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.

10. In an effort to prove that Kim Jong Il is still alive, his government arranges him as a contestant on ‘Deal or No Deal’.  Kim only wins $500 and subsequently orders the execution of models 21 thru 26.

9. Steven Hawking hosts hilarious ‘Pimp My Motorized Cart’ sketch in SNL digital short with Andy Samberg.  The video becomes the most downloaded YouTube clip of the year.

8. Knight Rider returns to NBC – on purpose.

7. At the Super Bowl halftime show Justin Timberlake inadvertently exposes the bare nipple of Larry King.  The SEC fines CBS a record eleventy-billion dollars.

6. Fox News Hologram of Will.I.Am leads an election night Roddy McDowell-Caesar-like overthrow of their electronic delegate board, declaring half the states won by Obama and the other half forming a new country of Holomerica.

5. Dreamy Anderson Cooper reveals his health secrets: a no-salt diet and sleeping every night on a bed of romaine lettuce.  Sales of romaine spike by 6000%

4. The Hills.  Not the fact that the show is popular, but the fact that this program is just so pathetic.  The water hazard on a putt-putt golf course has greater depth.

3. The Daytime Emmy was awarded to the new “Carrot Top o’ the Morning” talk show.

2. David Letterman rips John McCain for canceling his guest appearance – then Dave goes off the deep end and criticizes the cancelled appearances of John Lennon, former VP Schuyler Colfax and Pliny the Elder.

1. The emergence on NBC’s fall lineup of yet another police serial from Dick Wolf – Law and Order: Crossing Guard Unit.