I have always avoided those bracket pools in the office; I don't gamble much beyond pitching in on the group powerball tickets and getting up in the morning. So Bracketology has come as a shock to me. Brackets as an assessment technology, brackets about movies, books, whatever! NPR had a nice interview with the authors of
The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything by Mark Reiter (Author), Richard Sandomir (Author), Nigel Holmes (Designer) and I guess I'll have to buy a copy.
QUOTE
Someone asks you, "What's your favorite movie?" Not a deep question, but a probing one, something that comes up occasionally among reasonably curious folk—or men and women on their second date. Your favorite movie is a classic single-question personality profile that "reveals" you, an easy-to-apply litmus test that gives folks a snapshot of who you are or think you are or want the world to think you are. Whether that film is Die Hard or Four Weddings and a Funeral or Top Hat or Grand Illusion or Reservoir Dogs or Persona or Groundhog Day, your answer signals your worldliness and sophistication, your sense of humor, and, most particularly, your individuality. If you're like most people you have a default response that is either The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, or The Wizard of Oz.
But have you ever methodically listed all the movies that have charmed you, or that you've seen more than a dozen times, or that you have on both VHS and DVD formats—and pitted them against each other in an intellectual knockout tournament to determine, once and for all, your definitive personal champion?
What do you think? Did you know all about this and wonder what cave I've been living in?
