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Fifth Friday footnotes, follow-ups and far-flung fripperies:

• NCAA tournament bracketology is a diabolical device to make basketball fans care about every game played. For those of us without a bracket, it’s like a month of 26-hour days.
• “Something wicked this way comes,” said the candlemaker.
• Anyone wearing a hat is telling me more than they think they are.
• I celebrated the Pi Second on March 14 at 4:33:05 PM (3.14159265). When it comes to pi, I’m always thinking about seconds.
• Freezer and trunk: those are my favorite places to put things I want to forget completely about, assuming they won’t fit under the bed or in the back of the closet.
• Of course I’m not including the attic, which is reserved for stuff I want my ancestors to discover after it’s too late.
• It’s sometimes helpful to be reminded that the universe has more at stake in all this than you do.
• The seamstress hired a production assistant, but now she has to sew faster. She has her work cut out for her.
• It seems obvious that Amazon will narrow its HQ2 search to the Washington, D.C. area, so that the capital city, northern Virginia and suburban Maryland (all on the list of finalists) can bid up the incentives.
• Only Groundhog Day celebrates a middle. Six more weeks of winter is meteorologically (if not mythically) accepted, but there is where the beginning ends and the ending begins. Only winter has a halftime show.
• My Tai Chi class lacked enthusiasm. Everybody was just going through the motions.
• Do different bowl shapes have different bowl names?
• Those who wear slippers needn’t carpet the world.
• Are any throes not final?
• President Trump’s supporters are using the word “entrapment” with increasing frequency. What bears repeating bears watching.
• Let’s go ahead and stop adding meaningless preambles to our statements.
• A local physician has noted about his sedentary patients, “Americans don’t wear out; they rust.”
• We get bored before we get tired.
• I’m sorry, but I have to cancel any plans I made with you this afternoon. I have an avocado ripening between 4 PM and 6 PM today and I can’t miss it. I apologize for any inconvenience.
• There’s a bigger version of you that’s trying to get out.
• Truthfulness and honesty — always the same thing or not? Discuss.
• Could our founders have imagined a world where Americans consider themselves consumers first and citizens second?
• The future is much less foreseeable than it used to be.
• My mother loved loved loved Sara Lee pound cake in the early 1960s, but I never learned why. Was it the taste, the convenience, or the advertising jingle?
• A solution often arrives disguised as two problems.
• Facebook gained control over us only after we all added more friends than we could reasonably track. We feel like popular kids — something we and Mark Zuckerberg never were — while Facebook sorts what we see to serve the company.
• Teachers and police are being asked to do more, because parents are able or willing to do less. It won’t end well.
• Homelessness happened when Jimmy Carter lost reelection. His administration began dismantling centralized institutional solutions, but then wasn’t able to replace them with more humane alternatives.
• Politicians are professional people-pleasers. They sometimes become narcissists, but only after adding incumbency or corruption.
• “See above” made sense when priests were reading scrolls, but we still use the phrase in books. Kids these days.…
• The word “supper” connotes sharing. Do you agree? (By the way, “supper” was more popular than “lunch” until 1940. Look it up.)
• Do gluten-free households have breadwinners?
• Belt loops are helpful for so many other things.
• If you like checking expiration dates on your friends’ canned goods, we all wish you’d find a new hobby.
• We thought we found a way around the gatekeepers. Then the barriers fell down, leaving only the gates and its keepers.
• I refuse to use a backpack, except when I’m backpacking.
• Driverless car accidents, data breaches, and social network meddling all point to the same need. Software developers must form an independent Underwriters Laboratory to examine code and give its approval, like appliance manufacturers did with their internal wiring.
• Feeling helpless and feeling helped are weirdly the same.
• If it feels like falling but without a crash, isn’t that the same as flying?
• Who spots trends for you? Who is your near-sighted Nostradamus?
• Some people with good memories just have fewer of them.
• Has Social Security kept our society more secure? Yes, I think it has lived up to its name.
• We should worry less about Artificial Intelligence and more about Artificial Curiosity. Once machines begin knowing what they don’t know, our advantage over them will be erased.
• Why don’t directors fill luggage, handbags, and glasses for actors? Do they think we viewers can’t tell the difference?
• I often felt like I was bringing home the bacon to a family that had gone kosher.
• Resolutions are second solutions — trying again.
• We should have recognized trouble when they added handles to ziplock bags.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs at www.dksez.com.

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