2017 March Madness Is Finally Here

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and Puff is back with her predictions and analysis on the 2017 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Here are her thoughts:

Sorry, Cats and Cardinals fans. UK and U of L won’t go to Final Four.

Overall, it’s a wide open tournament. There will be upsets. But I’d keep my eye on Villanova and Gonzaga. Gonzaga has two point guards that are really sharp and can shoot the threes, and Mark Few is a good coach. I think he’s got one of his best teams coming into this tournament.

There will be upsets. I think Middle Tennessee can and will beat Minnesota, and UNCW can do the same to Virginia.

And I do think Northwestern can beat Vanderbilt.

Happy bracket picking!

Right and Wrong

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After watching Meet the Press this morning and hearing all the reporters discuss the malaise in the country, they completely missed the point: we’ve removed God from everything and taken morals away. Nobody does any wrong any more.

The media has to confess that they don’t report facts; they report people’s feelings and their own. If we don’t get back to recognizing that we have a right and wrong, we’re only heading down. Right and wrong came from our belief in God. It is through knowledge from God and the Ten Commandments we have morals. Without it, people pursue their own greedy way. The reason for so much dislike of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is that they show no moral principles. Trump is hedonistic, narcissistic and arrogant. Clinton is a seeker of power and money in any form, in any way.

We are becoming a godless society, in danger. Look at the Roman Empire: they were so far flung they spread themselves too thin and were completely without morals.

Chuck Todd and his guests did not once talk about morals, but one on thing we can agree: no matter who is elected, there will be more turmoil. This will go on unless everyone, especially our leaders, recognize right and wrong and truth, which is morals.

I don’t know what all the answers are, but I know there are too many people running around blind-sided. The media must begin to realize what their purpose is, and that is to give the facts, not their opinions. We’ll never know what the true story is unless they do.

And that’s where we are.

 

 

2016 NCAA March Madness Is Upon Us!

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I want my readers to know that I, along with my son-in-law and a few family members, compete in a pick-as-you-go March Madness bracket selection tournament, which means that we select our picks each round. Therefore, I shall be sharing my 2016 NCAA Men’s College Basketball choices after each round.

Here are some initial thoughts on the first and second rounds:

  • I like Xavier but they need to get tougher if they want to win past Weber State.
  • I believe Pittsburgh will topple Wisconsin.
  • Butler beats Texas Tech. [Editor’s note: They did!)
  • Dayton could come up through the Elite Eight. Don’t look past them.
  • The Midwest quadrant is the most interesting in terms of possibility for an upset.

More to come!

 

Thoughts Following Louisville’s Post-Season Ban

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In this time of great moral failures, we again are letting the NCAA, presidents of universities, athletic directors, and coaches come down with all their failures and put the blame on players who had nothing to do with them. The salaries paid to these people show you where all the greed is, as does the failure of the education for a lot of the players. It’s time that we as a people rise up and say, “Change it.”

Don’t hand pick one team here and one team there, hit them all when they have an infraction. Presidents of universities, athletic directors, and coaches all know there is no innocence in any of their three. Our entire society is gutted by this behavior. People have got to stand up and demand good morals.

If you don’t know what constitutes good morals, then you need go back and learn them.

And the media can take a lesson in all this, too. Good journalists always print the facts. They don’t give opinions unless they are trying to write on the opinion page, in which case they state clearly they’re sharing opinion and not facts.

I hope that U of L in their final games goes out and beats the pants of all of them, and leaves them all wondering how good they would have been in tournament play.

Lastly, I will add that I really don’t care who wins the Super Bowl, I just hope no one gets hurt.

Puff On Film

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maxresdefaultIt will be interesting to see who wins Best Picture in all the upcoming awards ceremonies (Golden Globes, Oscars, et. al). With all the pictures that have been made this year, there are two outstanding films that depict truth and they are: Spotlight and The Big Short. I recently saw both.

In both, the actors played their parts so well you forget who they really were. The American public would do well to pay attention to these two movies, respectively the hypocrisy of the Catholic hierarchy and the greed of the banking wheelers and dealers.

These crimes permeate all of society. I hope everyone reading this sees these films and speaks the truth — and acts on it.

On that note, since this is my sports column, now is the time to put your eyes on the basketball season and the big NCAA. With this, we can also look at the college and university presidents who hire these coaches… Again: what is their true purpose?

As Mark Twain is quoted in The Big Short: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

 

Puff On Violence In Sports

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It seems that the public does not invent anything new today; they just recreate the old and put it into new terms. The new little Ceasars are the owners of the NFL teams. The players are gladiators and the college football players take their cue from gladiators in the arena.

The American public feeds on it by purchasing the paraphernalia and worshipping the wrong things in society. The little Caesars know how to reap the profit from it. So wake up, America.

These new helmets will not solve any problems of greed, which is the first goal of the owner Caesars. Leaders of universities and colleges should pay attention to what their first purpose is and not fall into the pattern of the little Caesars.

For the old argument that professional football creates opportunities for people who wouldn’t otherwise have them, what kind of livelihood is it that by the time these players are 35 they have irreparable damage to their bodies and minds? What were they taught in universities, just to be a gladiator? I don’t know of a gladiator in history who stood up and made mankind better. (Spartacus was fiction.)

And the little sub-Caesars are the coaches and their pay, from the pros to the college level. Good sports games are fun to watch and cheer for, but we need to make it look like it doesn’t belong in the Coliseum.

Politics is stuck in a Catch-22

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After I listened to Meet The Press this morning, I could not keep my mouth shut another minute. I could not believe  Chuck Todd nor his guests didn’t see what I heard: the Catch-22 in American politics today.

In 1961, Joseph Heller published Catch-22 and gave us the perfect example of what’s happening now. All political speech today is Catch-22. If you don’t know what it means, go to the dictionary and look it up. [Editor’s note: I’m not linking to it because Puff would like you to look it up yourself and we all do what Puff says around here.]

Politicians speak in Catch-22-ese, so voters don’t get real answers, and that’s why voter turnout is so low. But it’s not just on the politicians. All American people need a course in basic Logic, so they can discern whether something is a contradiction (black and white) or a contrast (grey matter).

We don’t have logic today; we live in Catch-22: politicians don’t want to say anything that someone might vote against, so nobody knows what they’re saying. We need to make people’s brains move a little bit better and argue a point. We need to look at something someone is saying and ask ourselves, “What are the points here?”

This really affects everyone out there who is running for election and all the elections coming up next week. Let’s see if the men and women who are running for office can speak in logical terms on election day.

Correcting Chuck Todd

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While watching “Meet the Press” on Sunday (sitting mere steps from the editor of this blog), NBC announced Chuck Todd would replace David Gregory as its new host. Then Chuck introduced himself. He says he’s here to “interpret” the news.

WRONG.

He’s supposed to present the facts and the different arguments, not interpret them for the viewer. I’ll decide what the meaning is myself, Chuck. You’re not here to tell me how to think about an issue, you’re here to merely tell the information in a logical fashion.

Let’s just see how you do…

Congratulations to Holy Trinity’s 6th Grade Lacrosse Team!

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Holy Trinity Lacrosse victor!

Hats off to a very exciting sports victory today: my youngest grandchild’s lacrosse team in Louisville, Holy Trinity, won the city tournament 9-6! They complete an UNDEFEATED season. Go Lily! Go Eagles!

Pictured from left to right are my other grandchildren, Meg and Ryan. (Not pictured: their coach, my daughter, and Lily’s mom, Julie.) We roll deep!