This is going to be a freewheeling post.

I'm currently at Hard Times. Came here because it seemed like a good idea in order to try to get things done... but I'm not sure. Mostly I've just been eating.

-There's a guy right next to me, also sitting on his laptop and browsing the internet and such. I feel a kinship to him. Not because he's doing what I'm doing... but because his laptop cord is being held in its socket by duct tape.

I don't necessarily need duct tape anymore, as I went out and bought a new adapter... but still. I know what it's like.

-(The following is sort of sports related, but moreso about the stupidity of... business, I suppose. So you might want to read it even if you don't like sports! Actually... you probably won't.)

So I've been following college football a little bit, and by that, I mean... I watch it on television when I'm at work and there's nothing better to watch on Saturdays. But what's really caught my attention is all the conference wheeling and dealing, where one team leaves to go one conference, and that conference steals another team from another conference, and so on and so on.

So... I've always sort of like geography. And I used to do this sort of thing when I was younger, where I would rearrange sports teams and put them in different conferences/divisions according to the best/closest geographical arrangement. And it used to be this way in NCAA too... SEC was centered in the south, Big East was in the East, and the Big 12 was in the Great Plains/Texas area.

And a lot of conferences are now making plays to become more powerful conferences, usually by stealing from lesser powerful conferences. Which has resulted in the conferences that are now lacking a squad or two scrambling to put some sort of plan together where they can remain relevant in the new landscape (because... remaining relevant=getting an automatic BCS bid, which means more prestige and more money in case you didn't know.) The problem is that all the realignment has gotten so out of hand that the conferences are going WAYYYY out of their regions in attempts to attract schools from thousands of miles away.

The reason for this is I believe is because the regions want to attract more markets. As in... getting a team from say far away Texas is better than grabbing a team from an area you've already established a foothold in. So ostensibly it means more money. But mostly it's just stupid.

So the Big 12 (which currently features 10 teams... while the Big 10 features 12 teams) and the Big East have been the major conferences that have lost members to other conferences. The Big 12 added one team in Texas, which actually made sense... but they've also been trying to add other teams in order to get back to 12 teams (or, to just stay at 10, because there is speculation that Missouri is trying to go to the SEC, which again... is the Southern Conference.) So the teams they have been apparently looking at are Air Force (in Colorado... makes sense), Louisville (more East than any current team, but it's somewhat close), West Virginia (who is currently in the Big East... and possibly also trying to move to the SEC... and does not have any Big 12 team close to them), and Boise State (all the way up in the Pacific Northwest.)

The Big East, however, has just topped that. Apparently they have just extended offers Boise State, Air Force, Central Florida, Houston and SMU (in Texas). The conference, again, is called the Big East. Featuring teams in the Eastern Time Zone (or... you know, teams that are east ENOUGH). Extending invites all the way out to Boise.

There are a couple problems. One, if they accept the invitation, Boise State will have to travel 2000 plus miles for any road game that they have, which would put a small dent mentally and financially. Two, one of the thing that make college sports great is all the rivalries, which (like most rivalries) develops when two teams operate within close proximity of one another. Shoehorning a bunch of non-Eastern teams into the Big East means that there are no regional rivalries that will quickly develop. Three, the cumulative effect of this (if there is indeed a lot more shuffling and teams from other regions get put into conferences in regions outside their own) is that the conferences will begin to lose their own identities... and instead just seem like a random cobbled together group of schools that play each other frequently.

But apparently this is the way the NCAA is going. And it probably won't stop until there's a bunch of 20 team conferences that expand across the entire country. Resulting in Texas playing Indiana every year.

-Did you know that we are currently in the midst of the Oscar season, and that I have seen exactly 0 of the possibly-to-be-nominated movies?

This might be a low for me this year. Although I might change that later this week, cause I'm thinking about seeing Drive and Moneyball. But there are no guarantees that they'll get any nominations either. Unlike The Ides Of March. That's gonna have nominations coming out of every open hole in its body.

I don't know why I haven't gone to see more films out this year. I mean... I do. I have this habit of being into something heavily for a period of time, then moving on to something else. I think in the last year I've been catching up on all the acclaimed television series I missed out on, as well as recently... playing music all the time. But I *could* go see more films. Nothing's stopping me.

I think this has been a problem with me. I'm interested in a lot of things... but I'm not an "expert" in any sort of category. Which means that my film criticism career is dead in the water, my music history interest wanders in and out, and my television screenplays never get finished.

So that's why I float around, I suppose... instead of trying to become better in one single area. But then I suppose I won't derive as much enjoyment out of life. Or maybe I would, cause then I could claim I'm knowledgeable about one thing, instead of merely being not-ignorant in many categories. I don't know.

-I'm probably going to stop writing now.

I have work in less than an hour.