Because I couldn't vote for Salt Walther.

The Indianapolis Star is running a poll asking fans to select the best driver never to win the Indianapolis 500. Out of over 50 drivers submitted, the Star culled the field down to 12. Contemporary drivers you might know are Michael Andretti, Scott Goodyear, Nigel Mansell and Tony Stewart. Names from the past included on the ballot include Ted Horn, Jackie Stewart, Rex Mays, Lloyd Ruby, Dan Gurney and Gary Bettenhausen. The others that I'm not familiar with are Harry Hartz (who raced in the '20s) and Jack McGrath.

Andretti and Tony Stewart are probably the frontrunners for the "best driver to never win Indy" title based on the general idiocy of Internet voters. Andretti's got the name and, unfortunately, the curse - that curse being, to finish first, you've got to first finish, and his family's reputation as hard chargers means a lot of broken equipment. And because Tony Stewart is the most known name on the list, you're going to find a good percentage of people who will vote for him on that point alone.

(It's like the time I filled out Rolling Stone's yearly reader-participation awards survey - I was no older than 10 - and voted for Bob Marley as best reggae artist because that's the only reggae name I knew. Yes, he'd been dead for several years by that point, although I don't believe I was aware of it at the time.)

The fact is, Tony Stewart's body of work is too short to justify a vote for him - he ran Indy only 5 times. The same can be said for Nigel Mansell and Jackie Stewart, both of whom ran only twice at Indy but still are on the ballot.

Anyway, my vote went to Ted Horn. He ran for 10 years (with World War II interrupting the 500 for a handful of years in the '40s). After a 16th-place finish his first year, here is how he finished the next nine races: 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 4th, 4th, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 4th. Wow. He completed 1799 of a possible 1800 laps at Indy those 9 years. Given Indy's crapshoot nature and tendency to, on occasion, reach up and bite drivers, that's a phenomenal record.

I'd love to link to the survey, but am somehow unable to do so right now. Go to indystar.com; down the left side of the page, there is a box with a link to "Online Extras"; the poll is linked there.

My sentimental favorite for the title is Gary Bettenhausen. In 1987, he drove the Genesee Beer Wagon to 5th. That's all you need to know.

Update: After casting my vote, I saw where the results stood. Andretti is the runaway leader at 43 percent, with Lloyd Ruby in second. Ted Horn languishes in mid-pack at 6 percent. Of course.

Nobody remembers second place, except me.

In a result that surprised virtually nobody outside of the town of Montgomery, the Barr-Reeve High School Vikings fell short in their quest to win the boys Class A state championship last weekend.

Despite my years of antipathy for Barr-Reeve, I try to set those feelings aside whenever a local school makes it to the championship game. Even if I have to hold my nose while rooting for them, I'll still pull for local teams to make good.

However, Barr-Reeve's failure to bring home a championship is fairly commonplace for schools in our area. Since class basketball's beginnings 10 years ago (please, no debate here), there have been almost a disproportionate number of schools from my immediate area who have made it to the championship of their class ... only to lay an egg when they arrive at Conseco and get destroyed/beaten soundly/otherwise defeated. Check out these results ("local" schools highlighted):

Boys:

1997-98
Lafayette Central Catholic 56, Bloomfield 48 (A Championship)

1998-99
Westview 71, Paoli 52 (2A Championship)

1999-00
Marion 62, Bloomington North 56 (4A Championship)
Lafayette Central Catholic 82, Union (Dugger) 70 (A Championship)

2001-02
Rossville 79, Barr-Reeve 68 (A Championship)

2002-03
Cass 57, Forest Park 48 (2A Championship)

2004-05
Washington 74, Plymouth 72 (OT) (3A Championship)
Forest Park 68, Harding 63 (2A Championship)
Lapel 51, Loogootee 40 (A Championship)

2005-06
Forest Park 61, Harding 55 (2A Championship)

2006-07
Oregon-Davis 63, Barr-Reeve 52 (A Championship)

Looking at the three boys' successes from our area, 2004-05 Washington had a Mr. Basketball (Luke Zeller) on its team as well as a strong supporting cast, while Forest Park's back-to-back champions were probably as solid a team to come out of this area since class sports began. They were just a juggernaut that was just a knee injury away from likely bringing home three in a row.

