1. Being a college basketball geek, I have written a few times here about the absurd media over-rating and fawning that the Big East Conference and its teams enjoyed. In keeping with said blind adulation, the idiots behind the NCAA Tournament selection process (chaired by an alpha idiot from the  Big Ten Conference, the most Evil and Greedy of the Evil Greedhead Conferences that comprise the BCS Cartel in Division I College Football) picked 11 Big East teams of the 68 total selected to dance. The results were predictable, as the Big East has folded like a taco when it really counts: in the round of 16, only two Big East teams remain, and both of them advanced because they played other Big East teams in the round of 32, so someone from the Big Evil was going to move on, no matter what. In my hoops bracket, I have no Big East teams in the Elite Eight. I think the odds are good that I will be correct in this regard. I doff my cap to Charles Barkley for being as publicly adamant about the absurd Cult of the Big East as I am. Well played, Round Mound of Rebound. Well played, indeed.

2. I strongly encourage you to follow  this link to the best blog post I’ve read in ages and ages. Great, thought-provoking points made within a super arc of stories, written with punch and grab and passion. A clear beginning, a riveting middle, a decisive end. Tight, tense, original. No pandering to the audience here. This is how it’s done, bloggers. Pay attention.

3. This week marks one year since we’ve heard from Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. In tribute to the rugged little ex-rover, who long outlasted her original 90 day mission guarantee before becoming stuck in the sand near Home Plate Plateau at the edge of Gusev Crater, I send you to the saddest space geek comic strip ever.

4. On a happier note, Spirit‘s sister rover, Opportunity, is still rolling, and her work is being lovingly honored and illustrated over at The Road to Endeavour. We live in a glorious age of space exploration, as witnessed by the latest monthly summary from the Planetary Society: What’s Up in the Solar System in March 2011. The biggest news this month is that we put a craft (MESSENGER) into orbit around the planet Mercury for the first time. We have now orbited every classical (e.g. visible to the naked eye) moving planetary body in the heavens: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Why isn’t anybody (besides me and the geeks at Planetary Society) celebrating this astounding feat?

5. Blowing snow, slushy roads, bitter wind and freezing temperatures are not appropriate things to experience on the first day of spring, even up here in Albany. I demand a re-do. Somebody get cracking on that.