​It’s that time of year again where everybody’s an expert. Of course, this is the NCAA basketball tournaments, women’s and men’s. Everyone thinks they know everything.
 
When, in fact, very few people know anything. Kind of like public policy issues, our nation’s electric grid, how to best reduce global carbon emissions, and, of course, Covid. So many people spewing their opinions…..
 
With the tournament, it’s no big deal. Anyone can watch a lot of basketball games on TV and pretend they know what’s happening. All you need is a mouth to voice what you think, or a bracket to fill out on the screen and you committed to what you “think.”
 
The beauty is that you will be wrong. Repeatedly. Just like everyone else. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
 
Missing one game means you automatically miss the next if you picked that team to go on. The force multiplier means your ability to score goes down with each passing round.
 
Everyone’s opinion on the basketball tournament is valid. One could argue that’s true of other social, policy, political and engineering issues as well, but any sane person understands that experts should be respected in those technical and complicated areas. Many people don’t want to recognize the expertise of those individuals, though, hence the NCAA tournament can fill the void where you can act like the know-it-all about basketball and puff your chest out.
 
Sure, we have people like Jay Bilas, Rebecca Lobo, Pam Ward Seth Davis, Clark Kellogg, Jim Spanarkel, Cheryl Miller, Dick Vitale, Fran Fraschella, Bill Raftery and so many more, who are the “supposed” experts. But, like the rest of us, they get it all wrong. Because hunches, team chemistry, luck, who’s hot and who’s not, an injury, a bad bounce all affect one game, which in turn ripples through the ensuing contests. Their picks are jettisoned, just like ours.
 
When it comes to the tourney, the NBA announcers – Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, et al – drop down to commentate and predict on the college game. More “non-experts” (since they typically don’t follow the college game) telling us what they think. So why shouldn’t we be just as avid about our personal views?
 
It’s gotten dicey in society as more and more people believe from watching TV that they have the solution to a complex societal problem, one that requires research and analysis and deep fact digging. Instead, someone plays a hunch and believes that’s the solution.

That can work in the NCAA tournament, but not in developing electric vehicle reusable refill battery packs. Can’t be playing any hunches there. We need good hard data and facts to ensure the long-term technology is most effective.
 
I think that somehow there’s been a blurring of the line in our public discourse on tough issues where we need to respect those who have the knowledge and wisdom to pull the levers that help us progress as a society. Instead, too many people, IMHO, take a guess, fill out their bracket sheet on the most reliable new electric grid enhancing technology, and think they know what they’re talking about.
 
Respect the experts, because not everybody is one. We have the NCAA tournament to rant and rave. Let it all hang out there. Enjoy it. Yell at the TV. Scream at Charles Barkley. You can get lucky with your picks, just like them.

​My wife and I do a lot of walking. Pretty much every day we take our two dogs on a hike.
 
In the Wisconsin northern environs, when it hits the winter months, it changes where you can go. Some of the paths we like during warmer months are snow-packed and not easily accessible.

Other times, the paths may get icy or the snow so deep that we stick to the side of seldom-driven road. Regardless, winter forces us to adapt.
 
When we moved back north four-and-a-half years ago, this wasn’t something you considered. You settle in, enjoy the seasons, find places where you enjoy walking, and everything is copacetic. Then the winter weather kicks in and you realize you won’t be walking on certain paths for several months.

This past winter was a kicker, and drove this point home. We moved our daily trips with the dogs to different venues to give them variety and let them run. A brutal cold snap made the daily jaunt even more difficult.

Frozen lumpy snow is hard to traverse. It’s that damn simple. Twenty-five years ago, I’m not so sure I would have said that. I might have recognized that it took more effort, but doubt I would have thought about it much beyond that.

Now though, the change in the landscape from the snow is much more of a struggle. First, you try to avoid slipping on icy patches. I’d forgotten the dangers of hidden ice. Quite frankly, falling down from icy strips is probably one of the most problematic challenges you face in the winter.
 
Even if you don’t fall down, once you’ve slipped on a sidewalk or your driveway and righted yourself, but strained a shoulder, back muscle, hip or knee, you get tentative. Every place you take a step, you wonder if there’s ice under that thin veneer of snow.
 
Walking through an inch or two of snow is no big deal. But, if it gets to three or four inches or more, a one-mile walk seems more like two miles. There’s an added huffing and puffing burden as your body works to move through deeper accumulations.

Again, this is something you really don’t think about until you do it, and realize you’re 20 years older than the last time you walked in your boots for three miles through snow on hilly terrain. It’s a workout.
 
Recently we talked about this, as the first days of warmth melted snow, then refroze it, making it lumpy and icy. A few days later it melted some more. Then, whoa, pavement started to emerge on some of the local biking/jogging paths, and suddenly life seemed easier.
 
You felt the smoothness of the pavement. You took steps with authority. You felt confident. I remarked repeatedly to my wife on how much nicer it was to the point where I’m sure she stopped listening to me.
 
It’s not something you typically think about. But when it warms up and you experience the change to smoother, easier landscape to traipse, it improves your mood and motivates you to pick up the pace.
 
