"How can we cultivate a practice of stealing from the university? Do marooned and resistant communities exist on campus?"

"What do Moten and Harney mean when they recommend theft as our proper relationship to the university? What would this look like in our institutions and disciplines? Where do the undercommons exist or where can it be created? What skills do we need to develop to become thieves? Where would we use stolen and reappropriated resources?"

Things happening around here.

We're #6.

"The Top 10 Law Schools For Best �Social Life� (2015)."

"We never saw, on our monitor, what everybody saw at home, if you can believe that."

Said NCAA head of officiating John Adams.

�I saw it after they had left the monitor, and actually thought about, is it in my prerogative to get up, run over to the table, buzz the buzzer, and tell them to come back and look?� Adams said. �That�s how critical I thought the play was and concluded that this is a job for the guys on the floor. I�ve never done it before. Why would I do it tonight and perhaps change the balance of the game?�

They spent 2 minutes looking at the monitor and they didn't see what we all saw at home?!

I thought the whole point of this boring, game-stopping video review of a call was to save us from having to feel the way we do now � seeing what happened and knowing the call was wrong. They're not seeing what we are seeing?!

"Every summer, a beehive would form behind the backboard."

"Shooting the ball from close meant a close call with a swarm of bees. So naturally, I would shoot from far away, let the ball land, then sprint and go grab it and run back to my spot. Every once in a while, a bee would get me, but it never stopped me from shooting."

From Frank Kaminsky's "remarkable blog," quoted in a Washington Post article titled "Frank Kaminsky, Wisconsin basketball�s Napoleon Dynamite, and the triumph of the goofy."

Madison Easter.

We walked downtown and sat in the Peace Park...



Some shops were open and some were closed. A store with massive quantities of Wisconsin-themed clothes had racks of "Final Four" Badgers clothes but nothing representing tomorrow's game. "Final Four" is so yesterday, but the sales guy said the more up-to-date things are not printed yet. "It's Easter!" he said. Who wants to work on Easter? The skateboard shop was closed:



We pondered whether the skateboard people were religious, since they'd taken the trouble to make a special Easter-themed "closed" sign. There's no inconsistency between skateboarding and religion, but perhaps there's a slight disjuncture between religiosity and the use of the human-adult-sized rabbit character, as President Obama is learning if he's reading his Facebook commenters.

At the square, we sat on a bench near the statue of our Civil War hero Christian Heg, the site of some of our fondest protest-era memories � recorded here and here � and we conversed and people-watched until it seemed as though we were accelerating the process of becoming oldies...



... and we got a couple B-cycles out of the nearest kiosk and biked back home along Lake Mendota, which is exactly what we'd done the day before. But yesterday the lake was still maintaining its ice, in layered shards that looked like solid whitecaps. I should have taken a photo then, because today all that water had assumed the liquid form that gets to hog the name "water."

Beware, Duke.

Beware, Duke. #Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/jRfDuyPclK

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 5, 2015

State Street in Madison.

Pandemonium on State Street but behaved #badgers fans pic.twitter.com/gqBtIDKO4N
� Barry Adams (@madnewsboy) April 5, 2015

Click for more �

The Badgers Caf� is open...

... talk about basketball...



... or the protest panty-liners that are all over town today... or anything else you want.

Go Badgers.

And go Spartans. You know I picked Michigan State and Wisconsin for the final game. I told you that on March 17th:

So I looked at the NYT interactive tool, and I made it so Wisconsin plays Michigan State in final game. I used some sophisticated ranking tools to make that happen.

UPDATE: Victory!

The Oscar Robertson Trophy is badly designed...

... I googled (after seeing the University of Wisconsin's Frank Kaminsky posing with the award as the USBWA's national player of the year). The first hit was � in Sports Illustrated � "The Oscar Robertson Trophy is unfortunately shaped."

More bluntly stated � at a place called The Daily Dot � is: "Oscar Robertson's statue has a big rod going up his butt":

The 76-year-old Robertson is reportedly kind of a grouch these days � but no word yet on what he thinks of the ridiculous statue commissioned to honor Kaminsky's inside game.

"For your master's degree: Name 5 conservative professors at UW-Madison."

Says David Blaska, linking to "The Closing of the Campus Mind" at The Weekly Standard.

I see that, in the comments, a couple people name me and that Larry Kaufmann says: "I'm not sure Ann Althouse qualifies." I agree with Larry. There's no way the University of Wisconsin deserves credit for having "conservatives" by having me. I support abortion rights and gay rights (and have for the entire 30 years I've been on campus). I've never denounced affirmative action. I've written articles in the feminist genre. What is supposed to be conservative about me other than that I have a blog where I take conservative arguments seriously and put them up for discussion and don't kick out the right wingers in the comments but only needle them with questions? To count me as a UW conservative would be to further acknowledge the dominance of the left: I irk them, so I must be what they don't like.

