Max-stravaganza

1) The Stress Bracket It's 11:58am.  Like all respectable pools in this country, there is a hard noon deadline.  Maybe you got caught up in work.  Maybe you forgot that March Madness takes place in the month after February.  Maybe you were too busy playing team sports and hanging out with girls.  But somehow you forgot to fill out your bracket. It's a two minute mad cap dash to the Final Four.  Putting together a bracket last minute as though it's a 3000-word college term paper the night before, word-counting every other hour (my name counts as two, right?), messing with Microsoft Word's margins, and even considering adding in a few charts and graphics despite the fact that the topic is "Discuss the role of the individual in Moby-Dick ." Either way, this person fills out a bracket in less than 90 seconds (the aid of a flipped coin determining any close match ups) and then haphazardly hands it in, not even noticing that the seeds in his final four add

My rule of thumb regarding heavy drinking has always been: Go as hard as you want, but make sure that someone else in your party is drunker than you are.  That way, the next morning as your friends decompress the night and tag photos on Facebook, they'll say, "Yeah, you were pretty sloshed last night, bro.  But did you see Reginald?  That dude blacked out, tried to put a bouncer in the figure-four leglock, and then texted his mom to brag about it!" No matter how crazy you acted, no matter how many women slapped you for being sexist, no matter how many off color jokes you told (that you swear are funny but everyone else just didn't understand the context), no matter how badly you wrecked your credit card statement by buying drinks for people you had never met before, you can sleep well knowing that the other guy is going to pull focus. Well, that's essentially Newt Gingrich's role at the GOP debates. *****