10. Your pathological inability to phrase anything in the form of a question.

9. No opposable thumbs.

8. Your name rhymes with Bloaquin Floenix.

7. You keep selecting ‘Nursery Rhymes for $400′ even though it is not an available category.

6. You finished first in your class – in dog obedience school.

5. Your foes that day are Ozymandias and Steven Hawking (so what you will, that Hawking is blitzkrieg on the buzzer)

4. Your entire trivia knowledge comes from the ABC programming guide, 1974.

3. You are a member of the Flat Earth Society.

2. This morning you parked your Geo in Trebek’s personal space.

1. You were selected to appear on “All Dead Languages” week.

10. Instead of handing your wife the baby, you hike it to her.

9. Meticulously measuring everything in the front lawn with 10-yard chains.

8. When your kids argue about who broke the lamp – you go to the replay booth.

7. Due to a naming rights sponsorship deal, your children now sleep in the KFC Bedroom.

6. All family chores are determined by coin toss.

5. Other people’s kids are ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’; yours have ‘intangibles’ and ‘bring a lot to the table’.

4. You wake your wife by yelling “Blue 52, Blue 52!  Robber Cross Tango Fire!”

3. The police issue you a citation for tailgaiting excessively – at the Macy’s President’s Day Linens Sale.

2. You sell season tickets to the bleachers you recently installed – in your bedroom.

1. You’re only human.

So the great hulking beast of March Madness is coming. Don’t be afraid.  Any dangerous situation can be faced head-on if you are properly prepared.

Here are some basic steps to follow for gearing up for the tournament and the inevitable office pool.

First, don’t be frightened by conference acronyms.  You’ll hear people say SWAC and MEAC and OVC – no, these are not neurological disorders.  They are conferences of small schools that will send one and only team to the tournament.  No, you don’t need to know what the acronym stands for or where the teams are.  Just nod and smile.  Nobody expects you to know what conference Vermont or Tennessee-Chattanooga play in.

Second, don’t be afraid of the bracket.  Even the smart people don’t get 75% of the bracket correct so if your picks go poorly, just give the name of the best team you had that lost early and say “Yeah, <team xxx> really busted my bracket up.  I had them going far”.  That way you blame everything on only one team and don’t have to talk about the other 43 picks you also got wrong.

Finally, unless you have been watching games all year you don’t know anything about these teams.  You can do some research at the end of the season to catch up, but that’s like cramming for a final exam by learning an entire semester of chemistry in two weeks – you might pick up a few things to pass the class but nobody aces the bell curve that way.  It’s okay to lose – we all do – just accept and move on.   Remember, in 3 weeks after the tournament is over nobody will remember who picked what teams or why.  It’ll be a faded memory.

I just hope and pray that one day I am famous enough to be interviewed by David Letterman and perform just as well as Joaquin Phoenix.

That ‘Private Practice’ show must really be on life support for ABC to so completely and blatantly lie about the content.

Hey, ABC, when you say that ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and ‘Private Practice’ are having a ‘crossover’ episode, that means characters from both shows interact in some fashion in a combined effort.  It does NOT mean that the 2 hour block ends with one person on one show telephoning a person on the other show and saying “Hello” before fade to black.  What a fraud they are – apparently next week is the real episode.  What a nice smelly load of deceitful garbage – if PP is doing so poorly that ABC’s entire two weeks of commercials preceeding the program must lie about the content, just cancel the damn thing and put on reruns of That’s Incredible.

Nothing inspires faith like those four words.  Even teams like Pittsburgh and Washington who know they will likely lose 95 games still have hope during March and April.  Too bad this doesn’t last all season.

New England 8 to 1, Dallas 9 to 1, NYG and PIT 10, Indy and San Diego 12, Baltimore 14, Ten 16.

At the other end, Detroit and KC are 100 to 1 shots.

So, explain to me how we can have odds for next year’s game already?  We haven’t had the NFL draft yet, coaches and players may change squads, Tom Brady may have Jello for knee cartilage… honestly I’m all for wagering if that’s your ball of fun but how can we think that the Patriots with questions at QB and Dallas in mild turmoil are more likely to win the Super Bowl XLIV than the team that just won?

What a joke.

Watching Bruce inappropriately pelvic-thrust the world’s viewing audience.

10. Due to a scheduling mishap the halftime show is not Bruce Springsteen, singer but instead Bruce Goldstein, CPA.

9. With the weak economy many companies pull their ads and as a result NBC is forced to show 30 seconds of dead air during the second quarter.  Suicide rate quadruples.

8. Pre-game interview with Steven Hawking as he tries to explain why the Steelers only have the logo on one side of their helmet.

7. Scripps-Howard spelling bee winner fails in 3 attempts to spell Roethlisberger.

6. NBC accidentally leaves the 3D special effect on after the half-time entertainment and inadvertently shows John Madden eating a hoagie. In 3D.  Suicide rate quadruples.

5. The game runs long and NBC programmers cut to the scheduled presentation of ‘Heidi’.  When the game resumes, fans are shocked to learn that somehow the Oakland Raiders have won the game.

4. Arizona has zero rushing attempts in the first half, yet still leads after 30 minutes.

3. In a hastily thrown-together press conference Rod Blagojevich complains that he’s not allowed to be Commissioner of the NFL.

2. In a hastily thrown-together press conference Rod Blagojevich complains that his hair is not allowed to be Commissioner of the NFL.

1. What?!  The Super Bowl?  That’s today?  Jeez, you’d think someone would bother promoting the game or letting folks know it was going to be on tv or something.