Confessions of a Starving Artist

As it is, I’m not sitting that bad this year.  I’ll be the first to admit that I have been wrong before, but I’ve been a lot more wrong in years past.  I may only have ten of the sixteen, but I’m willing wager (and have) that they are a solid ten that are going to carry over into the next round and possibly float me into an overall win this year.  But let’s take a quick spin around the match-ups and see how much the ol’ Guttersnake’s tune has changed at this point.  News Flash: not much.

And speaking of No. 1 seeds staying the course, lets talk about UNC and the East.  If anyone’s East Region is completely blown out at this point, then you should probably let your spouse handle your financial matters, don’t offer your children ‘life advice’, and never go to Las Vegas .  The East was cut and dry, and if you missed more than two games there, I would suggest actually watching a college game before filling out your brackets next year.  UNC is still set to roll right on to the Final Four, despite an extremely spirited Washington State team and regardless of the outcome of a mediocre Tennessee team an unimpressive Louisville squad.  Those of you who’ve got The Vols upsetting The Tar Heels might find yourself praying for those extra points to pull your bracket out of the gutter, but you’ve probably got a better chance seeing a one seed falling in any other corner of the tournament.

And speaking of No. 1 seeds walking into the Final Four, let’s talk about Kansas .  The Midwest Region has been rough on a number of brackets here and across the board.  How can it not when you’ve got both a ten seed and a twelve seed in the Sweet Sixteen.  Lots of folks had Davidson’s incredible last minute win over the ‘Zags, but their route of Georgetown … I didn’t see that coming.  The Badger’s have two-stepped thus far in The Dance, so I’ll be interested to see if they can bring in the noise, bring in the funk against The Bulldogs.  ‘Nova’s had a similar trotting pace thanks to Clemson offing themselves in the first round.  I don’t like saying it, but looks like Kansas is going to find themselves in a National Semi-Final game without playing anyone yet.  That’s going to make my call of UNC in the Finals questionable with two powerhouse one seeds locking horns, but I’m going to hang tough with a Tar Heel call and see those boys in baby blue all they way ‘til the clock strikes midnight.

And speaking of No. 1 seeds that were supposed to be going out before the Final Four, let’s talk about Memphis .  Pitt losing to MSU, while likely, was not what most brackets in the South Region needed.  So that being the case, MSU needs to pull off a huge upset against a Tiger team that doesn’t show any of the signs of weakness that people predicted.  Unfortunately, I don’t think its going to happen.  However, Stanford v. Texas is something that’s a bit more liable to tip in a predicable direction.  The Longhorns struggled against St. Mary’s and Stanford is exploding both offensively and defensively thus far in two games that didn’t evolve NIT material teams.  Even if Memphis gets by MSU, I think that The Cardinal is going to run Memphis as the only one seed who will not make the Final Four… but it’s not going to be a cake-walk.

And speaking of No 1 seeds and close calls, let’s talk about UCLA and the West.  Anyone who has done well in this Region should drop an application for Sport Center and possibly NASA.  If the Mid-West was turbulent, then the West was a tornado.  The Bruins, a lock for a National Championship game by most, nearly got sent to the house in the second round against an unlikely Texas A&M.  Western Kentucky is not scared at all, but I don’t think fearlessness will be enough against a team with a sense of entitlement who nearly got eliminated the round prior.  Look for UCLA to be fired-up and blow out WKU.

And speaking of fired up; enter your Xavier Musketeers.  The X-treme Fans were robbed of a Duke rematch and a little payback for a buzzer-beater loss in the Elite Eight back in 2004.  However, the X-Men still have something to look forward to cutting their teeth on, because leading the charge of the West Virginia Mountaineers is none other than relocated University of Cincinnati head coach, Bob Huggins.  A similar match-up happened a few years ago when the late Skip Process, then displaced Xavier head coach, found himself in early round game at the helm of Wake Forest verses Coach Huggins and The Bearcats.  UC advanced that day; not good historical data for WV, and possibly a bit of foreshadowed poetic justice.  Regardless, Xavier is a big, faster, smarter team than West Virginia , and should move onto the Elite Eight and to an extremely tough match-up with a similar-styled UCLA.  From there, UCLA will likely oust The Musketeers and should move on to a National Championship game without too much effort, but it shouldn’t matter; both UNC and KU outgun The Bruins on any court, nine nights out of ten.