But by and large (and I'll grant that there are exceptions), here's what happens in most of these games: the local team will fall behind by about 10 or 12 points from the outset, sometimes more, then try to claw their way back into the game. (This happened with both Barr-Reeve runner-up finishes in the tournament, the Loogootee loss in 2005, and the losses by Wood Memorial, Washington Catholic and White River Valley on the girls' side).

And I'm going to be candid for a minute: a lot of local schools - and I'm not naming names, but they know who they are - play a horseshit brand of basketball that dictates that they cannot play from behind. They must keep it within 5 points, catch a couple of breaks to grab a lead, and then hold the ball.

That's not a knock on anyone. If you don't have the athletes to run a track meet against a more talented team, then you've got to compensate, and some schools have been very successful at it. Playing that brand of basketball requires a level of discipline that frustrates a lot of opponents who should, quite frankly, run them out of the gym, and more power to those who can pull it off.

It's just that when you get to the finals playing that brand of basketball, you typically run into teams that are stronger, faster, deeper and more rugged, who play a different type of basketball that usually murders our local squads.

And it happens seemingly every time. The list of scores above doesn't lie. (My first edit of this post had a similar list for the girls, which had a similar result, but dammit, I'm trying to learn brevity.)

****

My wife and I had a conversation in the closing minutes of the Barr-Reeve loss last week. I kind of chuckled as more Viking shots clanged off the iron, and she asked what was so funny.

Me: "I can't believe anyone would be shocked at this result."

Wife: "What do you mean?"

Me: "Every time someone from around here makes it to Indy (to play in the championship), they completely embarrass themselves. Loogootee laid an egg. Barr-Reeve's laid two eggs now. Wood Memorial's girls laid an egg in the girls' championship. I don't know why anyone thought this game would be different."

Wife (indignant): "Well, at least they made it. Your school has never won a sectional."

Me: "That's right, we've never won a sectional. We prefer to keep our embarrassment on a local level, instead of pooping our pants in front of a statewide audience like this."

Then, she told me how impossible I was, and I went off to do something else. But my last comment gave me a thought about what I'd hoped the next online edition of the Washington Times-Herald (the paper that would cover Barr-Reeve's run) would look like.

Being reprimanded and not feeling reprimanded.

People on this base need to get off their damned high horse.

Let me lay out what happened:

One of the women in my office received a phone call from her counterpart in another department, asking for us to pass around an envelope for the retirement of a worker (who will go unnamed). She stood in the middle of the office and announced so much.

Now, keep in mind that this is a large naval base - around 5,000 people work here, counting the contractors (such as myself). Still, in almost 2 1/2 years here, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of who a lot of the movers and shakers are, who not to cross and who to go to get something done. And this gentleman's name was one I had never heard before.

Still, the guy's retiring, so the moment shouldn't pass without some recognition, right? 30+ years in the federal service, probably making $30-$35 an hour for doing very little. (Just hazarding a guess; he might be one of the poor grunts who makes only $27 an hour. Like I said, I'd never heard the guy's name before.)

Taking all of this into account, I asked if anyone had change for a dollar.

*****

Next thing I know, I'm being called into Doom's office. He told me not to make remarks of that nature "because some people are sensitive to things like that."

He then told me to consider myself reprimanded.

I said, "Yeah, but did you get a chuckle out of it?"

He said yes, then snorted as I walked out of his office. He said, "You kinda said what I was thinking, but you still shouldn't have said it."

Which is pretty unbelievable, really, given his weakness for making comments about my comparative lack of hair. (Which happened again last Friday. Some people are sensitive to things like that, too, you prick.)

But I digress. I'm just saying that if a guy is apparently entitled to make $25-$35 an hour through a cushy federal job and retire with a pretty nice pension, then I'm entitled to make an offhand comment about needing change for a dollar to donate for a retirement gift for some fucker I've never heard of.

(Which, actually, as a contractor, I probably shouldn't do anyway, since it crosses some sort of ethical line that forbids things of that nature. The feds, as well as my employer, are touchy about crap like that.)

No wonder the bid came in so low. There's only one guy working!

From Linton's Daily World. This is an actual screenshot - I have only made the text larger in the browser so as to make it easier to read.

In the deserts of Greene County, one out-of-proportion man will work to save the minimum-risk inmates of that county from continuing their course down the wrong path in life. He will attempt to enter the Guinness book by building a 70-bed work-release center - or its synonym, "11,800 square foot" - out of sand and the provisions he is carrying.

