The whole world has gone mad! Not just March Mad but generally mad. People doing ridiculous things that would be extremely newsworthy if it wasn’t for a little basketball tournament that was known as March Madness. Celebrities have gone mad. Sport organization management has gone mad. Governments have gone made. And Gus Johnson has gone mad. Oh, Gus is always that amped up? Well, that’s why we love him.

Speaking of madness, cheap radio show/podcast plug: Our 50th show to air on radio is coming up on March 30th. That’s going to display our complete and utter madness.

Canadian Copyright Laws
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done some proper political bashing on the blog. Figures it would take something as near and dear to my heart as pirating music and video to get me back on my high horse. An NDP MP from somewhere in the nether regions of Northern Ontario introduced a private members bill (a piece of legislation that doesn’t have the backing of the government) that would add an extra tax to electronic devices and media that allow for the reproduction of copyrighted material. Basically, it was going to be a tax on MP3 players, blank CDs, blank DVDs and the like. However, this new piece of legislation would also give private citizens more rights regarding reproduction of copyrighted material. From the sounds of it, if you shared stuff with your friends, you wouldn’t be smacked down by the long arm of the law. Nothing too wrong with that in my opinion. Sadly, I’m much more worldly (and not under the influence of big industry) than the Conservative government. They’re against this bill. They’re trying to make this a tax issue when we know that the real issue is that they’re against lenient copyright laws for Canadians. Anything to help their deep-pocketed buddies in the music industry. They say they don’t want to make it more expensive to buy devices to listen to music but that’s just a lie. They tried to introduce a law last summer that basically said that if you don’t pay for music, you’ll pay the price… IN PRISON. I think we should look at every member of the Conservative government and their families. If there’s even one illegally downloaded MP3 in their family tree, I say we call them out as the hypocrites we all know they are.

Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods, y’all. It’s all good, y’all. Yes, he’s coming back to play in The Masters. Everyone kinda figured that regardless of how much in shambles his marriage was, he’d be playing in the biggest tournament of the year. At the start of the month, it was only a matter of whether he would come back for Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Invitational or The Masters. Because they run a far tighter ship at Augusta and are far less likely to let the riff-raff on to the grounds, Tiger and his people thought it was safer to come back at The Masters. I mean, God (or in Tiger’s case, Buddha) forbid that somebody shouts a fairly good double entendre at him. Something “In the hole!” or “Nice swing!” or “You the man!” have so many more meanings than they did six months ago. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that not only are The Masters cashing in on Tiger’s return but so is one of his (many) mistresses. Pornstar Joslyn James is starting up a website and posting Tiger’s text messages to her on it. It’s called sextingjoslynjames.com. Anything for a quick buck right? Figures that I would say that to describe a pornstar who likely got into the industry with the personal motto “Anything for a quick fuck.” Good play on words right? No… Moving on.

NCAA March Madness
For a post called “Madness,” the first actual reference to the big NCAA tourney comes pretty far down the way. Mind you, I’ve seen more CBI action (or was it the CIT?) than either the big show or the NIT. Of course, that’s because college basketball on the whole isn’t a big deal in Canada. I’ve called Western Mustangs games before with maybe 150 or 200 people for a playoff game. (Granted, the last basketball game I called was the 2009 OUA Championship and that was with over 1000 people crammed into the gym to sell the place out. First time I ever took my jacket off during a sports broadcast. Yes, I dressed up to call games. My old crony, Josh Sweetland, and I were easily the most professional [looking] pair that our station had.) Anyway, I expected to get at least one email about joining a March Madness bracket pool. Then again, I could have scared everyone off by dominating the 2007 tourney pool when I got something like two-thirds of the games right (and everything after the Elite Eight wrong). Anyway, I had a point when I started writing but seem to have forgotten as I’ve gone along and started to reminisce. Basketball as a whole isn’t a big deal in Canada. That’s not a big deal, in my opinion, until we get to the big show. Basketball is a great sport with amped up crowd, everything on the line, passion buckets overflowing, do or die, win or cry. Put your cliché of choice in there but it’s all true. March Madness is a great time of year to be a sports fan. If only Canadians cared about their schools as much as Americans. Then people might care about the CIS equivalent.

