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So the Big Dance tips off this afternoon. Sadly, I'll be working and won't be able to partake in the day's early festivities. Nevertheless, I'm entered into a couple of tourney pools, including a novel one at work where everyone picked four teams out of a hat, and whoever has the tourney-winning team is the pool champion. The twist here is that in order to advance with your team, they have to win by one more than the difference in their seeding. For instance, one of my teams is Winthrop, a 14 seed playing against Gonzaga. Naturally, if Winthrop pulls the upset, I move on with the Eagles to the next round. However, if Gonzaga wins by 11 points or fewer (the difference in seeds between the teams), the person holding Gonzaga loses in our tournament and I take over the Bulldogs going forward!

My initial impression is that there are two types of teams that this format favors: teams that are underseeded - especially if they play a slow-paced game and teams that are supremely talented (UConn last year, when they won all of their opening round games by 18 or more) and will crush all comers. That being the case, I'm feeling best about my three lowly-seeded teams (Winthrop, St. Mary's and Iowa State) and worse about my higher-seeded team (Michigan State).

On a related note, here's my picks for the first round games to watch: Alabama-UW-Milwaukee, Arizona-Utah State, Georgia Tech-GW, Wisconsin-Northern Iowa, Kansas-Bucknell, Oklahoma-Niagara, and last but not least, Syracuse-Vermont. All of the 8-9 and 7-10 games could be close and it's hard to call any result there an upset, so I excluded them from the list. But don't be surprised if you see the lower seed winning some of these other games. And remember that you saw it here first.

Getting back to my pick for game of the first round, I liked both Syracuse and Vermont as teams that had the potential to reach at least the sweet sixteen before the brackets were released on Sunday. Trade either team with the corresponding seed in the Chicago region (BC or Penn) and I'd definitely have 'em both marching on for two rounds. But alas, they meet in the first round. If there were only one first round game that I could watch, this would be the one.

Vermont matches up pretty well with Syracuse, and the battle between Hakim Warrick and Taylor Coppenrath should be great - these guys will both be playing on the next level. TJ Sorrentine vs. Gerry McNamara will be an appetizing undercard as well. The biggest key to the game will be foul trouble. If any of these four players has to spend lots of minutes on the bench, their team will be in trouble. Syracuse has struggled to find a third scoring option all year long. Josh Pace has emerged as the greatest threat, so he could be a key to victory for the Orangemen. Finally, it'll be interesting to see how the Catamounts handle the Syracuse 2-3 zone. I'm not sure how much of it they've seen in America East competition and the onus will be on Sorrentine to get the ball inside. With Vermont playing to give their coach a nice retirement present, I can absolutely see them knocking off the Orangemen... but then again, maybe not. (and it the result here has a large impact on my bracket, since I'm not holding my breath on Duke either...)

A lengthier update on what's what in DC will be coming soon... but for now, the Broke Down MC's fantasy baseball league is looking for some new faces. As we enter our fifth season, we're still short on owners, with the draft scheduled for Sunday afternoon (on Yahoo! sports)... The league is a 12 team 6x6 league (HR, RBI, SB, R, BA, OPS, W, ERA, WHIP, K/BB, HOLDS) and uses an all-MLB player pool. I know most of my BDBML friends are accustomed to the joys of single-league player pools - as was I before I joined in with the BDMC's... However, I've found that playing without scrubs is a different but not lesser joy... In fact, it gave me a greater appreciation of the big things that make teams win. The guys on the waiver wires may still be good players (although often they're not), but it's easier to understand their place when you take a look around the league and find 12-15 players beter than the guys who are still available. It's a particularly damning statement about the Pirates that only 3 or 4 of their guys are likely to be picked in any given draft... Beyond Oliver Perez, Jason Bay, Jose Mesa, there isn't much that makes this team's players worth owning. The Wilsons might get picked up sometimes and Kip Wells or Matt Lawton occasionally also, but these guys are - for the most part - afterthoughts. Anyway, if you're free Sunday around 3 PM EST, you oughtta join up... it's fun!

Much to my amusement, accidental blank posts draw more feedback than anything I've written... perhaps I should I just let you guys discuss amongst yourselves, eh? Well it might be about the only thing I have a chance to blog about for the next few weeks. Hours at my firm are being extended such that I'll be working at least 80 hours a week, and I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted us to do 90 hour weeks. My next day off is scheduled to be March 19th. Needless to say, additional posting over this time is unlikely...

The job itself is okay... We're paid well in absolute terms, but relatively poorly. Placements at other firms might make six to ten dollars an hour more than we make. Nevertheless, it is a whole new tax bracket for me... even if that salary level won't actually hold up for the full year.

Somehow, I managed to get a significant amount of supervisory responsibility as soon as a week and a half into the job. I have my own little staff of people working directly for me and to some extent I'm supervising all 75 or so document reviewers working on the project. My team likes to say half-jokingly that I'm on staff attorney track... I don't know what to say about that.

One of the worst parts about working at my firm (other than the new hours) is the commute. Every day I spend two hours going to or coming home from work, and the process costs $11 per day. At some point, I'll use this time to produce a parody of the Doobie Brothers song "China Grove" that does nothing but ridicule my local Metro stop (Shady Grove). That remains a future project.