Reality aside, lets perchance to dream lest a Cinderella story still be hiding somewhere in the recesses of the Regions.  Also note that it has been shown in this tournament, as much as any in recent memory, that it’s not about the seed, but the match up.  So let me play out a fantasy pick of mine…

It starts with UCLA not coming to play against Western Kentucky, disappearing right in step with Memphis .  Xavier marches over WV and faces a running-on-fumes WKU in the Elite Eight.  With a win there, XU moves on to the Final Four for the first time in school history against another three seed from the South Region, Stanford.  Xavier, driven by the possibility to do something that has never been done in school history, rockets themselves into a National Championship game.  From there, its just one night, one game, one chance… and when the odds are that skewed, all the guesswork and numbers can be thrown out the window, because it’s anyone’s game.

Let’s all just remember who won the Superbowl this year… GO MUSKIES!!!

The laws of probability; so true in general, so fallacious in particular.  ~ Edward Gibbson

With the focus of the majority of the nation on the election forth coming in the next seven months or so, the American public scrutinizes the every minute detail of each Congressmen, Senators, and Presidential Candidates in Washington, all looking for chinks within each party’s respective armor.  The smallest details can quick arise into a scandal with to attack the senior or incumbent nominee, to which the logical response is to find either a counter scandal or a handy diversion with which to distract the dull and listless American voting populace.  It’s a David Copperfield act at its finest - look at the flashing right hand while you barely notice the slick left hand shoving itself deeper into the realm of government mystery and conspiracy.

Well, faithful readers, I will now share with you one of the most feared and guarded secrets of our government and national defense.  The following is highly classified, and I am certain that if anyone within the upper levels of our government were to discover this information had leaked that I would be done for.  I share it with you so that you will realize times in our national history, such as now, when a true subterfuge is being employed, and that you will be able to focus directly upon civil-political matters at hand… The United States Government has a weather controlling devise.

I am not sure as to the exact date when the system actually came online, but I believe it was around the same time as the Reagan Star Wars Missile Defense Program.  This makes sense in my mind for several reasons, mainly as  that period of the 80s was the first time people started making a living “chasing storms”, worrying about things like “The Greenhouse Effect”, and noticing large-scale famine and drought in Africa, which, along with Utah and Nevada, then served as a consequence-free area for many government projects.  All of these were, of course, strategic tests conducted by the CIA and Department of Defense during that period to support a non-nuclear end to the Cold War.  To note, the hole in the ozone layer was an isolated misfire incident, and those agents responsible dealt with harshly.  At any rate, the effects of the system were deemed unstable, and moreover, the second and third order results were viewed as catastrophic by members of the Secretary of the Atmospheric Interior (very classified… most original members later went on to work as Ralph Nader’s personal staff).  It was realized that continued and prolonged uses of the system would be extremely dangerous and possibly irrevocable for the environment, not to mention becoming harder and harder to hide from enemies of the state as well as an immerging eco-friendly voter demographic and twenty-four hour news medias.  The machine was called “The Del Cielo Project” after the President’s Malibu California ranch home, was moved to a remote weather station in the Dakotas , and more or less left to low-priority experimentation within the Baltic.

The next President, George Bush Sr., ex-head of the CIA and vice-President under Reagan, further buried The Del Cielo Project after relocating all tests off the Atlantic coast line to create chaos for Cuba and accidentally producing Hurricane Hugo.  Now realizing that this system could do more harm to America than good, projected both by if it were exposed and if it were to fall into the wrong hands; it was placed at the “Presidential deniability” security level and locked away.  Records were destroyed and only a privileged few within the deepest recesses of national intelligence were allowed to know about the true capabilities of what lay within those Dakota badlands.

And there it stayed for several years, untouched and barely manned.  However, with the Clinton Administration’s extensive downsizing of the Department of Defense, one unlucky cabinet member stumbled upon some paperwork implementing The Department of the Atmosphere.  The Department was shortly thereafter officially closed, but the Secretary of the Atmosphere (the position had been renamed to encompass the whole of the free world by that time) was reassigned within the Clinton administration under an assumed and falsified title.  The concept was to re-open testing, and once raw data and positive test results had been achieved, present Del Cielo to the UN and NATO.  With testing in the lower Atlantic ruled out, President Clinton instead turned to the deep Pacific for testing grounds.  The result was a three year media frenzy involving displaced ocean currents and bizarre seasonal weather patterns that neo-ecos again dubbed as global warming.  The Clinton administration covered up the tests with a group of covertly bought-off ecologists who described the effects as a naturally occuring but unmonitored and unrecorded weather pattern.  The name “El Nino” was given to keep with the Spanish naming sequence set forth in the 80s.  The far reaching effects were well noted by the administration, and the machine was once again kept dormant… until the Monica Lewinski scandal.

