March Madness?

Although I will touch on the NCAA basketball tournament, I thought that I would get at some other items of “March Madness” in this post.

Item #1 — Is it just me or is it totally weird that we have just had a week of summer weather in mid-March and that the trees and the animals (including us) are really confused?  While a week of really warm weather does not provide irrefutable evidence for global warming, it is part of a pattern of ever greater vacillations from “normal” season variations.  In other words, we have always had freaky weather from time to time but not all the time.  Now it seems like extreme weather is the new normal, and while I like warmer weather in March, it’s somewhat scary to have 80 degrees one week and 20 degrees the next.  Interesting article about this in today’s New York Times.

Item #2 — Today is the big day for high school seniors and the final acceptances for the Class of 2016 (gosh, I feel old!).  Having gone through this with my own kids, I do feel for the parents of the seniors having to try and figure out what is “right” school for their sons and daughters.  “Right” also has a financial component, which is about as clear as mud these days (where the retail price is not the price that most students pay).

Item #3 — Why does Major League Baseball schedule two regular season games in Japan while everyone else is still playing spring training games?  It seems to me that this put those teams at a colossal disadvantage to start the season, and this is borne out by statistics.  Not that anyone thought that the As or the Mariners were going to go very far this season anyway.

Item #4 — Austin Rivers, the Duke freshman guard and son of Celtics’ Coach Doc Rivers, has announced, to no one’s surprise, that he is going to be a “one and done” college player and go to the NBA next year.  Like Kyrie Irving before him, Rivers is not going to stick around and wait for Duke to get better and be competitive for an NCAA title.  I can’t help but think that Jeremy Lin is a better NBA guard because he played four years at Harvard and actually matured as a player and a young man before going to the NBA.  Now Rivers has lots of talent, perhaps more than Lin did at the same stage of his career, but I do think that his life and career would have been greatly enhanced by the Duke degree and a college career.

Item #5 — Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides about the federal health care legislation (aka “Obamacare“), I would love for there to be a solution like the one that David Brooks discussed in his recent column — the feds set the overall policy direction and the states and localities figure out how to implement it.  While many of the opponents to this imperfect legislation crow about it taking away “our freedoms”, I am not at all convinced that my freedom is being impinged upon when we come up with a system that takes care of the sick by spreading the risk among all of us.  I would rather encourage people to get preventative care than to use the emergency department as their primary form of health care, wouldn’t you?

Item #6 — The NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament has been really fun to watch this, notwithstanding my brackets got busted two weeks ago.  While Kentucky may indeed win the whole thing, I think that any of the other teams could win it as well, and I will enjoy the final four weekend very much.  The Women’s tournament has been less interesting (save Pat Summitt‘s potential last game) with all four #1 seeds making it to the finals.  Baylor’s Brittney Griner could probably play for a number of men’s teams at this point.  She is simply amazing!

Can’t wait to see what April has in store for us….