I would have posted sooner, but I have found myself once more in mourning for a tournament bracket sheet that died before its time. It doesn't happen every year (the catastrophic early collapse always happens, just not the reason why this particular year fell apart), but every now and then I talk myself into picking Georgetown to go deep.

I don't know why I do. I hate Georgetown, and odds are, if you know people who went to Georgetown as I do, you probably hate Georgetown too. Georgetown is dick central. Of the 30 or so people I know who've attended Georgetown, I can think of 3 who aren't total dicks. That's certainly not a large enough sample from which to make a reasonable assessment, but then I'm not necessarily a fair guy.

All signs pointed to Georgetown losing early in this tournament. We all know the cliche that March Madness is dominated by great guard play. Georgetown featured the closest thing to an NBA ready big man available to any of the field of 65, but they didn't have an answer for Davidson's quickness and shooting. So now I look like even more of a moron than usual, but I can live with that.

I did want to see what happened when Roy Hibbert got to play against Brian Butch and the Insane Clone Posse that makes up the Wisconsin front line. I know the entire state of Wisconsin is made up of 5 family trees, but these guys look enough alike that I wouldn't be surprised if they came off an assembly line.

On one level, Hibbert should have demolished the Badgers, based on talent alone. However, in the Coach K era in college basketball, sometimes pure talent is more of a liability than an asset. Far more important is the ability to swallow one's pride and sense of morality and hack, slash, hold and flop in the face of superior talent. And that is Bo Ryan's mission statement as a basketball coach. So Wisconsin would likely have won, especially considering they have vastly more experience than Georgetown (Brian Butch alone has been in college for 7 seasons now, after all).

Having my bracket come apart so spectacularly almost took away most of the joy I felt (and (I'm sure shared with all right-thinking Americans) when Duke lost to West Virginia. Almost, but not quite. Seeing Duke bow out this early in a tournament is always good, but it gives me hope that there might be a chance that teams who flop and whine might be losing their advantage with the officials. That said, I am still terrified by the prospect of another San Antonio vs. Detroit matchup in the NBA Finals. But time will tell there...

In other matters, actor Richard Widmark passed away on Monday. And all I have to say about that is who knew he was still alive? I am a big fan of old movies, and I like my fair share of Westerns. But I was never a big fan of Richard Widmark. I suppose I ought to be more sensitive, now that he's dead, but I am an imperfect person.

I also feel compelled to bring this story to your attention, if you haven't seen it yet. A Mississippi man "accidentally" shot his wife while trying to use a .22 pistol to put a hole in his wall during a satellite TV installation. Prosecutors are considering charging him with manslaughter.

Not for a minute is this manslaughter. Granted it's Mississippi and not civilization, but they ought to throw the book at this guy for everything and anything under the sun. I am not a big advocate for gun control, but I do believe in moron control. Only a total jackass would use a gun in a DIY job. So I'm thinking the guy shot his wife deliberately and came up with this ridiculous story under the Sam Spade principle that a sensible story would have gotten him arrested in the first place.

In a sad news item, somebody stole and torched Shawne Merriman's $180,000 Mercedes this week. Isn't that just awful? What's the world coming to when a fine, upstanding young man like that can't trust the rest of the world to respect his possessions? To add insult to injury, the perpetrators stole his wheels (literally) and left it on milk crates before they burned it.

I have to say it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I may have mentioned in this space a time or two that Merriman is a fraud. After having read his official bio on his official website, I think it's time we upgraded Shawne Merriman to archfraud status. I guess one can't expect full disclosure from his own website, but it might have been refreshing to see some mention of Merriman's suspension for performance enhancing drugs not too long ago amid the description of how he became one of the NFL's most dominant (excpet in playoff games) defenders.

All too often, when I mention a story, it's to focus on the negative aspects. But today, I have to praise the courageous leaders of the great state of Maine. No longer can merchants in Maine sell novelty cigarette lighters. This is win-win for the people. First, children can no longer be tempted to play with the lighters and start accidental fires. Second, youngsters will no longer be tempted to smoke to look cool.

Shame on all 49 remaining states who rely on parents and other adults to take responsibility for the objects with which their spawn come in contact. Shame on the leaders of the other 49 states for assuming that their citizens might just be mature and responsible enough to handle decisions like this on their own. And shame on the rest of the nation for being slightly more mature and responsible enough not to be led around by the hand like our neighbors, the Mainiacs.

I know you don't need me to connect you with the news, and it is slightly hypocritical for me to provide this service when I try to avoid news on TV, radio and in the newspaper because it's too damn depressing, but I have two more minor items you may not have noticed. One is sad, the other is ultracreepy.

Al Copeland, the founder of Popeye's Chicken, passed away. This is sad, unless you are a total d-bag and you don't eat fried chicken. Popeye's is much better than KFC, and our world is a little poorer today, losing the man who brought Louisiana spiced fried chicken to the rest of the nation.

And the creepy story...LG is manufacturing a cell phone that feels like human skin. I find that to be beat on a number of levels. First, at this point cell phones can do much more than they should, with the capacity to send texts, photos, videos and play MP3s.

Maybe I'm hopelessly old fashioned, but all I need my phone to do is dial. I hate that I have a cell phone, and if it weren't cheaper than a land line and on very rare occasions useful, I'd throw the damn thing in a river or off the back of some tool's head as though I were a Red Sox fan and it were a slice of pizza.