"I�m jealous of the fun Wisconsin is having."

"I love this Wisconsin team so much that I hate them. I hate that they got to go to the Final Four last year, that it was so much fun that all the players who didn�t graduate came back, and that now they get to do it all over again. I hate that they�re taking Final Four selfies, messing with stenographers, adorably embarrassing themselves in press conferences, adorably embarrassing themselves in postgame interviews, growing out their mustaches, and wearing GoPros on their chests. I hate that they (almost) make Bo Ryan likable. I hate that their three most famous fans are a Florida alum (Andy North), a Cal alum (Aaron Rodgers), and an Oklahoma alum (Olivia Munn) who just can�t resist cheering for a team this fun. I hate that this is not only the best player on their team � he�s also the best player in the country.... I hate that all of this is happening with Wisconsin just because it�s not also happening to me. If Wisconsin held an auction in which the highest bidder got to ride mopeds, play FIFA, eat cheese curds, drink Spotted Cows, and do whatever else happens when you hang with the Buzzcuts for a week, I�d bid somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 billion."

Writes Mark Titus.

Aaron Rodgers will pull for any team he wants.

"Rodgers... fired back at critics who questioned his fandom and his being on the court following Wisconsin�s Final Four-clinching victory over Arizona on Saturday night...."

Badgers!

In the Final 4!

That was nerve-wracking.

Celebrating Wisconsin's victory.

"Initially, I began with the intention to soundly roast UW�s diversity initiatives."

"Armed with my frustration, I was prepared to call the Office of the Vice Provost on Diversity and Climate and demand what progress had been made with their lengthy, complex resolutions that, as of yet, have not seemed to make waves of any kind in a long-stagnant sea of overwhelming whiteness.... I can�t commend them for their success, but I also cannot condemn them for what I thought was an apathetic and ignorant attitude toward minority experiences on campus.... However, we need tangible evidence that progress is being made...."

Writes a University of Wisconsin�Madison freshman in the student newspaper.

"Many law school deans, bristling from criticism that they are replenishing their ranks with less academically qualified students as the number of law school applicants has fallen sharply..."

"... began to openly question the mechanics of the bar exam. About 80 law school deans last November jointly asked, for the first time anyone remembers, for details on how test questions were chosen and scored. The situation was already touchy after remarks made the previous month by a top bar exam official, who defended the results as indisputably correct, and then, in what the deans viewed as verbal dynamite, labeled the test takers as 'less able' than their predecessors."

From a NYT article titled "Bar Exam, the Standard to Become a Lawyer, Comes Under Fire," which contains the juicy nugget: "All states but one, Wisconsin, require passing the bar exam to become a licensed lawyer...".

"It is inside that nondescript alumni gym where Frankie Kaminsky � the self-described goofball who still remembers the combination of his high school locker (1-17-49)..."

"... and who tried to catch falling confetti on his tongue like a 7-foot-tall kid seeing snow for the first time after Wisconsin�s Big Ten tournament championship victory � became Frank the Tank, the polished senior scoring, rebounding and assist machine determined to lead the Badgers to a second straight Final Four."

That's just one sentence � diagram it! � in a long NYT article by Jeff Arnold titled "Wisconsin�s Frank Kaminsky Takes Pride in Growing Up."

(Go Badgers.)

Bracketology 101 from the UW's resident bracketologist.

5 points of advice from Laura McLay, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin�Madison. Excerpt:

2. Instead of records, use sophisticated ranking tools. The seeding committee uses some of these ranking tools to select the seeds, so the seeds themselves reflect strength of schedule and implicitly rank teams. But some ranking methods are better than others. I like the LRMC (Logistic Regression/Markov Chain) method from some of my colleagues at Georgia Tech. The RPI (Rating Percentage Index) is a really bad ranking method.

Okay. Whatever that means! I can barely tolerate basketball, the indoor game with unusually large people � men in silky skorts � in a cramped, squeaky place. But: Wisconsin! So I looked at the NYT interactive tool, and I made it so Wisconsin plays Michigan State in final game. I used some sophisticated ranking tools to make that happen.

"Virginia got jobbed when Duke and Wisconsin unjustly stole its No. 1 seed."

A USA Today headline that made me laugh.

The sign says "Memorial Union Terrace/CLOSED/For The Winter" but it's 60� here in Madison.

A man in shorts waits for a lake and a snowball to melt:



Many people have crossed the chain with the "CLOSED" sign, perhaps because the "CLOSED" sign is subject to interpretation � it's not substantively winter � or maybe because they don't care about your signs, man....



And here's another chain crossed:



That little yellow sign says "CLOSED," but come on... you can't close a lake...



Welcome to spring, everybody!