We at Bramble Tamble wish the unidentified soldier well as he embarks on his spiritual journey of enlightenment and crap.

Prayer for Older Folks

Going through some old books that we have, I found a cookbook that someone had given to their parents as a gift. They had written the below prayer in the back of it. I wanted to share it here.

Lord, thou knowst that I am growing older.

Keep me from becoming too talkative, and particularly keep me from falling into the tiresome habit of expressing an opinion on every subject.

Release me from the craving to straighten out everybody’s affairs.

Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details.

Give me the grace, Dear Lord, to listen to others describe their aches and pains. Help me to endure the boredom with patience and to keep my lips sealed, for my own aches and pains are increasing in number and intensity, and the pleasure of discussing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by.

Teach me the glorious lesson that, occasionally, I might be mistaken.

Keep me reasonably sweet. I do not wish to be a saint (saints are so hard to live with), but a sour old woman is the crowning work of the devil.

Make me thoughtful, but not moody; helpful, but not pushy; independent, yet able to accept with graciousness favors that others wish to bestow on me.

Free me of the notion that, simply because I have lived a long time, I am wiser than those who have not lived so long.

If I do not approve of some of the changes that have taken place in recent years, give me the wisdom to keep my mouth shut. Lord, you know that when the end comes, I would like to have a friend or two left.

Amen.

New category.

You'll note that to the right, in the "Categories" section, there is an addition called "In Memorandum (sic)." Topics covered include not only late, lamented friends and the passing of people I didn't know, but also the end of traditions and "the way things used to be." I'm a sucker for nostalgia, probably to my detriment.

Why "In Memorandum (sic)"?

During my salad days in cable advertising, we wrote a commercial for a local hospital. A doctor who had longtime ties with the hospital had recently passed, and the folks at the hospital wanted to spend a moment at the end of their commercial memorializing him.

After the commercial was produced, the production staff proudly transferred it to VHS for the client's viewing and approval. Imagine, if you will, the reaction when they found that the end slate read, "In Memorandum - Dr. (so and so)" with his picture on it.

Thankfully, the commercial didn't make it to air with the error.

Ahhh, baby.

Congratulations to The Captain, friend of Bramble Tamble, and his betrothed on the birth of their firstborn! She's swell.

A remembrance of someone I wish I knew.

My life on the Internet is fairly isolated and insulated. I have a list of favorite sites that I routinely visit - InstaPundit, Lileks, RWN, the Onion, local newspaper sites, a couple of sports and wrestling sites and so on - and so if I don't visit your blog even though it's gold, I'm sorry. Just haven't gotten into the habit of visiting it yet.

Which made me kick myself all the harder when I read the news about Cathy Seipp.

Having only familiarized myself with her writing after reading about her most recent hospitalization on Lileks yesterday, I hate that I didn't start reading her sooner. Judging by the 600-odd comments left on her daughter's announcement of her hospitalization, I was in the minority, as Cathy apparently had quite a silent following who read her regularly and respected her regardless of her politics - something that I think a lot of us, as writers and bloggers, aspire to as well.

There are a lot of comments on that above-referenced post that read along the lines of, "I never post comments here, but I wanted to wish you well and let you know I'm praying for you, Cathy."

And I am, too. Godspeed, Cathy.

Overheard at lunch.

Man #1: "I figured out how I'm going to survive during my retirement. I'm going to get one of those reverse mortgages on my house ... I don't have any kids, so who am I going to leave it to?"

Man #2: "Why don't you name me as your beneficiary, so I can get all of your money?"

Man #1: "I don't have any money."

Man #2: "What about your stock?"

Man #1: "I'll leave you the sump pump in my basement. Except I don't have a basement. But you can still have the sump pump."

Sonblogging, because I haven't in a while.

"How's the boy?" some of you might ask.

He's well. The last 3-6 months have been some of the best (his double ear infection some weeks back notwithstanding).

He loves watching PBS Kids Sprout's "The Good Night Show," and still loves Thomas the Pain Train (his favorite characters are Gordon and Diesel 10). He is starting to enjoy Bob the Builder, which I can't take seriously since Bob is voiced by Greg Proops and I've watched too much "Whose Line."

He also loves Mommy and Daddy.

