I'm back on blogger...dogger.

It continues to bother me that almost every single sleeper worth throwing your lot behind is in the South region, but I guess life is all about playing the hand you're dealt and it's pretty obvious the Tournament is a metaphor for life. So within this somewhat perverse context, I decided to do my part for all the daughters entering their father's office pool, all of whom I'm sure read Cheddar Ted, and the lay people just looking to fit in for the next couple weeks.
Here are the top 40 teams based on the 2008 draw.

Teams 1-8 are the most likely to make the final four:

1) Memphis
2) UCLA
3) UNC
4) Georgetown
5) KU/Tennessee (interchangeable)
7) Texas*
8) Duke/Xavier (interchangeable)

*This is the biggest wild-card of the bunch. They played St. Mary's early in the season and won by 18, but that score is not telling since the game was played close until Texas pulled away at the end. If these teams meet in the second round, the stage is set for the Dalton rule to prevail (This rule, established over the course of my four year high school basketball career, basically states that it is nearly impossible to beat a hard-nosed opponent twice or three times in the same season, especially if the final match-up is in a play-off situation. The New York Giants are the most recent example of this rule). That said, Texas is dangerous and volatile. It's conceivable that they will just tear through the lower half of the bracket and give either Memphis or Pitt a run for their money. 

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Teams 10-16 are basically a lock for the sweet 16 but all face very tough opponents to get into the Elite 8:

10) Pitt*
11) Clemson*
12) Louisville
13) Washington St.
14) Wisconsin
15) Stanford
16) Drake

*Both Pitt and Clemson are hard-nosed and balanced enough to make it to the elite eight or even the final four. In fact, Coach Bob Knight predicted PITT to win the whole thing and in my underdog pools, I have them in the final game, losing to Georgetown in what would definitely be a magnificent tribute to the most blue-collared conference in Division I sports: THE BIG EAST.

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Teams 17-26 are ranked based on talent alone. They are definitely dogs to make it to the sweet 16, but they have the talent to pull it off:

17) Marquette*
18) USC*
19) Notre Dame
20) UCONN
21) Butler**
21) MSU
22) West Virginia***
23) St. Mary's (see Texas explanation above)
24) Vandy
25) Indiana****
26) Oklahoma

*Marquette and USC are definitely the most likely teams of this milieu to make it to the sweet 16. Both had disappointing losses in their conference tournaments and both have something to prove.

**Even though Tennessee is a special team, Butler is dangerous and for a ranked team, remarkably underrated.

***West Virginia is back. Bob Huggins is almost inexplicably likable and Joe Alexander is channeling Kevin Pittsnoggle like some type of Mountaineer Soothsayer.  This team could definitely beat Duke. The truth is, Arizona might be a tougher game (at least according to Greg Anthony's Bracket)

****Indiana is an interesting team. A classically wounded powerhouse, this team could bow out in the first round in a depressing display of no heart and teamwork or they could say, "This is for Kelvin Sampson" and make a crazy run to the final four. Remember that this is the team that gave UCLA its toughest regional game in last year's tournament – a second round bruiser that was basically a home game for the Bruins – and all they did was add a great freshman in Eric Gordon. The Hoosiers are talented as hell, but their mental instability is the ultimate double-edged sword. Ironically, they remind me a lot of the 2000 UNC team who came in as an 8 seed, knocked off an overrated 1 in Stanford, and made it to the final four.  

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Teams 27-40 all are capable of first round wins, but are not totally exciting:

27) Purdue (I know nothing about this team)
28) Kent. St.
29) Miss St.
30) A & M
31) UNLV
32) Arizona
33) Davidson*
34) Gonzaga*
35) Miami
36) Baylor
37) Arkansas
38) BYU
39) Oregon
40) Kentucky

*It's unfortunate that these two likable squads face off in the first round and face an almost unbeatable opponent in the second round in Georgetown.                                                     

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This is list is obviously subject to change, and I feel that the NCAA Tournament selection committee did fans a great disservice by placing six extraordinarily dangerous teams – Memphis, MSU, Pitt, Marquette, Stanford and Texas – in the same bracket, but in the name of responsible punditry, my rankings, by obligation alone, took that into account.

Last thing – If you're in an auction or draft, stick to your guns and pick a cache of teams you can be proud of. Go for the hard-nosed teams with earnest coaches. They're the ones that are most dangerous in the tournament and also the teams you can feel happy about pulling for. Select the teams that match-up with the way you play the game, and throw your lot in with them. It will be your safety-belt in this rollercoaster of madness.