Charles Wang
You’ve got to give the New York Islanders owner some credit. There’s nothing he won’t pitch to make himself some money. He’s been threatening to move from Long Island for years if he doesn’t get public money to build a new arena. He fired a very competent GM for his backup goalie who fired a Jack Adams award winner for an AHL coach. Maybe I shouldn’t say that Wang knows how to make a buck but rather knows how to save a buck. So it shouldn’t have been that surprising that his latest NHL idea is ridiculous. He thinks that the NHL should have a single-elimination tournament for the 8th through 15th place teams in each conference for the final playoff spot. He says its a knock-off of the Olympic tournament where the bottom 8 teams played for 4 quarter-final spots. Really, it just makes the regular season meaningless. After the first seven spots are decided, it doesn’t matter how the rest of the season plays out. I think more importantly for Wang is that this gives his perennially hopeless team a shot at making the playoffs every year. Here’s an idea: Hire a proper GM and convince Rick DiPietro to retire to clear up the salary cap situation.

Conan O’Brien
Good news folks. It looks like CoCo is finally coming back to network TV. Rumour has it that a deal with FOX, which has been in the works (on and off) for the last nine years, is almost done. There’s still some due diligence happening on both sides. FOX is trying to iron out details with its affiliate stations so there can be a uniform time across the board when Conan’s new show will air. Team Conan is looking into a studio and if they can even do a show for a reported two-thirds of the budget that they had at NBC. The good news for all involved is that this will be the biggest splash that FOX could make in its charge to seal its #3 spot in the standings ahead of NBC. Let’s face it FOX is killing the peacock. Adding a late night show would just round out its offering to viewers. Meanwhile, Conan is going on tour to pass the time while off TV. Well, pass the time and make money to pay his laid-off staffers that where thrown out on their asses when NBC pulled Conan. And can you think of a better name for any tour than the “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour?” Greatest… Tour name… Ever.

Lindsay Lohan
Yeah, I know I’m beating a(n almost) dead horse with this one but I took last Friday off so give me some leeway. You’ve probably heard that she’s suing E-Trade for naming a “milkaholic” baby in one of their commercials “Lindsay.” Now, Miss Lohan and her attorneys possibly at law are suing E-Trade for $100 Million. Apparently, people only assume the name Lindsay with her. They compare her first name recognition to Oprah, Madonna, and Cher. They left out the part that Lindsay is famous for… People knowing her name? What does she do again? Oh, right. She thought she was a lesbian for a while. Other than being a washed up actress whose career has crashed and burned since Mean Girls, she hasn’t done anything remotely noteworthy. Like I said, she’s famous for being famous at one point in time. If she has an agent, though I severely doubt it because no one could possibly do that bad a job of managing someone’s career, he should get her a reality TV show. People love trainwreck television and there aren’t many bigger trainwrecks than her and her career.

WWE
A funny little story popped up in my RSS reader the other day. Did you know that the WWE Wellness Policy had a little known item that stated that it was illegal for their sports entertainers to hit another superstar in the head with a steel folding chair or other object? Well, neither did anyone one in the WWE. I’m pretty sure I saw at least one solid chair shot during my many WWE pay-per-view reviews and WWE Raw live blogs. The idea behind this provision of the Wellness Policy was to prevent concussions. But my question is how the hell would the WWE have enforced this policy should they have enforced it? If someone missed a chair shot and hit someone in the head, would that have been a real fine? If the script called for a chair shot to the head, would that be a real fine or a kayfabe fine? It doesn’t actually matter anymore because the WWE has quietly removed that language from their Wellness Policy. Well, not before the TLC (Tables, Ladders, and Chairs) pay-per-view which I’m sure involved hitting folks in the head with chairs, launching them head-first into ladders, and slamming them through tables. Of course, this was mostly an unknown and, if known, laughable part of the Wellness Policy until Linda McMahon’s opponent for the Republican nomination for a US Senate seat found it. His team discovered it and now wants McMahon to testify before committees discussing concussions suffered by athletes. It’s almost as if the man doesn’t realize that wrestling is scripted. Is this the sort of man that should be an elected official? Everyone knows that pro wrestling is scripted until something happens that they don’t expect so they assume that it was real. It’s kinda like the press running the story about Vince getting crushed by a part of his set as if it really happened and not as if it was part of a storyline. Who knew that something as simple as pro wrestling caused so much confusion? Then again, all these folks might have some scrambled brains after being hit in the head with a steel chair.