Saturday, March 15, 2014

Bracket Humor



With Selection Sunday looming and because of the additional incentive of Warren Buffett's Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, I have decided to resume blogging. For now, I plan to focus on the development and implementation of the perfect NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament bracket; whether this leads to further blogging on the panoply of topics that occupy my feverishly undisciplined brain or shamefully evaporates before the second weekend probably answers itself. Still, I can dream of being a productive polymath, and monkeys can dream of flying out of my butt. Wait. That didn't come out right.

This year, I have decided to give in completely to my incipient Ignatius J. Reilly-ness (hence the blog name) and center my bracket preparation on “theology and geometry”. Specifically, inspired by the Greek concept of the four humors, I postulate that there are four fundamental modes of bracket prognostication that connect to four bodily organs:

      1. Analysis – picking the “best” teams – Brain
      2. Positive Emotion – picking the teams you like – Heart
      3. Negative Emotion – picking the teams you hate – Spleen
      4. Luck – picking teams out of your ass – Colon

While in the past I have availed myself of all of these modes in various non-systematic amounts, what I always forgot what Hippocrates and Galen knew; the key was balance. In other words, my brackets were dyscrastic. No more. This year, I will create four separate “humoral” brackets, which I will submit to various contests, but for the Billion Dollar Challenge, I will attempt, through some mystical process as yet determined, to bring these four brackets into their proper balance. To me at least, the humorous possibilities seem manifold, especially at my expense. So I plan on blogging my way through.

No comments:

Post a Comment