I'm not a big commerce guy, even though I've had a few finance internships and I buy stuff sometimes, but seeing Bear Stearns collapse has been kind of an emotional experience for me. While it probably means I'll never get arrested for sexual harassment (I honed my rap "e-battling" skills on the Bear Stearns web server during my '03 internship at the Metrotech offices in Brooklyn), it also means the company that literally sold paperclips to its employees to save cash early on is dead.

You know, I'm not sure charging employees for necessary office supplies is the best way to foster goodwill in the office, but at least it sent A MESSAGE. A message that financial responsibility was going to be the M.O. of the firm. And that's what it was...for a while.

Bear was a throwback company. They had posters of their top employees in the office, they seemed to value public service more than other firms, and they had the ultimate "Ace" up their sleeve, the older bloke with the flair and joie de vivre of a recent MBA grad, but with the experience and humble wit of a sage.

It was a company to be proud of. But then 383 was erected.

At first it was exciting. Armed with state-of-the art conference rooms perfect for telecommunication seminars and a cafeteria that could easily "break bread" with Frank Gehry's culinary oasis in the new Conde Nast building on 42nd, 383 towered over Madison avenue with a message clear as day: Bear had finally earned its place among the financial giants of Midtown Manhattan.  

I was initially taken by the building just like the rest of them. But my internship ended and I was back in an academic environment, so naturally I started thinking. Was this great architectural achievement a symbolic break from the ethos on which the company was founded? Was Bear getting too big for its britches?

They definitely weren't charging for paper clips anymore. In fact, they were passing out pens and leather-bound resume folders like their employees were playing SUPERMARKET SWEEP at a Staples. That's all good and well, I guess, but this generosity and showmanship was just half a double edged sword, and the other half was forged with MOXIE. A moxie that could one day lead to leveraging most of your liquid assets in an alarmingly volatile climate.

Bear will probably be remembered for its fantastic demise - images of JP Morgan employees raiding the beautiful building on Madison avenue for documents to see if the company was worth acquiring - but I'll remember it differently. I'll remember it for the blue blood that once coarsed through the building's water. I'll remember it as the last firm to still hire employees on work ethic alone. So what if their banking division was packed with fancy Ivy League grads and ambitious MBAs? The backbone of the firm was in Brooklyn and it was built on blue collar high school grads and responsible employees that knew how to safely manage an account without too much risk. The Bear Stearns I'll remember is the Bear of Metrotech, BK, right off Jay Street. It didn't have a fancy "stock ticker" or "fountain sodas," but it had posters of Ace Greenberg and non-scannable ID cards. Its library was full of copies of MEMOS FROM THE CHAIRMAN and the cafeteria boasted a remarkably unhealthy cuisine.

Today, the good people of Cheddar Ted mourn Bear Stearns. It's hard to see this company - our company - go under. Ace, You're a great man and a throwback. You accomplished something to be proud of.

Arielle in THE LITTLE MERMAID

Dorothea in BEBE'S KIDS

Jasmine in ALADDIN

Pocahontas in POCAHONTAS

Esmerlada in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

Mulan in MULAN

Helen Parr/Elastigirl in THE INCREDIBLES

Ursula in the form of Arielle in THE LITTLE MERMAID

Anastasia in ANASTASIA

Tzippora in THE PRINCE OF EGYPT

I forget how I literally become a manic depressive lunatic during the NCAA tournament, but in the words of NAKED EYES, there's always something there to remind me and this year it happens to be a horrible slate of match-ups in the South Region.  The fact that the three most blue collar squads in the field, Memphis, Pitt and Michigan St., are the 1, 4 and 5 in the same side of a region is just real tough to stomach. Throw in Duke's easy jaunt to the elite eight and I really have NO IDEA WHAT THE NCAA TOURNAMENT SELECTION COMMITTEE IS DOING WITH ITS TIME.

Luckily, I'm putting Indiana in the final four and predicting that the championship game will be a rematch of the BIG EAST finals, so I can at least ride a manic wave of giddiness until the weekend, at which point two of my final four teams will probably be eliminated.

I guess dementia still is possible when dealing in the realm of March Madness.

Last thing - for those of you in Los Angeles, I will be holding a Julius Hodge memorial service in my living room this Saturday. It will begin at 7:10 EST for NC St.'s first round match-up every year and will last shorter than it should. R.I.P. Julius. I'm still waiting for another "example."

