#Spring is on the way. Honest. And here's why... #ldnont

April arrives next week, and this morning people living anywhere from Detroit to Toronto awoke to a dusting of snow and the promise of more to come this afternoon. Worse than the snow are the ongoing sub-freezing temperatures, which continue to stiff-arm the arrival of anything even resembling spring.

                  In most parts of the world, the changing of the seasons is a rhythm we expect and rely on in the same way we expect the sun to rise each morning. Our entire society is organized around the seasons, so when winter refuses to leave the stage for spring, we get grumpy. And not just because we’re still brushing snow off our windshields three months after Christmas.

                  Last week, some poor soul was trudging around our neighborhood trying to sign up homeowners for lawn maintenance this summer. That’s a tough sell when you can see his footprints in the snow, tracking from door to door. Sure, we know eventually we might need his services, but the idea of agreeing to spend money on that right now, with mounds of snow still dotting parking lots and cul-de-sacs everywhere, well, that’s a tough sell.

Perfect confluence of sun and snow           Photo: John Barwell

                  Deep down, however, we know the next season will arrive. It may be later than average, it may be wetter or cooler or drier or warmer than we would like or than we think we remember compared to that one year when everything was absolutely perfect, but we never really doubt the next season will arrive. We’ve been conditioned to expect it; it’s happened every year of our lives. So that’s why it’s so amazing to think about everything that had to happen, millions of years ago, to establish season-friendly conditions.

                  There are two factors that create seasons on any planet in our solar system – the shape of its orbit around the sun and the tilt of the planet on its own axis. On the Earth, it’s only the tilt that has any effect on our seasons. Our orbit is pretty close to a perfect circle, which means our distance from the sun varies only slightly during the year. To demonstrate how insignificant the change in distance really is, consider: Earth is closest to the sun during winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

                  Mars, by contrast, is 10 per cent closer to the sun during its summer than its winter. That makes for a serious change in climate. Good luck keeping your lawn watered during a Martian summer. The orbital effect is so dramatic that the atmospheric pressure on the planet is 25 per cent lower in the winter than the summer. That’ll cause some earaches.

                  It may feel as though we have large temperature swings on Earth, but they’re nothing compared to other planets that swing wildly closer and further from the sun. The thing that dictates our temperature changes, and thus our seasons, is the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth on its axis. The axis is imaginary, but the effect mostly certainly is not.

                  Think of the earth as a melon you’re considering buying at the local market – a melon that’s pretty much perfectly round. There isn’t really an axis running through it; you can turn the melon any which way and it’s still a sphere. But you know the seeds are running a certain way, and you cut it open so they run from top to bottom. The Earth’s axis is like those seeds, only they’re tilted 23.5 degrees. So what, you say?

                  That tilt wakes up hibernating animals each spring. It prompts migrating birds to begin their travels twice a year. It delivers the glorious oranges and reds of fall foliage. And it’s the reason we know the mounds of dirty, grey snow all around us will melt…eventually.

                  Millions of years ago, a big rock called Theia slammed into Earth. No one was around at the time, so there aren’t any selfies of people standing near the impact zone. It caused quite a mess, lots of dust and such, the same kind of thing we think spelled the end for the dinosaurs much later. Theia, we think, knocked Earth from rotating straight up and down – along the line of seeds in that melon – to rotating on its current tilt. And ever since then, parts of Earth get more direct sunlight at different times of year. When the Northern Hemisphere is facing the sun, it’s summer up there and winter down under mate.

                  Somehow, among all the billions of planets and stars and dark matter and space dust whizzing through a universe so large it’s nearly impossible to comprehend, we live on a planet tilted at just the proper angle to deliver the same four seasons year after year after year. Somehow, our orbit and distance from the sun are set just right to give us consistent temperatures from season to season. Climate change may be inching those averages up a tiny bit, but stop and think how amazing it is that our summer temperatures this year will be within a few degrees of what they were 10 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago and beyond.

                  This summer may be hotter than average, by what, one degree? On Venus, the daily temperatures fluctuate by more than 600 degrees Kelvin. You’d better take a coat if you go out at night. It’s gonna get chilly.

                  It’s one week until April, and grumble as we might, those of us in this part of the world know spring will arrive in the next few weeks. We never really doubt it will happen; we just complain about the timing. Instead, consider how amazing it is that it returns every year in the same form with the same collection of wonderful sights and smells, as it has for tens of thousands of years.                 

                 It’s worth pondering while you sip a hot chocolate in mid-April, wondering when your tulips will finally poke their heads through the frozen tundra that is your garden. 

Filling out your brackets #marchmadness

Today I heard someone describe the NCAA basketball tournament as the single best sports tournament in the world. It's hard to disagree, especially this week when everyone is eagerly filling out their brackets, picking teams they're vaguely familiar with to beat teams they've never heard of. 

Quick, where (or who?) is Stephen F. Austin? Were there so many Stephen Austin schools that it had to include the middle initial to differentiate itself? And what about Wofford? Who the heck are they? 

None of that matters. We make our picks on other criteria, largely name recognition. My girlfriend, Erin, picks Duke every year because she loves Coach K and the whole Duke aura. It should be said there are plenty of people less enamored with everything Duke who take pleasure in picking against the school. Gonzaga used to be a favorite of many, but it became too popular to continue as a plucky underdog and today is just another team. (As Yogi Berra said about a restaurant in St. Louis, "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded.")

