Bruce D. Wilner

You name it, I'm into it ... unless it's baseball or such. (If you judged by taxonomizing my library of a couple of thousand volumes, you'd conclude that my primary interests are Judaica; comparative religion; Biblical, Apocryphal, and pseudepigraphical exegesis; linguistics; paleontology; zoology; mythology; Talmud and affine scholiasm; Japanese, Chinese, and Russian history; the history of mathematics; unexplained phenomena and the concomitant paranormalist/rationalist tension; astronomy; and fantasy/sci-fi, particularly vis-a-vis its roots in medieval epics such as the Eddas, the Mabinogi, and the Kalevala.) I can't imagine why otherwise lackluster people with IQs in the single digits engage in protracted analyses of the Sweet Sixteen and the Final Four worthy of publication in the Boston Globe. If they applied that enthusiasm to significant tasks--their jobs, perhaps--they'd have retired as billionnaires decades ago. I've done lots of things in my time: I've been a professor, a consultant, an extreme wiseass (typically--nah, make that always), a serene Biblical scholar, even a (pseudonymous) author of (um, er ... hopping from foot to foot) fantasy lit that appeals to a rather rarefied audience and is illegal in some countries. Yes, I know, that's quite a heterogeneous melange--almost as heterogeneous as the structure of this erst-tight essay!