Clem the Feinschmecker writes, "I just put you in the acknowledgments section of my thesis, which is due in 8 days."

If "true blue" were in a Latin/English dictionary, there wouldn't be a picture of you, but only because you wouldn't want it that way. There'd be your thesis acknowledgement, however, as part of the "e.g. section."

I've always considered you to be an erudite cat and an honest scholar, and I'm honored to officially be a part of your academic pursuits. I would say I hope you finish your final semester at Harvard with the grace and earnest dedication you showed in the previous seven semesters, but there's no point. I know you will.

Gutta Cavat lapidem, Clem the Feinschmecker. Good luck at Oxford next year.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time agonizing over the parlance I employ in my interactions. I'd love to be able to constantly spout off memorable lines and cutting quips, but I find that most of the time I'm using words and phrases that I don't even like.

Like last week I probably said "meta" seven times. That would be cool, except I hate this word more than I hate the phonetics of "ditto" times the implications of "awk" divided by the inverse playfulness of "rambunctious." If PEMDAS is at play, which it always is, it becomes clear that the quanification of my hatred for the term is almost infinitesimal in value.

I'll say this though: I love the word "iota."

Another pair of words I quite like is "bullish" and "bearish" I'm always trying to say things like:

"That's a nice spinach and artichoke dip. I'd have to say I'm feeling pretty bullish about this crudite!"

Or:

"Obama's gotten a bit played out. I'm slightly bearish on enthusiastically supporting him right now."

Finally, even though I never thought it would be possible, I've at long last succeeded in seamlessly integrating the word "absolutely" into my lexicon without sounding like a completely pompous bloke. Saying "absolutely" has actually made me feel more articulate without forcing me to abandon the commonplace vulgarity that informs my speech.

My conversation has become sort of a back and forth tennis  match between urban colloquialism and a sophisticated type of Elizabethan vernacular. Neither side can falter, however, as the line judge is clear. My words form an impasse. There is a permanent state of deuce.

I might be overly partial to this flick since there's an off chance it's actually named after me and my brother, but I've been thinking a lot about the scene where Bill and Ted encounter Rufus and their future selves outside the Circle K, and I'm decently positive this is one of the most intelligent scenes in film history.

I'm no cinefile, but I do "work in film," and I've seen enough of them to wax philosophical in the only way it's possible to wax about film: superciliously. So think back for a moment to that scene outside the Circle K. Just beneath the surface, there are some pretty powerful forces at play: specifically, man's stuggle with a personal sense of perspective.

Present Bill and Ted are some pretty stressed out dudes. They have good reason to believe they're about to flunk out of school, Bill's worried about his lusty father, and Ted's got military school on the mind. They just met this futuristic bro, Rufus, and dementia is NOT something they need right now. But then future Bill and Ted, cavalier and care-free as Bill and Ted are supposed to be, roll through in a magical phonebooth and are like "Listen to this bro Rufus. Tell the princesses we say hi!" And they dial some historical code and take off. They're the same dudes, but from a temporal perspective, the differences between them are remarkable.

This past weekend, I was chilling with some William Morris mailroom bros, and their conversation was so jarringly familiar that I couldn't help but think of Rufus and the Circle K. As they waxed about sweeps, floating, "getting a desk," I romantically mused about these concerns, and how even though I used to feel them, they were now totally a thing of the past. I wanted to be like, "Bros. Haven't you read Camus? NOTHING MATTERS!" But I didn't want to spoil the pinnacle of their tenuous friendships, so I let them joke about rookie mistakes and how HR can be a fickle ally.

I was talking to my buddy Branson about the shifting nature of our personal sense of perspective, and he said, "Do you think we're gonna be chauncing ourselves in three months for having this conversation now?" I was just like, "Maybe."

A lot of people write off EXCELLENT ADVENTURE on account of Bill and Ted's mad colloquial discourse or the fact that they're not so sweet at guitar, but those earnest bros understand that life is about being "excellent to each other," and a little stress every once in a while isn't the worst thing in the world. It at least gets you listening to Rufus.

Maid Marian in ROBIN HOOD

Young Nala in THE LION KING

Lola Bunny in SPACE JAM

Bambi in BAMBI

Adult Nala in THE LION KING

Tanya Mouskewitz in AN AMERICAN TAIL