Deep into March and I’m well soaked in basketball. All seems right. I’ve recently made it my business to drag my raggedy butt over to Brooklyn’s Dodge YMCA Saturday mornings to hoop for at least an hour, something I haven’t done so regularly since, well, college. It shows in the jumpshot (and wheezing). And need I mention we are well into March Madness? It hasn’t been a particularly exciting tournament so far, but if you love basketball, several teams have put on some fine displays. Tennessee was looking silky smooth in the first round—a joy to watch, they converted fast breaks and sank jumper after jumper (and here I always thought Tennessee basketball was a girl’s sport). So in the midst of this surging love of a sport I’ve held dear for so many years, I thought I would pick up Mario Hoops 3-on-3. After all, 3-on-3 is my favorite variant of basketball. I’m not the best ballplayer, and keeping track of nine other players running around the court is a lot to ask of my little brain—five I can track. I fingered the DS packaging and thought, “Hmm, this little Mario character and his little game would seem to combine my two current obsessions, basketball and video games. Iconic game, iconic plumber.”

Read the full review on PopMatters

Christmas in Florida, originally uploaded by gtrefry.

There’s a beautiful line in Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Coast of Utopia. The frazzled Russian literary critic, Belinsky, in the midst of ranting lays it out:

When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets is from that moment inevitable.

I can think of no more appropriate words for this Election Day eve. We remain embroiled in an intellectuals war in which reality continues to rebuke the hubris of strong ideas and poor perception.

Florida, originally uploaded by gtrefry.

CNet wrote a nice article about how we’re all geeks here to in New York. So take that West Coast. Apparently there was some question about our technology-loving credentials.

But others insist that people who think New York isn’t a geek’s playground just need to look a little harder. The Big Apple, they say, definitely has its geek crowd; they’re just not as easily defined by their love of technology.

Best of all though, Come Out and Play is beginning to look like an institution. After a recent mention and exhortation for GPS games at next year’s festival in O’Reilly’s Radar blog, we get this nice mention here:

Social tech has expanded beyond Meetup, too. Last month, the Come Out and Play Festival saw Manhattan’s streets as a platform for “big games”: large-scale versions of Space Invaders and Assassins, digital-camera-driven scavenger hunts and pay phone races.

The whole event had its roots in a course taught in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the master’s degree track that also spawned Dennis Crowley’s Dodgeball. And early in October, a whole host of New York techies, including Crowley and Spiegel, gathered for an overnight “un-conference” called BarCampNYC.