Because of this horrendous commute - and because I don't like living so far out - I'm looking to move into the District as soon as possible. It's tough to do that when only about a quarter of the studios in the right parts of town are affordable and when it's so difficult to find random people who seem acceptable as roommates (and for whom the feeling is mutual). It would be a lot easier if someone I knew were also looking for a place and a roommate in DC... so Josh, you better move down here after you quit the job...

On another note, if anyone plans on doing any shopping at Best Buy in the near future, please get in touch with me first...

Today's P-G reports that the Pirates appear to be headed into the 2005 campaign with potentially the lowest payroll in baseball for the first time since the 1997 "freak show" Pirates took the field. Having the lowest payroll is a dubious distinction, but in and of itself isn't terribly upsetting. But parsing the article, a reader can glean this list of the lowest payrolls for 2005:

30. Devil Rays - $32 million (may or may not include the $1.3 million contract Travis Lee signed with the D-Rays today)
29. Pirates - $33.4 million (minus an unknown amount of Matt Lawton's contract being paid by Cleveland)
27(t). Brewers - $41 million
27(t). Royals - $41 million
26. Indians - $42-45 million
25. everybody else, $50 million+

Not only do the Pirates look like they'll be last, but it's at least plausible and perhaps likely that they'll be within $10 million of only one team and within $20 million of just four. That is embarassing. It also suggests to me that the Bucs' ownership group is pocketing some nice change. Between the new ballpark and $13 million or so of revenue sharing money coming in just last season, the incoming cash has gone up significantly in the last 5 years, but payroll hasn't really increased much over 2000 levels. Francises in similar situations to the Pirates such as the Tigers, Reds, and Marlins (who have the worst lease deal in all of baseball) have all managed to find a way to jack payroll over $50 million, so why can't the Pirates?

I haven't taken any online quizzes in awhile and Sean pointed me in the direction of one I thought I'd take: the nerdiness quiz! Now admittedly, I'm just a wannabe computer nerd (which is to say I know enough to know all the things that I don't know), but I'm also nerdy about lots of other things - geography and baseball being the big two... I like to think of myself as a "Renaissance Nerd"... someone with a broad base of nerdy aptitude... So I'm not sure if this nerdiness quiz quite sizes me up right, but I suppose the result more or less confirms my preconceptions (since so many of the questions are computer-based)...

Richard Kral has a remarkable survival story, but I have to wonder if it wouldn't have been more efficient (not to mention safer) to eat the snow instead...

OMB is likely to be infrequently updated for the next six weeks or so, as I've sold out to the man taken a temporary job doing document review. My schedule has me working at least 12 hours a day, 6 days a week... so when I'm not at work, I'll probably be sleeping... more thoughts on my job coming soon...

Take a second and head over to Jason Christ Superstar to welcome him to the blogosphere.

Google has unveiled a new Google Video service that allows you to search for terms that have appeared in television broadcasts... at least to the extent that they show up in the closed captioning. We've all seen a bunch of priceless errors in closed captioning, so we'll see how effective the search engine is, but for now, I'm feeling wiser to know that doughnuts are featured so prominently in "Everybody Loves Raymond" and the masked wrestling cartoon, "Mucha Lucha."

It's not just another case of the Mondays, according to the BBC...

Misery is expected to peak on Monday, as 24 January has been pinpointed as the worst day of the year. January has been long regarded as the darkest of months, but a formula from a part-time tutor at Cardiff University shows it gets even worse this Monday.

I suspect it'll be especially true in Pittsburgh...

Just when you thought Jesse Orosco would be the last active player from the 1986 World Series, here comes the Oil Can!

Jen pointed me in the direction of this educational website, which hosts some assorted geography games and quizzes. I think I ended up doing better on the difficult African nations quiz than most people would do on their US states. Mostly, I'm just bragging about being a nerd, but it's disappointing that more people don't know where stuff is - even in their own country!

Don't ask how, but this morning I stumbled across a site that tracks celebrity biorythms and allows you to compare yourself to the celebrities (and really any other person, if you hack the URL) for compatibility. From this I have learned that I am 87% compatible with Salma Hayek, 89% compatible with Natalie Portman and 93% compatible with Denise Richards, but only 40% compatible with Osama bin Laden. Sounds good to me!

Somewhere between when I moved out of my last apartment and when I moved down here to Gaithersburg, I managed to misplace my social security card. Right now, the missing card is potentially my biggest hurdle to finding employment because I'll need to fill out an I-9 form for any job for which I would be hired and I would need my social security card to prove that I am eligible to work in the US (no, I don't have a passport). So I went on over to the instructions for getting a replacement card at the socialsecurity.gov website, where I found the following interesting direction for maintaining the integrity of the SSN system:

NOTE: In order to enhance public service and strengthen the integrity of the Social Security Number, the Social Security Administration opened the Brooklyn (New York) Social Security Card Center on November 13, 2002. The center, located at 625 Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn NY, is the only location where residents of Brooklyn - both U.S. citizens and noncitizens - can apply for an original Social Security Number or for a replacement card.

Now I'm not at all familiar with the background of why there's a special treatment from Brooklynites and no one else (although I assume fraud has something to do with it), but it seems strange to me... If someone were willing to put in a fraudulent claim to a social security number, why wouldn't they also be willing to use a false address? Maybe make a trip up to Queens or something and say you're from there? It just seems very arbitrary and perhaps ineffective...