, a Chromebook, and a Kindle Fire. It's a poor man's substitute for multiple TVs.
"Only two" TVs; a poor man has only one big screen TV, a laptop, a Chromebook, and a Kindle Fire for watching the NCAA Tournament. If you're not seeing the irony in such things, you don't understand the immense wealth the modern West enjoys. From an historical perspective, it's absolutely mind-blowing. Will it all distract us to the gates of Hell? Yeah, I fear it's possible. My advice? Enjoy it while detaching yourself from it. It's a simple formula, but it's the sacramental way. And though the formula is simple, it's devilishly hard to implement.
I always tell my kids: "I just want to give you the rules, the formulas, the outlooks. It's up to you to implement them, and that takes real work: study, meditation, prayer. Good luck. Call me when you figure out the day-to-day-rubber-hits-the-road application."
I guess Bill Walton went on a rant about how ridiculous it is that the NCAA gives automatic births to the small D1 conferences. Only a rationalistic jackass completely devoid of a working soul can fail to see the beauty of allowing those small schools into the Dance. Thousands of players in those little conferences have something to strive for: a shot to play on a national stage, and hundreds of them get to do it every year. Then people like Walton want to take it away because some mammoth school couldn't establish that its one of the top
teams in the country. Absurd.
Sixty-eight teams make the Tournament; of those, 32 are automatic bids; of those 32 automatic bids, only 14 of them (in my opinion) come from conferences that probably wouldn't have a team in the top 68 anyway. So, the top 54 teams in the country make the tournament. If you don't have a conclusive claim to be in, say, the top 40, you can't whine that you didn't make the tournament. The worst part of the whole NCAA Tournament is watching Vitale (who I like) gripe about who got left out of the tournament. If you're on the bubble, you can't complain.
Daylight Savings Time starts tonight. I like DST, but it disrupts your sleeping cycle, lowers your immunity, and poses small health risks. In order to mitigate the effects, double-down on pro-sleep habits, starting today and continuing to next weekend: no caffeine after noon, sleep-friendly herbal tea after dinner, no blue light after 7:00 PM, more meditation at night. I don't if it'll work, but I'm going to try it this year.
