Dear Jim Nantz,

The fact that Jeremy Lamb’s dad as part of VCU, once beat a Calhoun coached team in the NCAA tournament is not in any way a “paradox.” I believe the word you are looking for is “coincidence.”

Also a coincidence: the fact that UConn and Butler played the first two rounds of this tournament at the same regional site and stayed in the same hotel.  You used “oddity” which is closer, but still makes me wonder if you have some sort of mental block against the word that literally means “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection.”

That said, I am amused by how you and your announcing partners gave up pretending both these offenses didn’t suck tonight before the first half was even over.

Love (kinda),

Whitney

P.S. Would you please consider letting Gus Johnson have your Final Four slot next year?  Just think — you could go down to Augusta early, and not be hoarse and half-deaf during the practice rounds.

P.P.S. Dog puns? Really?  You were going to use the same lines for the Butler Bulldogs, weren’t you?

And so another longstanding grudge dies a quiet death ….

Perhaps a later history will view all these as the final gutterings of a spent flame. This is no golden age, and several of its ballets are indeed dead. My own main alarm about ballet — not one that troubles Ms. Homans — is that its dependence on pointwork for women and partnering by men proposes a dichotomizing view of the sexes that is at best outmoded and at worst repellently sexist. Nevertheless, this balletgoer testifies that the scene feels brighter than it did 10, 15 or 20 years ago.

That’s an entire paragraph of Alistair Macauley that not only didn’t make me roll my eyes, it made me cheer at my computer screen.  I have to stop totally hating him now.  Not that he didn’t pull his share of name-dropping condecension in the rest of the review, but he’s no longer completely dismissable as a high art snob.