"When masochism's lost its fun..."

Yes, I'm aware I've misquoted the line here, but, eh.

So, spring has sprung, and dumped ten inches of snow on Madison to boot. If I haven't said it already (and yes, I know I have), I'm quite ready for this winter to be over.

Barack Obama has released his NCAA bracket. Call me a cynic, but only a candidate scraping for votes in Pennsylvania picks Pitt to make the Final Four.
Speaking of which, my bracket is officially done for. That's what I get for picking too many underdogs (and the wrong ones, at that), but there's no money involved this year, so I'm not too worried about it. (By the way, I've got Memphis winning it all.)
Back to politics - I'll only say that we've still got a month until the Pennsylvania primary, and all of this down time really forces us to focus on things that don't matter - this is when people like Ferraro and Wright dominate the headlines. Again, it's ridiculous.
I just finished reading Everything Bad is Good For You. It's an interesting read - author Steven Johnson basically argues that today's pop culture is actually making us smarter (whaddya know, I just ripped off the subtitle) - for example, video games are becoming far more intricate (from the simple patterns of PacMan to the sprawling worlds of Zelda), and television is forcing the audience to fill in more of the plot and understand the relationships between characters without actually saying it (see The West Wing and 24). Johnson doesn't argue that books are becoming irrelevant, he just says that society nowadays is too quick to judge the new mass media as "trash" instead of understanding that these new formats are helping us build our brains just as much, which translates to better problem-solving skills in real life.
Okay, so that's it for me.