Month: March 2006

Having made the brilliant move of picking UCLA to make the Final Four, my ranking in ESPN’s NCAA Tournament Bracket has risen from it’s low of being in the bottom 2.7% to my current ranking in the bottom 16.2%. The meteoric rise from the gutters stops there since I don’t have any other teams still alive and I’ve picked UCLA to lose their next game (to Duke), but at least now I can mock all of those people in the bottom ten percent for their lack of basketball knowledge. Amateurs.

The ongoing series of memorable Audrey-inspired experiences continued this past weekend, with a trip to see Safari Arnie. When she was a kid she was co-anchor on a show called Elementary News, and Arnie was a weekly guest who would show up with snakes and lizards and whales and stuff. We visited him at his home in the hills on Sunday, and it was a pretty unreal experience – walking up to the guy’s house is like walking through a rainforest, with giant palm trees, vines, and even a huge stand of bamboo planted outside. As soon as you enter the house you cross a small river with fish on one side and turtles on the other, and a giant cave bear skeleton stands eight feet tall to greet everyone. He’s got vines, bones, and all sorts of other wackiness on display, and is a really cool guy to boot. There were several highlights to the evening, but foremost amongst them was his story of how a robbery of his home many years ago was thwarted when the six alligators he was keeping in his yard started roaring. I only wish I could make something like that up.

Despite knowing almost nothing about college basketball, I put together an NCAA Tournament Bracket. You can win $10,000 if you guess right, so why not? As of right now, I’m ranked #2,423,844, placing me squarely in the bottom 9.4%. I’m guessing that there’s probably a group of monkeys in the San Diego Zoo, a blind Pakistani two-year-old, and fourteen people currently in persistent vegetative states that are ahead of me…

There is a “Holy Schnike Edition” of the Tommy Boy DVD. It is truly a wonderful world in which we live.

There hasn’t been a lot worth noting lately, although on Saturday Audrey took me out to help with jobs at two of her client’s houses in Malibu. I am forbidden from naming names, but the first house was unreal — huge, tons of land, and a private beach. The guy was turning the basement of a second house into a giant studio, so I got to play lifestyles of the rich and famous while Audrey took measurements and chatted with the recording engineer. The second visit was to another Malibu home to deliver and install some stuff, and we did so while the studio’s owner fooled around on the piano and sang a bit. A cool guy, and a very surreal experience.

My own work is much less interesting at the moment as I’m playing around with a couple of software packages and making some updates to Rod Planck’s web site. The Skipper suggested adding the ability to change the delay in the slideshow in my photo galleries, which is now done — anyone else with suggestions, please let me know. And for no reason at all, here’s another penguin picture: