I have a riddle for you. When is a win not a win? When an official goes mad with power, runs amok and ejects the best player on either team with little or no justification. Such was the case last night in Dallas, where the Spurs went into a funk after Joey Crawford kicked Tim Duncan out of the game on a insane power trip and lost to the Mavericks.

After a long silence on the subject of basketball, the Benefactor weighed in on this subject today. Mark Cuban doesn't want you to send him emails complaining about the officiating in the NBA anymore. He wants you to email the owners or managers of the other NBA franchises to stir up grass roots action to change the face of NBA officiating.

Of course, as a blogger who has long been critical of his hypocrisy, I have to wonder whether the Benefactor would have been so quick to bow out because of the severity of any fine the league would levy prevents it from being worth his while had it been one of his players instead of Tim Duncan. I have to think that had Joey Crawford had so much as troubled the serenity of Dirk Nowitzki by mentioning the fact that the German government recently tried to draft a four week old child into its war machine or pointing out that David Hasselhoff's music sucks, the Benefactor would have manned the barricades and screamed bloody murder. But that's just me.

That gets to the root of my problem with the Benefactor. More even than his atrocious personal deportment in the crowd at games, which constantly evokes the image of a spoiled four year old throwing a temper tantrum because another child is playing with his favorite toy, the fact that his concern with the quality of NBA officiating begins and ends with how it impacts the Mavericks.

If Joey Crawford broke a chair over a player from any other team's head, kidnapped his family to force them to participate in some ill-conceived cross-country race or sold poisoned milk to school children, Mark Cuban would keep his mouth shut. But if he misses one call that the Benefactor thinks should have benefited the Mavs, and it's go time. Even if David Stern decided to forgo the standard fine and handed Mark Cuban over to black market organ harvesters to exact punishment, the Benefactor would move heaven and earth to get his two cents heard.

And Mark Cuban doesn't want to be bothered by fans looking for a mouthpiece to articulate their discontent with NBA officiating. It seems like he should have made that call a few years ago, before he set himself up as NBA gadfly to get people to notice him. And if you don't think it's about ego with the Benefactor, then maybe you shouldn't read this little piece about what a tool Mark Cuban is.

I have a solution to his little problem. Email Mark Cuban to complain about NBA officiating. Email him to talk about the umpires in Major League Baseball. Email him to talk about the weather in your town. Email him to ask pointless, unanswerable questions. Email him to talk about sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings as though you were the damn Walrus from Alice in Wonderland. Email Mark Cuban several times a day to tell him no one cares about his opinion on Google and YouTube. Just email him to tell him he's a tool and a hypocrite and wish the Mavericks an early exit from the playoffs when you email him.

I think I have reasonable precedent for this. According to legend, the eminent comedian WC Fields would send Elanor Roosevelt and the IRS letters every day to complain about them. I think you should take the time to complain about Mark Cuban, provided of course that you want to. God knows, if I ever become famous, I'm going to send a letter to remind people (like John Henry, Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino, Danny Ainge, Wyc, Steve, Irv, the rest of Banner 17, Bill Simmons, the CHB, Bob Ryan, Jay Mariotti, Mark Cuban and others) that I don't like them.

Just do me one favor if you decide to email Cuban, keep it clean and don't do anything illegal. And do not under any circumstances send any complaints to the IRS. That sounds like one hell of a good way to get an audit, and I just don't need that hassle.

Tonight, we have a combined tool of note segment and random thing I hate thing segment for the first time ever. They both come out of that colossal waste of time that is the Boston Marathon. While I hate the marathon, it is not the random object of my derision tonight. Instead, that honor goes to the space program.

Space exploration was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be a giant waste of time and money. So what if we got Tang, Velcro and pens that write upside down. I just don't see how that and all the and a little flag on the moon justifies the billions and billions upon yet more billions of dollars of the next dozen generations' money that the government spent on the space program.

Even if there is intelligent life in the universe (based on what passes for it on this planet, I sincerely doubt that intelligent life exists anywhere), I just don't see how sending people up in rockets to do experiments of little tangible value is going to help us here on Earth. So what if aliens invade the planet to probe rednecks or kidnap people or kill us all.

And among all of the colossal wastes of both time and money in the space program, there is this gem. A woman at the space station was tethered to a treadmill to run the Boston Marathon in spirit. And on both Tax Day and Patriots' Day. The Founding Fathers must have been rolling over in their graves. They revolted against a relatively benign tyranny over a 3 cent tax on tea, and now we have a woman in space running on a treadmill at the expense of billions of dollars of public money.

Even better, the woman was running the Boston Marathon in spirit as a gesture of solidarity with her sister. Aside from the gargantuan waste of money, this struck me as a total fraud. First, if there were gravity on the space station, why did they have to tether her to the treadmill? And if there was less than normal gravity shouldn't she have had to run further? And how does it count, even if she'd changed the incline settings at the appropriate times? It's not like she ran real, honest to goodness, no fooling hills in the rain.

