March Madness--ZZzzzzzzz

I don’t like basketball. While I’m not disparaging anyone who does, to me it’s boring. The image of seven footers loping from one end of the court to the other, dropping the ball into the net then repeating the sequence all night puts me to sleep. The yearly practice of devoting nine hours a day to basketball games for days on end, omitting the six and ten o’clock news and all programs in between, gets me riled to some degree. If you are a big basketball fan, imagine that the only thing on the sports channels was eight hours of tiddlywinks or maybe back to back biographies of noted bird watchers. You’d probably be looking for something else to do.

This annual ritual they call March Madness on CBS kicked off yesterday afternoon. I had forgotten about it until I turned to the Channel 12 news at six and found no news but a basketball game instead. That wasn’t too bad; I watched the news on Channel 10. After that I watched O’Reilly on Fox News then an old documentary about noodlin’ for catfish on PBS. I figured the ball games would have been over by eight because I wanted to watch CSI. Nope, more basketball. A check again at nine, and what do you know, more BBall.

At ten, they were still at it. I usually watch Leno at 10:30, but Obama was on and I've had about as much of his face and his speechfying as I can take. So I listened to a radio episode of Dragnet, first recorded in 1948. It was the best entertainment of the night.

Tonight promises more of the same, so it’ll either be old radio programs or one of the 8 DVDs of English murder mysteries that I got for Christmas.