Find The Madness!

The print and television media are doing an extraordinary job of relentlessly reporting negative economic data ad nauseum. As we pound another piton into our morning trying to eek out shallow victories in the carnage of that day , the news networks remind us that the worst is yet to come.

The Yard suggests that we all divert our attention to the escape and redemption that is March Madness. College basketball will reign supreme for the next month. By April 6, a new NCAA Hoops Champion will be crowned in Detroit. It is quite remarkable that this new champion will be crowned at the city that is the face and ground zero of this unfettered economic meltdown. All of the games are easily accessed from your sofa portal. Heroes are included with your basic cable.

So get engaged with something other than despair, famine and pestilence. Root for unpaid athletes who will perform heroic deeds, cheered on by brightly festooned fans and college coeds. If that is not a place you want to escape to, then by all means tune into the nightly news and remember there is still a seven day waiting period to buy a hand gun.

The Yard applauds the signing of Manny and the Dodger nation has weighed in with a boon in ticket sales and enthusiasm. Frank McCourt impressed us while staring down uber-Agent Scott Boras. Manny playing for a three year deal while playing under the terms of a one year deal is the best of Manny’s.

The MVP of the Lakers this year is Lamar Odom. Kobe is given the rope to do what he does every night. Lamar has to judge the length of his twine nightly in the shadow of Kobe. When Bynum went down, the Lakers could have stumbled like a Celtic sans Garnett. Odom did the brick and mortar work while the Kobe splashed the brilliance. The brick and mortar is required before brilliance can be applied. The Yard loves hard working athletes in the last year of a contract and brilliance always!

The recently released list gracing Pete Carroll as the highest paid employee of a private university in the entire United States did not surprise us. The $4,415,740 million that USC invests in one employee was not that shocking either in light of the local priorities for the myopic. It blew our minds that #2 on the list was Dr. David Silvers of the Columbia University School of Dermatology at $4,332,759. What the hell are they doing at Columbia anyway?

Anyone who is a member of this advertised Clipper Nation, please contact the Yard and let us know where you are hiding.

Commissioner Bud Selig announced this week that as commissioner he had unequivocally eradicated the abuses that he ignored as an owner. Bud is now paid $14 million a year to clean up a mess he helped make.

Let us stay the course, never out kick our coverage and find victories in our daily lives.

“When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” Jacob Riis