Strictly For My Sportz Nerdz

This right here is probably the dorkiest thing I've ever written -- a piece for Wired.com about the joys of the do-it-yourself NCAA tournament fantasy basketball league. (Frequent collaborator and MacGyver commish Brendan Flynn is the hero):

We are all grown men: some of us fathers, some with post-graduate degrees, all of us comparatively well-adjusted, some of us smart enough to know that Richmond’s first-round matchup against Vanderbilt looks like a reasonable upset pick. Why were we doing this? Well, the simplest answer is that we are hideous, hideous basketball dorks who happen also to share a taste for fantasy basketball. (Ladies!)

But the more specific answer is that we were having a NCAA fantasy draft because we could. Licensing issues prevent fantasy sports giants from hosting player-driven NCAA drafts along the lines of the average NBA fantasy basketball league, and those sites do plenty well with their bracket-prediction fantasy games. Last year, 4 million people picked a bracket through ESPN.com’s Tournament Challenge, which features some nifty coding, a $10,000 prize for a perfect bracket, and a State Farm sponsorship. In contrast, there are eight of us in the hand-collated NCAA fantasy league run by Brendan Flynn, a doctoral candidate in political science at the City University of New York’s grad center. We’re still working out the corporate sponsorship thing.

I'm happy with it, and enjoyed the experience immensely, as I have enjoyed all my experiences writing for Wired's Erik Malinowski. That said: serious levels of nerderation jumping off on this one. Sports + MS Excel = LADIES!

Our Tricorn Hat-Rocking Right: Now Ruining Vacations

This was inevitable, probably. Once you get enough people to believe that George Washington was somehow a megachurch-y libertarian with a staunch opposition to any taxation at all, the next step is clear -- book a vacation, and just totally ruin things for everybody else.

They stand in the crowd listening closely as the costumed actors relive dramatic moments in the founding of our country. They clap loudly when an actor portraying Patrick Henry delivers his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. They cheer and hoot when Gen. George Washington surveys the troops behind the original 18th-century courthouse. And they shout out about the tyranny of our current government during scenes depicting the nation's struggle for freedom from Britain.

"General, when is it appropriate to resort to arms to fight for our liberty?" asked a tourist on a recent weekday during "A Conversation with George Washington," a hugely popular dialogue between actor and audience in the shaded backyard of Charlton's Coffeehouse.

Standing on a simple wooden stage before a crowd of about 100, the man portraying Washington replied: "Only when all peaceful remedies have been exhausted. Or if we are forced to do so in our own self-defense." The tourist, a self-described conservative activist named Ismael Nieves from Elmer, N.J., nodded thoughtfully. Afterward, he said this was his fifth visit to Colonial Williamsburg.

Salem County stand up! Okay, now please sit back down. You're terrible. Please sit.