Spent this weekend watching NCAA basketball.
Some thoughts:
-Glad to see UCLA squeeze by Texas A&M. Although it seems a number of sports pundits have got UCLA pegged to win it all, the Bruins seem to have some current vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Plus they've gotten some lucky breaks, along the way. I don't know if they can muster their capabilities to be able to beat the other top seeds, if they get to the Final Four, let alone to the round before that.
-Sorry that I missed the 2nd half of the Davidson-Georgetown game. Obviously, a complete turnaround, and I didn't get to see the resurrection of Curry's hot hand.
I wonder how the Wildcats match up against their next opponent, the Badgers. So far, some of the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage is to be found, online, at USA Today. I think I'll check, there.
-I don't do brackets 'cause I never pay that much attention to most of the teams during the regular season -- so how can I figure out who will win and lose during the tournament?
-How much of a factor does good coaching play? Since I don't follow the game, religiously, I don't have a good feel for who are the best coaches and why.
Sort of related to this is wondering how well John Wooden's approach would work in today's environment.
-About a week ago, one sports blog discussed what schools had the hotter cheerleaders, and, therefore, would be bigger distractors to officials.
What strikes me about many of the pictures in that blog and what I've seen on tv, is how unstylish many cheerleading uniforms seem to be, both women's and men's. I'm sure there's been discussion over the years and elsewhere on the web (or "in cyberspace" -- LOL, does anyone say that anymore?).
And yet, there are so many frumpy uniforms that look like they were designed a couple decades ago (if not more).
Lately I've been thinking about magnetic tape preservation. I'd run across an excerpt of an article about baking tapes, written by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead band. It was quoted in the current newsletter of the Annals of Improbable Research, a science comedy e-publication. They titled the item, "Baking by the Dead."
I'm not sure why it's supposed to be funny. Is the title a play on words?
Tape preservation is a serious matter to me, in that I've got dozens (probably more like hundreds) of old reels and cassettes of interviews, actuality (sounds), and air checks. They're mostly of and for my Asian American radio show, Gold Mountain, that ran on WPFW (89.3 FM, Washington, D.C.) from 1980 to 1995.
From my preliminary web surfing, I guess I would need to buy a food dehydrator that would provide an even temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The consumer convection ovens I checked don't seem suitable, in that they bake at higher temperatures.
I need to transfer the recorded content to a more stable, lasting media.
Some of the stuff, recorded on cheap tape and cassettes may not be recoverable. That would be a shame, because some of these people I interviewed are dead or the actualites have historical value.