Cinderella has entered the building

Ozzie is back in town, and he promptly plopped himself down in front of the television for four days of basketball watching. I knew there was a reason I liked that man. Plenty of couch sittin' and commercial watchin' to go 'round.

Normally, I don't pay much attention to the games. If I'm going to be watching 10 hours of commercials, I have to rest my eyes at some point. But this year was different cuz most of the games were exciting. I mean who wouldn't want to watch Bucknell beat up on bad old Kansas? I'm not entirely sure what a Catamount is, but I sure was pulling for Vermont to defeat Syrcause. For the next week, UW-Milwaukee is my favorite school.

The one thing I don't understand is why the coaches get so worked up and start jumping around and yelling and behaving like a chicken with its head cut off. The coach isn't playing, so what good is all the arm flapping? The players are trying to impress NBA scouts and bring childhood dreams of a national title to fruition, so they're playing hard. Even if players were loafing, the arenas have 15,000 screaming fans, what difference does one coach make in the energy boostin' department?

Now, if I were coaching a basketball game, I would just sit on the bench looking cool and calm. Let the players think I'm in control (even though I don't know the first thing about basketball). Say, "Chill, baby. This ain't nothing you haven't done 75,000 times before." Working through that triple negative will get them to relax and reflect and ignore the crowd noise. Use a double negative and the players will just think coach Goofball is ignorant. Use a triple negative and they know I'm playing mind games with them and that we're gonna win. Let the assistants run the players through drills and draw up X's and O's -- the Goofball's job is to look composed and in charge of the ensuing drama.

Unfortunately, the commercials didn't quite match the drama of the basketball games. I like the taste loss ads. Now, I don't drink beer or even have taste buds, but the Goofball can appreciate finely tuned satire of pharmaceutical ads. "Didn't the government eliminate taste loss in the 1950s?" Ain't nothing better than a high concept faithfully executed. The rest of the ads? Blah. The most disturbing ad is that freak wearing a bear suit talking about salmon spawning. Dude is giving bears a bad name. He's not cuddly; he's just fat and bloated. He's not clever; he's smug and annoying. The only virtue that actor in the bear suit possesses is that he was probably cheap to hire. Well, if they wanted cheap, they shoulda hired me. I'd be in a commercial for free, as long as it wasn't degrading towards bears or women or the Chinese factories that make teddy bears. And I wouldn't want to get dirty, because then I'd have to take a bath. I wouldn't demand a trailer either, a director's chair would suffice. A director's chair with my name on the back of it would be pretty sweet, actually. Forget acting, I should direct the commercials. Directing is a lot like coaching basketball: just sit back and say, "Chill, baby. This ain't nothing you haven't done 75,000 times before."

Only problem is that I'm not sure actors are smart enough to work through the triple negative.