march madness (1) and a clarification (2)

1. here's the st. louis region of my march madness bracket. i haven't watched much college ball this year, so it would be a miracle if i nailed many of these games. but not according to the newspaper industry--i was browsing a forum of angry newspaper editors this afternoon, and those crotchety red inksters insisted that there is no room for miracles in the media. writers, get your religious beliefs out of our stories, they cried. this seemed rather excessive to me. i appreciate that a journalist's duty is to report the news and not reflect on it (that's what the quasi-anchors and pundits do), and perhaps we over-use the term in colloquial speech, but as one poster suggested, miracles have been around since chaucer, why should they stop now?

(despite the presence of a few upsets, the closest thing to a miracle in my bracket is the prospective advancement of UNLV into the sweet sixteen.)


2. i hope yesterday's post wasn't misleading. i started the post by describing authorial out-of-body experiences in which writers swap the self for the other and then i concluded with a subtle variation on that idea: rather than dwelling within another soul, my next step is to sample others' experiences and make them my own. thus you won't find me speaking in an unfamiliar dialect or complaining about cramps. i'll still be expressing some sense of myself, but i'll be using new avenues for this exploration. that is, if i follow through and actually write something....

the something that i wrote