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• According to Slate, the very first bracket in a sports tournament came in 1851 at a chess tournament in London.
  • With the city hosting the Great Exhibition for British technology, English chess master Howard Staunton set out to organize the world’s first international chess tournament. In order to whittle the 16-player field down to one winner, Staunton decided to make eight pairs, with the losers of each being eliminated from contention. Instead of seeding players to decide pairings (like the modern NCAA tournament), Staunton had each draw a random lot. After the first round, the eight winners drew tickets again for fresh adversaries, all the way to the championship match.
    
• As for NCAA March Madness, here’s a ten-year-old Smithsonian article about it:
  • The first NCAA bracket pool—putting some money where your bracket is—is thought to have started in 1977 in a Staten Island bar. 88 people filled out brackets in the pool that year, and paid $10 in a winner-take-all format. At the same bar, in 2006, 150,000 entered, and prize money exceeded $1.5 million. So much money was exchanged that the federal government took notice, and the bar’s pool went on a hiatus*. But its history serves as a concrete example of the metoric rise in the NCAA bracket’s popularity from the mid-70s to today.
  • Have you ever wondered why the idea of filling out a bracket didn’t start until the late 1970s? Basically, there are two reasons: UCLA’s John Wooden and the structure of the tournament’s complexity.
    • By the 1950s, the tournament included 23 teams and nine byes, making the prospect of filling out a bracket even more confusing than it is today.
    • Through the 1960s and the 1970s, anyone with cursory knowledge of college basketball could predict the tournament’s winner. The UCLA Bruins were the tournament’s masters, winning 10 championships in 12 years, with their first coming in 1964. “The dominance of the Bruins was so powerful that no one was talking about seeding or anything because UCLA always won the tournament, so it didn’t matter where other teams were seeded,” explains Ken Rappoport, co-author of The Big Dance: The Story of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. With the tournament a virtual cinch for UCLA, people weren’t interested in trying to predict how the tournament would go.
    • “It changed for UCLA when John Wooden retired.” In 1975, Wooden hung up his clipboard, but that wasn’t the only major change to the NCAA tournament. The tournament expanded that year to 32 teams, creating a much more user friendly, symmetrical bracket.

• The campaign for Derek Myers, a MAGA-loving House candidate in Ohio, accidentally issued a concession statement four hours before polls closed in the state on Tuesday. “Tonight did not go as we had hoped, but as we know, this race is decided in the primary,” the email read. “I want to give my congratulations to the Congressman-elect. I’m looking forward to uniting behind him and working with him to get President Trump re-elected to the White House and evicting Joe Biden.” The statement was also accompanied by a pre-recorded concession speech in which Myers declares, “As I’ve told everyone on the campaign trail, ‘I’m in my 30s and if I don’t win this race, that’s OK—because I’ve got 30 or 50 more years left.’” The Myers campaign retracted the premature announcement about 10 minutes later, subject line: “DISREGARD CONCESSION EMAIL.” In a followup state

I’m going to be interested in animal behavior. I hear stories of the sounds of locusts or cicadas dying off and about ten or fifteen minutes before totality, the crickets will start, their sound will die off, and then you’ll hear the locusts or cicadas again. If you see a group of birds flying in the 15 minutes before totality, like they look like they’re going somewhere, that’s a behavior. They’re going to their nighttime resting spot.

There’s a great app to help you experience the event, especially if you plan on taking pictures or recording it. Basically, you go to a location, pull out your phone, and hit your GPS location. The app does all the math for you and talks you through the experience. There’s even a practice video for all of you who really like to be prepared.

Solar Eclipse Timer App iOS | Solar Eclipse Timer App Android

This is probably the best review since it compares viewing the 2017 Eclipse without the app and then experiencing the 2019 Eclipse with the app.

• I remember renting the Spielberg film Always from Blockbuster in junior high, really enjoying it, and recommending Dad to watch it before we had to return it the next day. Blockbuster had those two-day rentals. I always thought it was a little sleazy that the day of rental was considered a full day. Anywho, I remember walking to the kitchen. Dad just finished watching the movie. We were always the type to be kind and rewind. Not to mention, we didn’t want to be fined. It was always our habit to rewind immediately after viewing. Dad was shedding a few tears, wiped his eyes, and called me “Boy” like he always did. He said something like, “Boy, you picked a really good movie. It brought back a lot of memories of my flying days. That plane was similar to what I flew in.” Up until then, I had no idea he flew while in the service.
• In case you were wondering, the plane in the film was an A-26 Invader. And here’s another piece of movie trivia for you, it was Audrey Hepburn’s last film.

• C – Training
• Y – Nite Flying
• G – Gunnery
• J – Scout-Patrol Escort
• O – Utility
• V – Instruments

• The High Velocity Aircraft Rocket, or HVAR, also known by the nickname Holy Moses, was an American unguided rocket developed during World War II to attack targets on the ground from aircraft. It saw extensive use during both World War II and the Korean War.
• And they were indeed a part of the PV-1 Ventura: These aircraft could also carry eight 5-inch (127 mm) HVAR rockets on launchers underneath the wings.
• From my understanding, in the military sense, a rocket has to be guided to be called a missile.