And on top of everything else, the woman was a Red Sox fan. There they were on TV, the banners, trappings and paraphernalia of the team I hate as the woman was wasting an entire nation's money in an exercise that was so obviously fraudulent. A perfect storm, in the metaphorical sense, and with no pun on the miserable weather.

As a special bonus, here is a second tool, with a bizarre infatuation for the terribly pointless UPS whiteboard ads.

It's finally happened. I suppose it was a matter of time, but I doubt any one expected it to come so suddenly. After decades of mocking kings, popes, God Almighty and any one and every one under the sun, the Onion has finally brought ruin down on itself. Where will we go to find out what larks Area Man and Area Woman have gotten themselves into this week. A legion of Patriots fans is now gathering. In about three years, after they learn basic navigation and develop opposable thumbs, the Onion is done like dinner.

For those who have not seen the slander most vile, here it is. The very idea that Bill Belichick could muddle his way through any question on any subject is anathema to a New Englander. We know that if this great coach and archdouche doesn't have a home-made particle accelerator somewhere on his fortified residential compound, it's because he lacks the time rather than a working knowledge of advanced multidisciplinary physics. That, and I'm reasonably sure the presence of a particle accelerator on the grounds of the Patriots team facilities would attract a certain amount of interest from several government agencies.

It's bad enough that LaDainian Tomlinson can get away with casting aspersions on the great Belichick. But when the NFL, the US government and all right thinking Americans tolerate a media outlet of questionable repute slandering the man who single-handedly saved the National Football League, I just don't think I can find the strength to go on. Belichick did save the NFL, just ask a Patriots fan. That conversation might get a little murky when you point out that the NFL hasn't faced a grave threat since 1987, but a command of current events and the ability to bring the powers of rational thought to bear on said events have never been the hallmarks of the New England sports fan.

That said, the article itself was a little disappointing. It wasn't very funny, in the first place. I felt they tried too hard to work in the economic angle, any question on any other subject would probably have been more amusing. That's the trouble with satire as a genre, when it's good it's great and when it's even average it's stale and disappointing. But, since I went 2 for 2 last week, I'm feeling arrogant enough to predict these games.

The past record doesn't mean very much when it comes time to lace up the spikes on game day. Neither Manning's long run of failure against the Patriots, nor his recent string of victories in Foxboro will have the impact that the media is giving them right now. As for my feeling, I want both teams to lose. Since that it impossible, I have to weigh my hatred of the Pats against my hatred of Peyton Manning. I simply do not want to live in a world where Peyton Manning is a champion. After all, I pronounced him an archfraud in this space in September. So I'm going with the Patriots.

Then there is this piece I discovered on Slate. If you are wondering why Slate pays people to write about football, or like me you wonder why Slate pays the people it pays to write about football, this will justify your sentiments. First of all, this tool runs down the idea of seeing a playoff game live. I've never seen an NFL playoff game in person, but I think it would easily be the most amazing experience of my life.

The game I saw at Gillette Stadium this season was fantastic. The playoff game which featured the largest single comeback in NBA postseason history (Celtics vs. Nets, 2001) was unbelievable. The overtime playoff loss to the New Jersey Devils (1994) I saw at the real Garden was awesome. I imagine an NFL playoff game would be like all of that combined and then some. I imagine it would rank right behind Springsteen's concert as the most amazing spectacle I've ever seen.

Atmosphere isn't overrated. Sitting in front of your TV, even if it is HD, is overrated. But even worse, this person referred to Shaun Alexander as Gimpy McHalfspeed in an article for which he was paid (in the interest of fairness, I must confess I didn't click that link to find out if it were an original or borrowed name. I was simply too depressed). Would that I were a douche with a prepackaged sense of humor, then I too could be paid for poor writing (and I am aware of the irony inherent in my criticizing another writer when this isn't exactly Charles Dickens).

Then there is this other participant in Slate's dialog on the NFL playoffs. Quick aside: Good call on the dialog format, Slate editors. After all, Plato is still jumping off the shelves these days for other reasons than the simple fact that educators will insist on force-feeding him to generations of people that really don't need it (far be it for me to discount the wisdom of the ancients, I just don't see the brilliance of the Republic, a work which continually runs down Athenian democracy while admitting that the work could not have been composed under any other system). I just don't like Plato, but now isn't the time for philosophy.

According to our commentator, weather will not be as big a factor as predicted. After all, most of the Bears players do not come from Chicago originally. But the Bears do have more recent experience at managing cold weather than the Saints do. Living on the Great Lakes, which tend to be a degree or two chillier than the Gulf Coast, and playing in Soldier Field (which is outdoors, and as such slightly cooler and a bit more windy than your average dome) might give them a slight edge over a team which comes from 1,000 miles to the South and is still practicing indoors.

In the end, I think the weather will give the Bears a slight edge, but one that will matter very little if they can't keep Deuce McAllister in check. I think the Bears will win the game. I see NO as somewhat better on offense than Seatlle and not quite as good on defense. As long as Rex doesn't make stupid mistakes, I think we're looking at a rematch.

In the Super Bowl, I see Kraft and Belichick using the two week layoff to pressure Dolphins management into converting the field format in another sad psychological ploy.