NCAA - Day 2

After a lazy Saturday of lunching with Peppas, shopping and then dinner with Danyelle (Jen's college roomie) and David. It was time for more basketball.

Another Walnut Ridgian (Ridger?) came down to our seats during the Texas-Miami game. Jay is the youth pastor at the big rich folks Methodist church in Little Rock. On Thursday, he was sitting in the Rockefeller skybox. Yes, those Rockefellers. They go to his church and had extra tickets, so he was living the high life. On Sunday, he told us nobody was in the skybox. He was up there all alone, so we joined him.



Since none of the Rockefellers were there for the first game, there wasn't any food. Being uninvited guests, we weren't going to order any through the skybox staff because it would be billed to the Rockefellers. So I went over to the McAlister's Deli concession stand for nachos and iced tea. And this leads me to a rant ...

Alltel Arena has 18,000-plus seats. Little Rock is in the South. So who is the moron who decided there would only be two (2) locations in the entire building serving iced tea!?! With fans from Memphis, Mississippi State, Texas and us Arkies just there for basketball, you had an entire building filled with iced tea drinkers. Which is why the lines for tea were always 50 people deep. I stood in line for 20 minutes to get nachos and sweet tea. Ten feet over, you could walk right up to the counter to get a Coke. This is the South damn it, there should be as many tea stands as Coke stands.

Just before the Memphis-Mississippi State game started, some Rockefellers showed up. The teenaged ones. Odd being in a room with a scion of one of the most famous families in the nation. Especially since his allowance is probably more than any of us make per year. Jay, who was leaving for NYC on a mission trip on Monday, was planning to leave at halftime of the Memphis game. So we went back down to our seats. Honestly, while the skybox was nice. We had a better view from our normal seats.



After the game, we drove back to the Fort. Stopping in Russellville to eat at a Ruby Tuesday. Try the mini-burgers, they were good.

NCAA in NLR - Day 1

What a long day. Woke up before 7 a.m. to get down here in time for the first tip.

Luckily, our hotel is two blocks from Alltel Arena. So we were able to check in before 11 a.m., bring our bags up to our room and then walk over for the first two games.

Both were blowouts. Miami roughed up poor St. Mary's in the first game. Then Texas whipped Austin Peay, which I always thought was Austin Pee-ay. Not true. It's Austin P, which is odd sounding when the fans chant "Let's go P! Let's go P!"

Mississippi State slipped past Oregon in a game that was interesting for 3/4 of the time. Memphis toyed with Texas - Arlington. UTA had a Mesquite native in the starting five. But he must have gone to that other school - instead of Brownie's alma mater - because he stunk. A Skeeter would have scored at least 10 points against Memphis.

Photos will be added later. Hope your bracket is doing well.

Avoid Stubhub.com

As many, if not all, of you know, Jennifer is a nut for March Madness. She'll go months without watching college basketball, but when March gets here she's suddenly glued to the TV.

So when it was announced the first and second rounds were going to be in North Little Rock, I knew we were going. Luckily, my name was selected in the ticket lottery and we paid $300 for two tickets in the upper deck.

All was right with Jen's March Madness world (though if she never had to hear Bill Raftery say "with the kiss!" or "Onions!" it would be even better).

Then a friend of mine in central Arkansas tells me he's got two tickets with my name on them ... in the lower deck. I naturally accept his offer.

Our paid tickets are suddenly not needed, so I list them on StubHub.com. StubHub is a very reputable and expansive online ticket broker. No scalping tickets outside the stadium, instead you do it via the Internet and the buyer and seller never meet, speak, e-mail nor even know each other's names.

Our tickets get bid up to $450 on Monday. We've just made a profit on them. That's when the trouble starts.

I log in to my StubHub account and try to confirm the transaction. I get an error message. I call customer service and am told there's no record of the sale at all. They check my account and whoops, there was a transaction. I'm bumped from customer service to a supervisor who tells me in all the years the site has been running, they've never had this happen. And they'll fix it within 24 hours.

In the meantime, I'm getting an e-mail from StubHub on my .Mac account on the average of once every 10 minutes. Sometimes I'll get two in a one-minute span. But I'm averaging six an hour, 144 per day. Each one is exactly the same, telling me to confirm the order ASAP.

I call customer service again, ask them to please make the e-mails stop. At this point, I realize we aren't going to turn a profit (much to Jen's chagrin) because it's too late to do an online sale and ship the tickets to somebody. And since I don't want a "Sports Editor Arrested For Scalping" headline to be in Saturday's paper, I'm not about to work a corner outside of Alltel.

Luckily, Dad's extensive contacts came through. I just unloaded the tickets for what we paid for them (including shipping and handling) to one of Dad's buddies.

The StubHub e-mails haven't stopped yet. I got two while typing this post.