He enjoys visits to his pediatrician. Yesterday, so when I loaded him up in the car, he looked at me and said, "Daddy. I'm sick. Go see Doc Bies." I felt his head - he didn't feel warm, so I asked the owner of the daycare, and she explained that one of the other kids was sick (great). Naturally, my son also wanted to be sick so he could go to the doctor. (I think that this is an indirect consequence of making medicine taste like candy.)

Also have had a couple of out-of-the-blue moments with him the last week or so. Some mornings, when I am taking him to the daycare, we'll pass the road where I turn to go to my day job at the Spirit Sapper, and I'll say, "That's where Daddy goes to work after I drop you off at (daycare)." One evening last week, on the way home from the daycare, when we passed that road, he said, "That's where Daddy goes work after drop me at (daycare)." It was sweet, and I almost wrecked the car, I was so proud.

Also, since he loves Thomas the Pain Train so much, he also enjoys real-life trains and real-life train tracks. Because there are no railroad crossings between the daycare and our house, I'll often take a side trip to cross a couple of tracks, since it's not too far out of the way. A couple of weeks ago, we had crossed about four different crossings, and he wanted to go across more. I told him that instead of wanting to go across more, he should understand that we were going out of our way to do this, and he should tell me, "Thank you for taking me across the choo-choo tracks, Daddy."

Lo and behold, one night last week, that's exactly what he said - completely out of the blue and without any cues from me.

So, it's going well. I love being a daddy, and I hope one day after I'm gone, he'll look back and say how much he loved being my son.

(Personal note to the Captain: It's moments like these you have to look forward to, buddy. Makes all of the sleepless nights and stressful moments worthwhile.)

You are tuned in to Bramble Tamble's wall-to-wall coverage of The Death of That Guy Who Sang For Boston.

Not much to say about Brad Delp's passing, really. I wasn't too much of a Boston fan; their first heyday was before my time, and my most vivid memory of their 1980s comeback was standing forlornly along the wall at junior high dances wishing I could slow-dance with someone named Amanda to the song "Amanda." Oh, the irony.

Still, no voices embodied stadium rock and 1970s FM radio better than those of Delp and Paul Rodgers. Post-Vietnam, the '70s seem like they were a pretty unassuming time, and Delp's vocals for Boston were a perfect fit for the era. It was almost as though his voice was distinctive in its comparative nondistinctiveness, if that makes sense.

Anyway, sad to hear of his passing. The family is now saying that it was a suicide.

Update 1: If you're like me and you're thinking of '70s FM radio, you probably have the monster riff to "Long Time" stuck in your head now. If not, now you do. You're welcome.

Update 2: I mentioned Delp and Paul Rodgers as the voices that most embodied stadium rock and '70s FM radio. A co-worker, unaware of this blog, just mentioned the name of Joe Walsh, who definitely fits on that list as well.

Update 3: No, Robert Plant wouldn't be a candidate for that list, because Zeppelin is so timeless.

My promised March Madness "analysis."

Some thoughts on the NCAA tournament, courtesy of a guy who's watched maybe six games all year:

Midwest: I think this is the weakest of the four regions, and I can see only very few scenarios in which Florida doesn't advance to the Final Four out of this region ... With the injury to Wisconsin's Brian Butch, the Badgers aren't nearly as solid as their 2 seed indicates, and I see them getting taken out by UNLV in the second round ... 11th-seeded Winthrop is the preordained darling of the tournament, which should sufficiently honk off Notre Dame to the point where the Irish play up to their seeding and eliminate the Eagles in the first round ... Butler's not been nearly as impressive down the stretch as they were in the early part of the season, but I still see them getting to the Sweet 16 before falling to Florida. Sweet 16 picks: Florida over Butler, UNLV over Oregon. Elite 8 pick: Florida over UNLV.

West: It's kind of funny how close we were to an Indiana-Texas Tech first-round matchup, since both Texas Tech and Gonzaga were 10 seeds. Still, IU-Gonzaga is intriguing. I had planned a blog post earlier this year about how this season would be the end of Gonzaga as a player on the national scene - this was after watching an average Virginia team destroy the 'Zags by what should have been about 40 shortly after the New Year. Glad I held off on that post, since they've seemed to pull it together somewhat ... I'm picking the yearly 5-12 upset to happen in this bracket, with Illinois knocking off Virginia Tech ... A lot of people are pegging this to be the year that Duke's streak of Sweet 16 runs ends, with either VCU or Pittsburgh knocking them out. I concur, and picked VCU to eliminate Duke in the first round. Sweet 16 picks: Southern Illinois over Kansas, Pittsburgh over Gonzaga. Elite 8 pick: Pittsburgh over Southern Illinois.

