"The Fine Print" #50 -- It's March! Time for madness!

“The Fine Print”, by M.H. Schrader

It’s March! Time for Madness!

(Published 19 March 1997 in the Neighborhood Journal. Posted in toto with Preface 7 October 2002.)

PREFACE -- This column has a very peculiar ending -- it doesn’t have one. The omission was the topic of Column #51.

Well, it’s that time of the year again. March Madness.. But March Madness is more, much more than just a silly basketball tournament. March Madness is a socio-physio-psycho-logical phenomenon afflicting millions of otherwise sane and rational people every year. In particular, every March. And, it’s untreatable.

The first symptoms of March Madness are innocuous enough. A little girl dresed in green or brown comes to the door selling her wares, and, being adults with big hearts, we comment on how precious she is and proceed to buy what we normally wouldn’t buy. “Sure, sweety, I’ll buy some. It’s for a good cause.”

The phenomenon just described is the “Girl Scout Cookie Syndrome”, GSCS for short. GSCS causes temporary insanity, and causes to normally sane and rational human being to do a crazy and irrational thing--spend way to much on a box of cookies. Those afflicted with the advanced stages of GSCS will actually buy multiple boxes.

I must admit, I have advanced GSCS. One whole shelf of my kitchen pantry is taken up with box upon box of Girl Scout Cookies. I won’t pay at the store what I paid the Girl Scouts for a box a cookies. After all, Girl Scout cookies are not inexpensive. But, boy oh boy, they sure are good! So, being afflicted with March Madness, I not only buy one overpriced box, I buy many. And so do many others. After all, what sane, rational adult can say no to a sweet and innocent little Girl Scout?

The weather is a big contributor to March Madness. Don’t like the weather? Just wait a few minutes. I remember a March here in central Arkansas a couple of years back where it was 70 and sunny at 8 in the morning and 40 and raining at 10. These abrupt changes tend to create an overall crankiness, as it makes it virtually impossible to know exactly what to put on when you get dressed in the morning. Either you’re irritable because you’re sweating profusely, as you put on your heavy woolens as you expected Alaska and got Key West, or you’re freezing you’re extremities, as you expected Key West and got Alaska. Or you don’t pack you’re umbrella and suddenly you’re caught in Monsoon Monty. And then the temperature drops 30 degrees. Makes me irritable every time!

And let’s not forget that March Madness also causes grown men to sit in front of the television for hour on hours watching teams that they couldn’t give the faintest hoot about play basketball. Okay, okay, this effect of the Madness is not just confined to March, and it’s not just confined to basketball season. After all, I’m quite sure that there are a lot of men who did watch this years’ Las Vegas Bowl. And there are a lot of men who watch ice motorcycle racing. (Just for the record, if you’ve never seen it, watch it; it’s pretty cool!)

But, in terms of rooting for teams you’ve never heard of, nothing can top the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. Is it my imagination, or does there seem to be whole bunch of UT-Chattanooga fans lately? (How ‘bout them Moccasins!)

After it’s upset of South Carolina, Coppin State became the Cinderella of the NCAA Ball. Think about it, though--with the exception of Tournament time, how many people are die hard Coppin State fans? It may just be me, but I’ll bet that there aren’t too many people who walk into their local Wal-Mart looking for Coppin State merchandise. (Pshaw, I don’t want that Notre Dame junk; I want Coppin State!) I personally do not know a single alumnus of Coppin State To be honest, I don’t even know where Coppin State is. Unless there’s a fifty-first state that I am not aware of (which wouldn’t be surprising, there’s a lot that I am not aware of!) there is not a state of Coppin, at lest not in the United States.

The state of intoxication I’ve heard of. In fact, I’ll bet that many people across this great nation of ours who attended St. Patrick’s Day parties (another type of March Madness) personally visited the sate of intoxication. (We are talking March Madness!) And, I’ll bet many people across our great nation visited the state of anxiety as a result of the visit to the state of intoxication. But, I suspect that nobody visited the state of Coppin.

Saint Patrick’s Day is another March Madness syndrome. On St. Patrick’s Day, everybody claims to be Irish. I knew people named Wasielewski and Vagi and Kowalczyk who claimed Irishness. Of course, it is possible that they did have some Irish in them. After all, Schrader is a very German name, but yet I am one-quarter Irish, thanks to my Irish maternal grandmother. (My other three grandparents were one-hundred percent kraut, which, of course, comes in handy for Maifest and Oktoberfest.)

However, it’s seeing people that you know full well have absolutely not one single solitary blood cell (either red or white or platelet or plasma) of Irish blood claiming to be Irish that makes infection by March Madness evident. After all, there are not any days (to my limited knowledge, at least) when we all claim to be Chinese, African, British, French, Polish, and the list goes on and on. I will concede that there are German festivals--but the Germans don’t confine their celebration to one day; they use two months. (It gives more time to enjoy traveling to other states.) And, at least during Maifest and Oktoberfest you don’t see millions and millions of people dressing up in the exact same color

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