Tuesday Top Ten: Things I Learned This Weekend

As I said yesterday, it was a great weekend. Kudos to the new TV set-up for the NCAA tournament, with every game being shown on either CBS, TBS, TNT, or Tru. It allowed me to invest the $70 I usually spend on DirecTV's Mega March Madness package in pools. Either way, I'm out $70.

Enough small talk. Here are the top ten things I learned this weekend.

10. Charles Barkley adds nothing to any conversation about college basketball.

9. Istanbul Restaurant at Broadway and Addison is out of business, and A La Turka is under new management and doesn't yet have its liquor license. What fun is Iskender kebob without a glass of Efes and a shot of raki to wash it down?

8. Most of my brackets are screwed -- especially my brackets that had Syracuse over Pitt, Texas over Louisville, Notre Dame over Texas, and St. John's over Kentucky -- but I suppose everyone else's brackets are screwed too. But no matter how bad you might think you're doing, there's someone in one of my pools, I shit you not, who picked Oakland to win it all. He also had LIU in the Final Four. Yet there are still 20 people below him in the pool, including people who had the following championship matchups: Illinois over Michigan, Michigan State over Ohio State, Purdue over North Carolina, Michigan State over North Carolina, Vanderbilt over Syracuse, and Louisville over San Diego State.

7. The United States of America owes me money.

6. Jester got 29 of 32 games right in the first round, which ranked her tied for 492nd on ESPN.com (out of about 6 million) for approximately 16 hours. Never in my life have I had more respect for a woman I've slept with.

5. Without Joe Barry Carroll, Purdue has no chance of going to the Final Four. I guess I've known that for the last 30 years.

4. I might have made the worst picks ever for an 8-person draft pool. Every year, I'm in this draft pool with 7 other guys. We pick teams in snake order. It's standard bracket pool scoring (1-2-4-8-16-24) plus seed. I had the second pick. Here are the teams that I chose, in order: Pitt, Louisville, Georgetown, Utah State, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Princeton, and Boston University. Awful. Why would I ever choose Vandy, even in the fifth round? They never win anything. And Pitt? I put way too much faith in them every year, and they treat me like the rest of the world treats Rodney Dangerfield. Georgetown? What the fuck, guys? I thought you were supposed to play better with Chris Wright.

3. I have absolutely no idea which is a cooler pet: a mini giraffe or a komodo dragon with a cooler in it the side of its body.

2. Daughter's first sentence: "Don't bite." Sadly, she was not talking to our dog; she was talking to me.

1. Two guys I want to party with: Chauncey and Alejandro.