East: A lot of folks are pegging Texas' freshman phenom Kevin Durant as the Player of the Year. OK, fine. I still don't have them making it to the Sweet 16, because as I've said - I watched about six games this year ... Texas Tech is in this bracket, and while I picked them to beat Boston College, I don't see them getting past Georgetown - if Bob Knight had a week to prepare for the Hoyas instead of two days, I'd like the Red Raiders' chances a lot better ... "Upsets" I picked in this bracket include Michigan State over Marquette, New Mexico State over Texas and George Washington over Vanderbilt ... Sweet 16 picks: North Carolina over New Mexico State, Georgetown over Washington State. Elite 8 pick: Georgetown over North Carolina.

South: This bracket will play out mostly to form in the first round, with 9 seed Xavier being the lowest seed to win. Long Beach State is kind of a glamour pick to pull out an upset in the first round (especially with their game being the of the 5-12 variety), but I went with Tennessee ... The second round will be a little more topsy-turvy - I like Nevada to defeat Memphis, who nevertheless will have a chip on their shoulder thanks to the fact that many folks think they're in too high at a 2 ... All told, Ohio State shouldn't have too much of a problem advancing out of this region. Sweet 16 picks: Ohio State over Tennessee, Texas A&M over Nevada. Elite 8 pick: Ohio State over Texas A&M.

Final Four: Florida over Pittsburgh, Ohio State over Georgetown.

National Championship: Ohio State 80, Florida 71.

Rose: "If I bet on the Reds, here's how I did it."

After a decade and a half of denials, Pete Rose has finally come clean and admitted to betting "every night" on the team he managed.

No word on whether this will affect his Hall of Fame candidacy, but since the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America, who makes the selections for the Hall) will likely blackball him for the majority of his time on the ballot, such a question is irrelevant, I guess.

Me - I'm a Pete Rose fan, and always will be. But it seems like every time his name slips out of the spotlight for a few months, he has new "revelations" to spring on a public that is probably fairly tired of the shenanigans. But at long last, he's admitted to what most people long suspected. So that's something.

The folks who do the billboard ads for Holiday Inn Express ... *need* to stay at a Holiday Inn Express!

They say "you can't get there from here." I'm beginning to believe that nowhere is this adage truer than in southern Indiana.

About a year or so ago, a billboard went up in my town that gave directions to a Holiday Inn Express in Washington, about 20 minutes west of here. The only problem was, it gave the entirely wrong directions; if you had followed the directions, you would have ended up in Petersburg, about 20 minutes south of Washington.

The billboard eventually was corrected with the right directions. However, driving to Washington tonight, I saw another billboard just west of Montgomery, which is between Loogootee and Washington on US 50. At the billboard's site, it's no more than 5 minutes from Washington, and that's if you get behind an Amish caravan.

The billboard was for (you guessed it) Holiday Inn Express in Washington. It said, "15 minutes to US 50 Business," and then some further directions. 15 minutes from that billboard would put you in Wheatland, a small town between Washington and Vincennes on US 50 that has no Holiday Inn Express!

Then, coming back from Washington, I saw a billboard for the new casino in French Lick (which is a hole and should be avoided at all costs because you will lose your money and overspend on food). It said to "turn right on I-231." There's no such beast! Maybe the billboard company is sending a subtle anti-gambling message - you'll drive around for so long looking for "I-231" that you'll eventually get up and go home to play Parcheesi or watch dirty movies or something.

Billboard companies in Indiana - call me for directions to places! I can give you correct directions - on the cheap!

Colts lose Rhodes & Harper? It's OK.

Bob Knight has coached for around 40 years. His teams have won three national championships and almost 900 games with very few true "superstar" players - his teams have produced a grand total of one NBA All-Star (Isiah Thomas). The bulk of his players who did advance to the next level turned out to be busts (Steve Alford, Uwe Blab, Eric Anderson) or, at best, journeymen (Scott May, Quinn Buckner, Dean Garrett). This isn't a knock on Coach Knight – I'm bringing this up to illustrate a bigger point.