Here is where the abuses of the technology by our highest elected officials begin.  Clinton, recognizing the need for something (anything) to take the media pressure off him, used Del Cielo in a series of small natural disasters on American soil, such as a drought in the Mid-West, an ice storm in New England, wild fires in California, and a small set of storms in the Florida Keys to include Hurricane Ivan, all occuring during the year 1998.  The tactic worked, and President Clinton was acquitted, but the weather effects took their toll.  Clinton never used the machine again, recognized its true lack of control, but also believed that it could serve some good if only further testing could be continued.  So rather than destroy the system or bury the project further, he kept it within his cabinet and later, seeing that his father has intimate knowledge of the project, pasted continued research too his successor; President George W. Bush.

Like all things in the Bush Administration, here’s where the wheels came off.  President Bush saw no reason to use Del Cielo prior to 9/11, mainly because he didn’t fully understand it.  He felt that the clever naming and application of “La Nina” as a series of low-grade government damage control measures for early Clinton fowl-ups was enough to keep the project covertly funded and quietly dormant.  However, during the invasion of Iraq, President Bush felt he could afford no mistakes and utilized Del Ceilo in one of the few successful employments of the system by creating a three-day sandstorm that screened the US invasion and facilitated a massive advantage for the troops.  This was a both a great achievement and crescendo to Del Ceilo’s service.  A few years later, President Bush, seeking relief from the heavy popular criticism over the War on Terror decided to use the system not unlike President Clinton with regards to the Lewinski scandal - as a diversionary tactic to create a little chaos at home and refocus the American media on America .  The result was Hurricane Katrina and Rita.  The blow-back from the massive bungling of this operation was too much for a weakened CIA to cover up; The Del Cielo Project was reintroduced into the Department of Defense under extreme classification in late in 2006.

Even with its classification, it is possible that various interest groups have gotten wind of the system (no pun intended) and bled the capabilities to various third parties, government officials, possibly even to Presidential Candidates.  Which is why with the advent of An Inconvenient Truth (the global warming notated in that movie being no more than a prolonged miscalculation of those small scale Clinton disasters of 1998, which were actually the direct oversight of then Vice-President Al Gore himself) and the focus on resent rises in local temperatures, it is likely that someone directly involved in the 2008 election has recently gained some level of control over Del Cielo.  The evidence is clear: the massive snowfalls in the Northeast, the bizarre weather in the Mid-West, and shocking Texas flash-flooding all point to an anti-global warming agenda.  While it is possible that President Bush and his administration are still pushing the buttons as to alleviate stress from a oil-sluggish Republican ecological platform thus clearing the way for Senator McCain, it is also very likely that one of the two Senators, Obama or Clinton, have employed the system to take a fractional amount of visibility off of an extremely tight race.

My sources tell me that Hillary is likely the undermining force at work here, both due to her experience with Del Cielo in ’98 with her husband’s administration and close personal ties with two of the senior operators of the system which was relocated to an undisclosed location in Alaska not three years ago.  It is unknown whether Senator Obama even has knowledge of the device or its capabilities at all.

I offer this to you, the American voter, all at great peril to myself, but I feel the American public cannot afford another four years of a candidate who is willing to literally manipulate the winds of change!  Our purple mountains majesty or’ amber waves of grain shall not be smudged by the likes of Hillary Clinton and her shameful self-serving schema!  Apt that we, the American public, will unlikely ever hear about “The Del Cielo Project” in any sort of public medium lest it be nearing the hour of judgment.  But please understand that my message of what has been occurring over the past two decades, not only in our country, but to the world at large, is one that is as equally far reaching and as it is influential; one that will effect our children, the children of our allies, and the children of our enemies as well as every living thing on this planet:

Do not vote for Hillary Clinton.  Thank you.

The NCAA Men’s Tournament is the monument upon which all other sporting play-offs should be based.  Each year The Dance is so shockingly different and dynamic that you either know the largest gamut of teams in any sporting base, professional or amateur, or you have nothing to go on but a handful of weekday sports pages from your local paper and blur of Sport Center updates.  It’s sixty-four squads playing single elimination after conference play is over and all coaches and player awards have been divided out.  Its no excuses athletics where players have one night to cut a name for themselves, their schools, and Tournament history, only then, for most, to forever-after fall into relative obscurity and legend, gone off to start a real life in the real world.  No bowl game, no play-off run, no series can equate to the pure adrenaline and passion that literally drips from the players, coaches, and fans in a game where the clock is the most absolute merciless than in any sport.  It’s gladiatorial, it’s chaotic, and it’s time, dear friends and readers, once again for Bracketology 101… Dr. Snake will begin his lesson now so please open your books and take notes.

