"The Enlightened Bracketologist"

There are certain books that are just for fun, and "The Enlightened Bracketologist" is one of them. In fact, if there were brackets established for current books that are just for fun, "The Enlightened Bracketologist" would edge out "The Cheater's Guide To Baseball" and move on to the next round.

The editors of this book assume that most things that matter — Bob Dylan cover songs, for example, and conspiracy theories, and plastic surgery disasters — can be bracketized: that is, examples can be placed in competition with each other in an elimination tournament format, so that, for example, the video game Zork beats the video game Doom to face the video game The Sims.

Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir edited the book and filled out some of the brackets themselves. They are sports fans, I guess, because some of their categories are Sports Books, NASCAR phrases, and Meaningless Sports Statistics, in which "driving accuracy" edges out "fumble recoveries." But Reiter and Sandomir care about other things, too, which explains why the book also includes brackets for "Greatest Political Blunders of the Past 50 Years" (George W. Bush goes up against George W. Bush in the finals of this one) and "Women's Undies."

I enjoyed "The Enlightened Bracketologist". So did everybody else in the office. Then we got back to work.