This story also gives me the heebie-jeebies because it seems to send a message that we are so starved for actual human contact that we might want a phone that feels like a person. Either that or we're trying to get in touch with our inner Dr. Frankenstein. It's not good. In fact, it's quite gross.

So, the NCAA tournament is again upon us. I'm sorry that I haven't been posting much lately, but I haven't really had all that much to say. I'm staying away from commenting on the Celtics because my comments on the Red Sox throughout last season looked fairly ridiculous when October's travesty finally played itself out. And I just haven't really been all that motivated to watch a lot of college basketball these days.

One of the problems, I suppose, when it comes right down to it is that I hate Duke and I hate North Carolina. I just don't want to see either team do well. Nor do I want to see announcers grovelling at the feet of the coaches and players associated with either team. And unfortunately, while one can never escape the latter (especially where Duke is concerned), there was far too much of the former for my taste this season.

And then at the end of last week, Illinois launched an improbable, history making run in the Big Ten tournament. Too bad they fell short, but it was still a great story. And you can tell it was a great story, based merely on the reaction of the Chicago media's one man answer to the bubonic plague, Jay Mariotti.

I realize I spend a scandalous amount of time in a blog devoted (ostensibly, any way) to the Boston sports landscape shredding a columnist from Chicago. But if ever there were a person who deserves it, it's Mariotti. And since not every one has the time to read fine sites like Jay the Joke and Boise Wants Jay, there's always room in this space to let Chicagoans know that a few people on the East Coast feel sorry for what they have to endure.

I've been thinking this for a long time, but I am now just about convinced that Jay Mariotti is the biggest douche in the continental United States. It seems improbable that a moderately trained chimpanzee could spend a decade or so covering sports and manage after all that time to fail to understand why we watch sports. And yet Mariotti has not developed the faintest inkling of the curious appeal that a team like this season's Illini can have over even the most cynical, relentlessly negative, unpleasant people in America (i.e. me).

Illinois had, up until this month began, been one of the big disappointments in college basketball. They could do a few things effectively enough to hang in most of the games they lost, but they didn't do enough of those things well enough to win, or even be a particularly watchable team. And all of that changed this week, at least except the bit about being particularly watchable.

Although, as an aside, I should introduce this anecdote. I have a friend who did a semester abroad at St. Andrews in Scotland, mostly for the academics, naturally, but he managed to get in a round or two of golf. He came back with a term he picked up from the natives to describe what we might call a wormburner. In Scotland, some people call it a Sally Gunnels shot, after some female track star in the distant past. The rationale, as they put it: "She's not pretty but she sure can run."

Leaving aside for a moment that which is Scottish and very likely sexist, that was this season's Illini in the Big Ten tournament. In the words of Victor Frankenstein, it wasn't supposed to be this way, it was supposed to be a thing of beauty. But for three and a half games over the course of four days, Illinois reminded us that we look to sports as the last remaining area where David has a shot against Goliath.

In every other aspect of our lives, some one some where is probably micturating upon you in some sense and expecting you to believe that it's raining. It may be your boss. It may be Uncle. It may be the guy who lives three doors down from you and brings his dog to drop a deuce in your wife's flowers while you're just trying to get some damn sleep. Who knows. But odds are some one in life is making your life more difficult than it really ought to be and you probably can't do all that much about it.

And go figure it had to be Wisconsin who stopped Illinois. If ever there were a team custom tailored to play the modern American Goliath, it's Duke. But Wisconsin's a close second. In fact, I hate the Badgers and Bo Ryan second only to Duke in the NCAA landscape today. And for a lot of the same reasons. Wisconsin players flop shamelessly and whine incessantly.

If they wore blue and white instead of red and white, all Wisconsin would need to play Duke's mini-me is a Coach who looked enough like a certain German dictator to make me think there might have been something more than meets the eye behind the plot of the classic Gregory Peck film The Boys From Brazil. Too bad they have to settle for a cheese ball who looks like a frustrated, failing lounge singer, right down to the lame wardrobe and giant bald spot.

Not so in sports. Every once in a while, there's a team like Illinois that, despite all signs to the contrary, manages to pull off an inspiring run like this weekend's trip through Indianapolis. And when that improbable run occurs, there's going to be some douche like Mariotti out there to try to ruin that for the rest of us. He's the guy who's going to sit through the sub-prime meltdown, the Bear Sterns China Syndrome and the damn recession that's falling down around our ears right now and rip to shreds the few bright spots that might give us a reason to smile for 15 minutes. Even I won't do that/

I guess the lesson here is that if you find yourself on the other side of what the guy I go to for my Red Sox info blithely refers to as "the douche trade" and I'm not standing there with you, you must really be king douche. So once more, congratulations, Jay.

In other matters, I have decided to revive last year's failed experiment. If you want to enter the Sedition in Red Sox Nation bracket challenge and prove that you can pick college basketball games better than a bitter dude whose motivations stem from bizarre, yet deep-seeded, personal antagonisms against coaches he's never met on campuses he's never visited in towns he can't spell, have at it.

Go to this link, and sign up: http://sirsn.mayhem.sportsline.com/e
The group password is s3dition

And I promise to cheat only if I lose.