Bob Knight broke Dean Smith's Division I men's basketball coaching wins record because his system works. He recruited the right players – players who may not have been McDonald's All-Americans coming out of high school, but who nevertheless played smart and bought into Knight's team-first system. He could win 20 games a season anywhere in college basketball (and has proven so much at Texas Tech) – he could make Northwestern a perennial contender.

It's the Indianapolis Colts' recent free-agent defections of Dominic Rhodes and Nick Harper that cause me to think about this. Both players were an integral part of the Super Bowl champions, and both have opted to go elsewhere for more money (Rhodes, in particular, may get the bulk of the carries in Oakland, while Harper will likely slide right into a starting role in Tennessee).

Colts fans, don't be too devastated about the loss of these two fine players. Tony Dungy's system works also, and I think that both players will struggle in their new environs because the systems in place for those teams won't work to their advantage nearly as well as the Colts' did. (See also James, Edgerrin.) Rhodes has already proven that he can't be the primary ground option, but did phenomenally well when splitting carries with James or Joseph Addai. Harper is a little undersized, but like the rest of the Colts' defense, he's quick when someone isn't stabbing him in the leg.

Coach Dungy and the Colts will do as they've done recently with great success: plug their replacements into the system, pay them considerably less money and yet continue to win 10-12 games a season. One of these years, the strategy will come back to bite them, but I don't see it happening this year.

Overanalyzing the bracket.

My three favorite events on the sports calendar are the Indiana high school boys basketball tournament, the first two rounds of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and the Indy 500.

The first and the last have been jerked around with so much by seemingly well-intentioned people trying to make them better that the events have lost a lot of their luster. I follow both pretty closely, but shudder to imagine how much more time I'd spend following them if they were as they once were, if that makes sense.

The second one, meanwhile, is still pretty cool, but I've got a complaint about the peripheral coverage of it. Writing about and projecting the NCAA tournament is a 24-7 industry, and I've got to admit to more than a bit of fatigue as a result. There are several folks on the Internet who projected the tournament bracket weekly, daily and eventually multiple times a day, and the constant stream of "they're in/they're out" just makes me tired.

(Keep in mind that these folks aren't projecting the outcomes of the games - they are projecting who will play whom and who will get left out. Geez. This would be like me projecting the 43 starters for NASCAR's season-ending Homestead race every week until the end of the season.)

Fortunately, the brackets are finally out (I may post thoughts later, adding to your fatigue), and while there will be plenty of additional overanalysis of the actual brackets between now and the tournament's start, for the most part everyone can just shut up and watch them play.

Winless Watch Team of the Year (Boys): A no-brainer?

Sorry for the lack of Winless Watch updates ... it's been on my to-do list, but it's not quite as exciting to do a horserace analysis of what ended up being two teams.

Yes, out of almost 400 basketball-playing high schools in the state of Indiana, only two teams ended up winless for the year. One was Tindley, which just completed its first season of IHSAA basketball with an 0-17 record (three game results are still unreported to John Harrell). Granted, the Tigers were outscored by an average of 83-27 in the 16 games played on the court (a 2-0 forfeit loss not counted in that result). That's 56 points a game, which makes last year's Cannelton games seem like barnburners by comparison. So, they should be hands-down the WW Team of the Year, and a favorite for WW Team of the Decade if I'm still doing this three years from now, right?

Not so fast. I'm not going to pile on Tindley. A first-year class A school who still played one of the comparatively stronger schedules in the state (164th strongest schedule out of almost 400 schools, ordained the latest Sagarin numbers), who played more 4A and 3A schools than schools in its own class ... it'd be rude of me to highlight their shortcomings more than I have already.

Which brings us to North Newton.

The Class 2A Spartans went 0-21 against the 374th toughest schedule in the state. They played 12 schools in the smaller class A and only played schools in a bigger class twice, which may not be a problem of scaredy-cat scheduling so much as it is a problem with geography. But they did lose by an average of about 28 points a game.

Against common opponents, North Newton fell by 5 points to Lafayette First Assembly, while Tindley fell by 32 and 15 to the same team. Again - hands-down to Tindley, right?

But I'll tell you how my theory of common opponents panned out for *me* this year: in the Evansville Courier-Press' High School Basketball Challenge, where you picked the outcomes of 14 games per week throughout the season, I was 730th out of about 750 contestants heading into sectional before a respectable showing in the sectional (i.e., using common sense to select teams) rocketed me up to almost 700th in the standings. So, you know, poop on my "common opponents" method of picking games.

