Sorry, Mr. Carlson, but I won't be calling.

You have to wonder about how your day's gonna go when you find yourself about to place a call to the Maytag Repairman. For when I went to feed the kitzels this morning, remembering for once to remove the dry from the dryer, I discovered it chockablock full of wet.  I checked the connections again; when Sears installed the thing a few years back, they refused, for liability reasons, to actually connect any of the venting, so it's always been a bit wonky, and in fact needed a bit of a tweak just last night.  I reset the timer and invoked gods of various religions, and 80 minutes later there was dry where once there had been damp.

I do not rule out the possibility of never having turned the dryer ON last night.

----

That fixed, I shall instead direct my ranting at something I can throw away and carry in a replacement for.

Telephony has improved exponentially in my lifetime. From that single black dial phone, hardwired into the wall, we now have virtual dataports on the desk with tone dialing, multi-number memory, onboard caller ID and even speakerphone capability at a price far less than what my first calculator cost.

So why, I ask the geniuses of Bell Labs, have they been unable all these years to devise a cord that won't thoroughly entangle itself at least three times a week, leaving a length for that One Crucial Call that's barely enough to reach to the outer limits of my chin?

----

You think your team got hosed by the NCAA selection committee?

This particular example is from the somewhat less March Mad world of Division I mens' hockey (aka the "Frozen Four"), but the rules, best as I can tell, would apply in college hoops as well.

Two years ago, one of our local schools, RIT, upgraded their hockey program to Division I.  After an unremarkable debut year, this year's Tigers clawed their way to the top of their conference in only their second year at the highest level, meaning that at the conference championship in their home town of Rochester this weekend, they will play...

nobody.

Under NCAA rules that I cannot figure out for the life of me, teams upgrading from Division II are ineligible for the NCAA tournament in their sport(s) for their first two years at the new level. Conferences are free to invite those teams to play in their own championship playoffs, but due to the potential embarrassment of having to send a loser to the Frozen Four, RIT's conference voted to exclude them from that tournament, as well, even though it (as well as the first round of the NCAA tourney) are being played in Rachacha.

It gets worse.  The players on the RIT team can't even watch the tournaments being played in their own home town, without buying a ticket in like you, me and everyone else. That's because of yet another NCAA rule banning "comps" of any kind.

I wonder if we could sneak them into one of the other schools' pep bands. I'd be happy to lead them in a serenade of the NCAA, by none other than Frank Zappa:

Cause you're an asshole, you're an asshole
(Thats right!)
You're an asshole, you're an asshole
(Yes, yes!)
You're an asshole, you're an asshole
(Thats right!)
You're an asshole, you're an asshole