March Madness

Don't you love/hate this time of year?

I'm in three NCAA pools, and in one I was virtually locked out by Thursday night, thanks in large part to Alabama.

In the second, I was also hosed after Thursday night, thanks to a whole lot of bad picks.

In the third, I was hanging in the middle of the pack after Thursday, and by Friday night I was the leader (results are updated online). I had a smooth 14 out of 16 on Friday, and I even picked Bucknell over Kansas in the first round, which gave me some extra points. I was perfect in the Albuquerque Region, and I was nearly so in the Syracuse Region, missing only one game in the first round.

By Sunday morning, I was tied for the lead, and had the most potential points remaining. All I needed was for UConn to win (my pick for national champion), and to pick up a couple of lesser games, and I would be in good shape. Among Georgia Tech, Mississippi State, and Southern Illinois, I figured if I got three of three, I'd be a virtual lock to win the pool, and even if I got only two, I'd have a pretty good chance.

Sunday. The Wisconsin and North Carolina games were the only ones I won all day, and I think everyone had NC. So I moved way down the list, and I have no chance of winning the third pool.

An entire weekend of roundball overdose, and all I have to show for it are three pool sheets that have more X's on them than a cross-stitched quilt.

I'm looking forward to baseball season, when my beloved Tribe takes the field on their way to the World Series.

Heigh-Ho! Heigh-Ho! Part 2: E-Mail Hell

It was back to work, part time, on Monday.

It took me three days to get through my e-mail inbox. During my absence, I received mail from 348 people. I saved many of the e-mails, but trashed 1685 messages. That should tell you something about the quality of the e-mails I received.

Relativity

If I were a cartoonist, I'd draw a cartoon with two old men sitting on a park bench, one being Albert Einstein, the other being either Plato or Thomas Hobbes (I don't know what either of them looked like or even if they lived long enough to be old, which is why this cartoon doesn't work without some explanation).

Plato (or Hobbes) would look at Einstein, and say, "So, you really think that everything is relative?"

To which Einstein would reply, "Absolutely!"

The Castle

One of the greatest experiences of my life was seeing the Gerhardstein Castle.

I was stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany for three and a half years in the 1970's. Anywhere I traveled in Germany, I looked in phone books trying to find another Gerhardstein, but never found one. I went to various government offices trying to find any family history I could, but I was always told the same thing: what probably happened was that the ancestor who arrived in America probably was named Gerhard Stein, and my last name was a corruption thereof. Although I did find a fifth cousin of my Dad's in Oberbexbach -- a man named Otto Ruffing -- I had no success in finding a Gerhardstein.

We would go to a rifle range near the town of Gerolstein, about 25 kilometers from Spangdahlem. You may have seen Gerolsteiner Sprudel Wasser (mineral water) in the store, and it comes from Gerolstein. Because I got there by military bus, and our time there was limited to the range, I was not able to explore the town, and in fact I had no compelling reason to do so.

Imagine my reaction when a distant cousin, while traveling in Germany in 1985, found the Gerhardstein Castle in the town of Gerolstein. For 42 months, I had been a half-hour drive from our ancestoral home and didn't even know it existed.

Then, while recovering from back surgery in 1999, I did an internet search of German telephone directories and found a Peter Gerhardstein listed in Wiesbaden. I immediately wrote a letter, and about a week later, I received a phone call from Sandra Gerhardstein-Bishoff, Peter's daughter. (Peter had died several years earlier.) She thought she was the only Gerhardstein in the world. Sandra's English is not great, nor is my German, but we managed to communicate, and over the next several years we swapped many stories and family pictures.

In late 2002, I took a trip to Paris to visit my daughter, who was studying at the Sorbonne. We rented a car and drove to Wiesbaden to visit Sandra, her husband Manni, and her mother Luise. On our second day there, we hopped in the car and drove to Gerolstein to see the castle.

The castle was built on a hill overlooking Gerolstein around 1115, and is little more than a ruin today. No matter. Seeing the ruins and the carved stone lions guarding the castle at the foot of the hill was worth the trip. This is a partial view of the ruins.