Last weekend, I settled in for two mostly uninterrupted days of NBA playoff basketball. Then, on Monday morning, I took a photo of myself.

Why? Because I plan on getting deep into this spring’s edition of the NBA playoffs – regardless of how the Blazers fare – for the first time in half a decade and I needed to capture an image of myself as a young man. When the playoffs are finally over, my beard will have turned gray, the wrinkles on my forehead multiplied, my fear of immigrants quadrupled. My emails will be sent from an AOL account and written in all capital letters and I'll begin speaking of little other than the weather…because I’ll be super old by the time these playoffs are over. But hey, at least I might have an RV or a golf cart.

For four days every April, I get hooked on a televised sporting event called The Masters. The sport in question is “goff.” It looks a lot like golf, but according to patrician looking elderly men in green blazers appearing on the Masters television broadcasts, it’s “goff.”

Masters goff is about wealthy young men playing a golf-like game in front of an extremely well-dressed and polite audience in a fairyland setting known as the Augusta National course.

There are two things you can be sure of when you begin penning a sports column, even if most of what you write, like in this column, is intentionally childish, mostly ridiculous and deep-fried in sarcasm. The first thing is, a few people will really like what you write, and maybe a few of them will tell you so. Secondly, a few people will really not like what you’re writing and all of them will tell you about it.

For example, here’s what happened on Thursday:

First the phone rang in our office, as it does at least 10 times a day. Then, someone told me I had a call. I answered jovially, because that’s how I greet the people kind enough to call me.

For all of you who started paying attention to college basketball sometime at the end of February and are getting all pissy because there are two teams from outside the sacred circle of the BCS fraternity in the Final Four, you really need to shut up. Stop calling into sports talk radio shows (no one listens to that stuff anymore), don’t bitch about your bracket in public (everyone is screwed, so don’t act so special) and if it’s that damn hard for you to believe that both Butler and Virginia Commonwealth universities are in the Final Four, you shouldn’t be watching college basketball.

Can you believe these unions? They’re ruining America, y’all! First it was those greedy teachers, who literally make thousands of dollars every year and had to be smacked down by the brave governors of Wisconsin and other states with large amounts of farmland and underarm fat. Then it was cops and firemen and all the other evil people I heard about from that Hannity guy, who literally makes 40 million dollars each year, mostly because he’s not in a union, I guess.

There was one good union in this god-forsaken country, but now that’s been decertified. Go figure. That union, of course, is the National Football League Player’s Association, which has been entangled in a dispute with team owners over the collective bargaining agreement between the two entities. Those owners want to make the NFL schedule two games longer, making for an 18-game season (full of exciting injuries and lackluster back-up quarterback play, no doubt) and the players are all like, “Hells to the no! We ain’t going to smash our brains into each other for two more games. Did you know that some us only make half a million bucks a year? And Peyton Manning only makes $15 million a year, and has to do Oreo commercials to make ends meet.”