Now, the top four seeds this year are heavily favored, and have been all year long:  UNC, Memphis, Kansas , and UCLA.  However, each team, with an arguable exception of the Tar Heels, have been shown to be beatable… which in my book would usually make Carolina the most likely to dive first… but lets take things step-by-step.

Let’s start in the Mid-West.  Kansas is the favorite to win it all, and for the love of all that is holy I wish these people with such faith were in my friendly firebase competition because I would love to take their money and slap their uneducated mouths.  Kansas spent most of the season ranked right around No.4 in the AP Polls, so why then are the Jay Hawks suddenly something to squawk about.  Don’t get me wrong; they are a powerhouse, and yes, they are a team to beat, but look out for some of the other teams in this division… Clemson gutted Duke in conference play just a week ago and is going to be a ball of orange-hotness over ‘Nova.  The mauling doesn’t stop there, because the Tigers are going to sink the vastly over-seeded Vanderbilt Commodores without much effort.  Kansas will take flight over Clemson in the third round, but wait again…  USC is a sleeper cell, possibly the biggest one in The Tournament.  Watch for the Trojans to make it to the Sweet Sixteen with a big win over three-seeded Wisconsin , but the dream dies there.  The Georgetown Hoyas have been another under-rated team all year long just barking for attention, and after they roll-over a strong Davidson team and break the lines of USC, look for them to bird-dog Kansas in the Elite Eight for a bid to the Final Four.

The South is my mayhem bracket.  I had to think long and hard about this one, but hear me out - sometimes it’s not the team, it’s the match-up.  For example, take the case of Texas and St. Mary’s.  If a university baring the name Texas lost to a school called Mary’s, there would be legislation pasted in Austin the next day demanding that the school change its name and leave the state… so that game’s a given.  However, almost every other game in this bracket is a toss up.  Marquette and UK got a good game coming up in the first round, and I’ll pick the Golden Eagles to soar over a slow Wildcat squad.  However, with a match-up against Stanford in the next round, I see Marquette grounded, leaving Texas to deal with the Lopez twins.  DJ Augustine is not going to be enough to drive the Longhorns, and I’ll give Standard the edge here.  Now, focus on the fact that Memphis has slowed down in the last bit of the season, and is showing signs of being beatable.  Not the best way to face a razor-sharp Pittsburg team.  Expect this game to be tooth & nail, possibly an overtime or buzzer-beater, but in the end the Panthers are going to lick their claws at the first real upset of the season.  In the Eight, Stanford’s got a set of guards that Pitt is not capable of handling in the same manner they did against the Tiger’s inside game.  I don’t feel 100% comfortable with it, but I’m going to play the long shot and call Stanford in the Final Four in the South.

The West is easily the weakest and most unstable of the brackets, but ironically, I see things playing out pretty straight forward here.  UCLA has been a fan’s team all year, but the weakest one-seed, getting picked over a likely Volunteer team.  However with The Bruins only having hose-down the Brigham-Young Cougars, they should be able to bear-crawl into the third-round without too much effort and likely beyond.  I’ve got Drake in a dog-fight against an unstable UConn defense running them down with a pack of three-point plays, only to get leashed by UCLA in the next round.  To many of you it won’t be surprised that I have The Musketeers shooting their way into the Elite Eight over a cold-burning Blue Devil’s offense in the Sweet Sixteen.  (I consider it kismet for the ’04 Xavier v. Duke match-up where Duke came out ahead).  All in all, The X-Men will get torn-apart by UCLA, handing The Bruins an easily won Western Champs crown.

The upsets in the East stop after the second round.  The Tar Heels take a walk to the Elite Eight, stepping all over Indiana and Washington State .  I like surprise Atlantic-Ten Champs St. Joe’s sending the Sooners packing west after a first round upset, but Louisville is going to fly by them into the third-round.  Tennessee and UNC is going to be the best game of The Tournament, but I got Carolina paving the highway all the way to the Final Four.

And how does it end?  The Cardinal gets felled by UCLA, and the Hoyas head to the porch after getting their noses rubbed in it by the Tar Heels.  The Championship game is going to be a blood-bath but I got UNC painting the town baby-blue 78-73.

In the past five years, I realize that I’ve had some pretty far out calls, and I wouldn’t be offended if some of you decided to make some of your own choices.  Goodness knows, the average office waging would suffer if you all listened to me, so by all means, go out on a limb with your wide-eyed picks.  You’re allowed to be crazy and foolish… It’s March Madness…

“’But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat.  “We’re all mad here.  I’m mad.  You’re mad…”
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice .
‘You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.’”
~ Lewis Carol  Alice in Wonderland