BTW, Erin is off the Duke bandwagon this year, going completely the other way and taking Mercer to beat them in the first round. (Update: March 21 -- Mercer beats Duke! Erin celebrates with multiple fist pumps!)

Speaking of brackets, check out Anne Elk (Miss) and her theory about dinosaurs, courtesy of Monty Python.

I started watching the tournament in the late 80s, with my university roommate Mark. We would stay up to watch the games on tape-delay, the only way CBS showed games on weeknights. You were lucky to see more than one game per night, and if you wanted a bracket you had to hunt for it in a newspaper. No one bothered. 

For the win...Keith Smart from the corner for Indiana

We cheered in 1987 when Keith Smart sunk the game-winning bucket to give Indiana a 74-73 win over Syracuse in the championship game. It was the most exciting stuff we had ever seen on TV.

Since then, the tournament has expanded several times, becoming more of a spectacle with every change. It is too large for a single TV network now, which means you can watch every game if you can carve out the time. And carve out the time people do. Is there anything better than the first Thursday and Friday of the tournament, with 16 games each day, one rolling into another so by sometime around midnight when the last buzzer sounds, you can't possibly remember everything you've seen that day?

You don't have to remember. You can look at your brackets, creased and folded or pristinely blinking at you from a tablet screen. Either way, they track your success and failure while building hope for the next day when your upset picks surely will deliver. 

Everyone has their own way to pick their bracket, including some cheaters who fill out multiple brackets. If the teams are playing one-and-done, shouldn't we do the same? If you're looking for a new way to increase your odds of winning the pool you're in, check out this bracketology approach that emphasizes finding the bargains between favorites and long shots:

Picking a winner like a hedge fund manager

My final four is: Kansas, Iowa St., Arizona and Wichita St. And I'll take Kansas over Wichita to win it all. Good luck to all. Enjoy the games. 

Oh, one more thing: Stephen F. Austin State University is in Nacogdoches, Texas. The F stands for Fuller. And Wofford is a school of fewer than 2,000 students in Spartanburg, SC. 

David Brenner was one of the greatest

David Brenner died Friday, age 78. He was one of the funniest people I ever saw perform.

More than two decades ago, I saw him in Toronto, at a theatre then known as the O’Keefe Centre. There was a musical opening act whom I have long-since forgotten. Then Elayne Boozler came out and did about 20 minutes, mostly about being a single woman with few prospects. “I don’t have a kitchen table. I just have an extra kitchen sink to stand over while I eat.”

Next came Brenner who spent about 90 minutes ostensibly spinning one story – about going to the dentist. Every comedian has done bits about the dentist. Jeremy Hotz has a great bit about the hygienist criticizing his bleeding gums. “Well, maybe if you stopped poking them with those sharp metal instruments…”

David Brenner started talking about the dentist and veered into every facet of life. He was probably just past the zenith of his career, when he was a regular guest host on the Tonight Show, filling in for the oft-absent Johnny Carson. I remember very little of what he actually said that night in Toronto, only that he constructed the perfect 90-minute performance, leveraged on one story about going to the dentist. Most of the audience had forgotten about the set up when he finally got around to the punch line to conclude the evening. It was a master example of writing and performing.

I never saw him perform again, something I now wish I had done.

RIP David Brenner, a very funny man.

David Letterman is still getting it done

I started watching David Letterman in high school, staying up much too late to see the first 20 or 30 minutes of Late Night, seeing what crazy stuff he would pull before bringing out a guest I probably didn’t know.

            Over the years, I’ve continued watching/recording, usually flying through the show in 15 minutes the next morning. I’ll admit, the show is not nearly as inventive as it once was, but I still love those 5 minutes he spends at the desk, after the first commercial break, riffing about anything and everything.

              Although his interviews too often fall back on stories about celebrities’ kids, he’s still willing and able to zing a guest, something he did regularly in the early days.

            Two weeks ago, for no apparent reason, Late Show announcer Alan Kalter did the entire intro in a muffled voice, as though someone had duct-taped his mouth. On other shows – certainly on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show – the camera would have cut to the announcer at some point, and the host would have made some mention of the muffled announcing.

            Not on Letterman. The show has always taken the long way to a laugh and chosen the subtle way over the Leno-esque obvious way. Kalter continued with the muffled voice for the entire show, never indicating why it was happening.

Fallon is immensely talented, but he is continuing Leno’s broad brush comedy, appealing to the masses, crushing nuance and subtlety at every opportunity. It’s just not possible that every story a guest tells is funny enough to cause the host to double over in laughter and pound his desk. We’re a month into Fallon and that move is already tired. He did it for five years from the Late Night desk, so it’s not surprising, but it does draw a distinction between himself and Letterman.

            Jimmy Kimmel seems to be the heir apparent to Letterman, not just because he grew up idolizing him, but because his show and sense of humour is similar to Letterman’s.

            One day soon, Letterman will decline the latest contract extension from CBS, and the countdown to his final show will begin. Then perhaps Jon Stewart will slide over from the Daily Show to take his place.

            I’m hoping that day is still a long time off. 

Getting started

Deep thoughts to come...