Due to Tindley's extenauting circumstances and brave scheduling, I'm going to let them slide - besides, if they're not even eligible for postseason play yet, then they shouldn't be eligible for WW ignominy, either. This makes (by default) the North Newton Spartans your 2006-07 Winless Watch Boys Team of the Year!

A short discourse on the effects of "running government like a business."

Had the singular pleasure yesterday of meeting some of our state's environmental commissioner. When I say "singular pleasure," I mean it in the same way that drinking month-old milk is a singular pleasure. In other words, not at all.

When various conservative politicians sweep into office and announce that they want to "run government like a business," I'm all for it. I'm making a blanket statement here, but government is woefully inefficient thanks to the fact that it's the government and it doesn't have to make itself better, while private industry must make itself more efficient to survive and thrive. Why shouldn't government do the same just out of principle?

Granted, "lean" initiatives and "continuous improvement" have become buzzwords at the government facility where I work. The complaints against these from the rank-and-file, though, are nearly universal. I've been in one "lean event" during my employment there*, and it was a week of my life that I'll never get back. On the one hand, you have "continuous improvement" being shoved down your throat at every opportunity: from the moment you drive through the security, the message board touts "continuous improvement" as the way forward. On the other hand, "continuous improvement" butts up against "reality," which usually wins out in the end - usually sooner rather than later, when you don't get buy-in from the people who should be continuously improving.

Anyway, I'm off-track.

One of the consequences, though, of "running government like a business" is that, inevitably, the natural result of putting this theory into practice is that you end up with people like … our state's environmental commissioner.

I'm going to have to rethink this "running government like a business" concept. Maybe I shouldn't be so much for it if rude, inconsequential, ineffective middle managers will eventually rise to the upper echelon of government.

* - not counting the "lean event" I was in a couple of weeks ago where I got the flu and lost 15 pounds

Here's one I don't get.

I'm having a very difficult time with the fact that Nirvana's "Breed" is being used to hawk some Major League Baseball video game.

It's bad news for Bad News.

Taking a moment to raise a glass to the memory of former WWF wrestler Bad News Brown, who passed away yesterday morning at 63 (!).

A couple of memories about Bad News:

1. The guy was probably the original WWF badass. Black guy, black trunks, black glove, shaved head and full beard ... put it all together, and it made for a very intimidating package (and there was one other piece of the puzzle that completed the package that I'll talk about in a couple of moments). A real no-nonsense heel who relied solely on his badass-ness and didn't need a gimmick or mic skills to get over. Hated him to death at the time of his WWF run, but I was reminiscing a few weeks ago and thinking, in retrospect, just how awesome he and Ted DiBiase were as super-effective heels.

2. Never got a run with one of the WWF's two singles belts at the time, which is too bad. The one match I remember most was on USA's old Tuesday Night Titans program (or whatever it was called at the time), when he wrestled jobber Scott Casey for what seemed like 20 minutes. BNB's "gimmick" at the time, if you can call it that, was that he was undefeated and unbeatable. Casey nearly defeated him at several points in the match, and I was rooting so hard for Casey to steal a win (except I don't think he had much of a finisher - maybe a dreaded "lariat," since he was from Texas - so that would have been an issue standing in the way of a victory) ... and then out of nowhere, BNB hit his "ghetto blaster" finisher for the pin. God, I hated him.

3. The other match that stands out was his turn on Bret Hart at the Wrestlemania IV battle royal. BNB and Bret Hart (before Hart became "TBTI, TBTW, TBTEWB") had eliminated all of the other competitors and had seemed to agree to split the win and the trophy. Hart was preening for the crowd (he was a heel at the time as well), when BNB hit the ghetto blaster on Hart and tossed him out of the ring, which cemented his badass reputation. (Think of sort of a pre-Stone Cold Stone Cold Steve Austin. Today, Bad News would probably be the biggest face in the company, except he would have been ... 63? Really???)

4. Probably the thing I recall best about BNB was the fact that he walked to the ring without entrance music for the bulk of his run. Can you imagine that today? No entrance music? We're now in an era where the WWE uses entrance music for run-ins, for crying out loud - which dampens the "surprise" element of the run-in, it would seem.

R.I.P., Bad News Brown.