Spring just hit us. Not sure it is really spring. False hope hits too often in Wisconsin after three of our nice days. We’ll get more snow, but it won’t stick around. The paths will re-emerge quickly. We’ll walk with confidence and increase our pace and mileage. Small steps of progress, one of my mottos this year.

Dammit, I’m going back to the pencil. That dinosauric instrument. I’ve had it with pens.

For those of you who read this column regularly, you may remember my rant about cheap pens a few years back. I went off on how quickly the ink goes dry. You’re signing a check or some other important document and halfway through your signature the ink disappears.

You go offline and scribble on another sheet of paper to try and get it functioning again. Sometimes, if you circle and circle and circle on the paper, you’ll get another dribble of ink and you think you’ve conquered the problem, only for the pen to cease functioning once you apply it to the real task at hand rather than on the warmup paper.
 
Pisses me off. In essence, that was the column – railing against the pen manufacturers for their cheapness.
 
Going back to using a pencil shows my personal growth. Rather than complaining, I’m choosing the solution. Screw the pen. Give me a pencil.

I already feel slightly less agitated as I write down items with a pencil for our grocery list. Or, jot notes for my next upcoming column. I don’t lose any thoughts in mid-sentence as the ink trails off. Instead, the pencil allows me to put the idea down, write a couple of paragraphs, capture the theme, and give me a close, all while nostalgically making me think of being a child again, when the pencil was the tool of choice before Bic took over.
 
If I’m writing asparagus, paper towels, apples, bananas, yogurt and cerea….. down on the grocery list, I don’t have to worry about the pencil going dry on the “l” of cereal.  If, for some reason, the lead is shrinking, just pull out the other trusty dinosauric instrument – the pencil sharpener. Hum a tune. Sharpen that puppy up. Oh yeah, back to writing.
 
You have to wonder why we went away from the pencil. Did the pen manufacturers put out some conspiracy theory that pencils were dangerous or made you stupid and slow? Who knows?

For some reason, the pen became ubiquitous. It was THE instrument.
 
I remember our dad ALWAYS used a pencil. Not that he wouldn’t use a pen, just that he seemed to prefer the pencil. I can still envision various notes he wrote on yellow pads.
 
The pencil also allows you to erase, which is an additional advantage to going back in time. Embrace the eraser. It allows you to get rid of your mistakes. Might be a slogan in there somewhere.
 
I’ve found an odd contentment lately using the pencil. Knowing that it WORKS. It’s not going to fail me. That gives me a sense of stability. I don’t care when it’s sharper, the tip might break, or the words are written more finely. Just keep writing and the tip will dull and the words get easier to read.
 
Somehow the pencil reminds me of our bodies. You use it regularly, and it remains reliable. Use it a lot, and it wears down a bit. But, if you sharpen it up, keep it in shape, it serves you nicely day after day until it wears down to a tiny nub. That’s when you know it’s had a good life and served well.

​If you happen to play “Words With Friends” on your smart phone, or a similar game that pits you vs. an opponent, you can relate to the singularity of that contest. Recently, I determined there is also a strong component of cooperation involved if the game is to progress satisfactorily.
 
In doing so, it laid out to me those seemingly conflicting ideologies, and how maybe they aren’t so conflicting. Maybe they are complementary. They need each other to succeed.
 
What the hell is the point? Let me explain.
 
In Words With Friends, the goal is to maximize your points in building words, similar to Scrabble, to defeat your opponent. As such, you try to put your opponent at a disadvantage if you can’t build a word. Box them in. Make it so they cannot move.
 
That’s all well and good. Kind of like our political environment in the U.S. Rather than help each other out, there is too much production emphasizing “what’s in it for me,” whether that’s a pet program or something a politician isn’t willing to cooperate on. “Cooperation” is seen as a bad word. Like you sell out your principles.

As opposed to working together to find a solution. Have some give and take. Explore new ideas and options, see how that plays out.
 
In Words With Friends, that concept comes up when the board is blocked, which happens quite often. You’re trying to find a space for a good word that gets you 47 points if you get a triple word score on a specific tile. You can’t play there. You can’t play anywhere using all those delicious letters. Instead, you can make a huge word that opens the board for your opponent, while scoring next to nothing.
 
What do you do?  Do you cooperate? Or do you continue down the path of your individuality to your singular doom, and a score that is so low it causes you to lose?

Choosing to open up the board with a long word that gets you virtually no points, but allows your opponent to capitalize effectively in a couple of spots takes a leap of faith. You must recognize and support that for the good of the contest, you have some moves down the road that will develop because you opened the board up, rather than bull-headedly continuing down the path of five points, seven points, nine points, with no chance to decently grow your score.
Not only must you think differently to be open to this perspective, you also must think longer term in the sense of two or three moves ahead, like we should do in life, or for our elected representatives thinking down the road in terms of where we are headed. Thinking ahead is a good thing.

The game of Chess is another great example of how you may sacrifice a pawn (lower point player) to capture an opponent’s higher point player several shifty moves ahead. “Sacrifice” is another important word. We seem to have forgotten that one a lot, too.
 
It is good to remember the sacrifices necessary for both our individual and collective good as a society. “Sacrifice” and “cooperation” help us progress.