Brackets

The NCAA men's basketball tournament, aka March Madness, kicks off in earnest with 16 matches Thursday and 16 more Friday. How do you keep up with all the games -- let alone watch them all? Here are some apps to help cope with all the madness. NCAA March Madness Live If you want to watch the tournament from your smartphone or tablet, you can do so with NCAA March Madness Live. The app is free to download and lets you watch games shown on CBS at no charge. Users have to sign in with their cable provider in order to watch games broadcast on TBS, TNT and truTV.

An upside-down American flag is considered a signal of distress. And that's the feeling Robert Rosebrock had when he looked up and noticed the red, white and blue street-lamp banners outside the Department of Veterans Affairs' West Los Angeles Medical Center were in disarray - tattered, tangled around the poles or flapping upside-down in the breeze. "It was disgraceful," said Rosebrock, a 71-year-old U.S. Army veteran who arranged for the flags' installation 11 months ago using $12,000 donated by Metabolic Studio, a charitable arm of the Annenberg Foundation.

Call it the audacity of chalk. President Obama's NCAA bracket is conspicuously devoid of upsets, with all of the top seeds in the college basketball championship advancing to the Final Four. Three of those four No. 1 seeds -- Duke, Pittsburgh and Ohio State -- also just so happen to hail from swing states Obama hopes to carry again in 2012. But the president ultimately picks the team from a deeply red state, Kansas, to win it all, defeating Ohio State in the championship game. "I think that Kansas has more firepower," Obama said of the pick.

Ask Louisville Coach Rick Pitino or Syracuse's Jim Boeheim about Madison Square Garden or Big East Conference founder Dave Gavitt. Even the tight-lipped Boeheim becomes sentimental and is apt to weave a story about a Big East classic. "I would have been happy if someone said, 'Coach, you're going to coach Syracuse and be in this league 10 years,'" Boeheim said. "'We'll give you 10 pretty good years, but that's it.' I'd have said, 'OK, I'll take it,' right then. It just has been unbelievable.

An upside-down American flag is considered a signal of distress. And that's the feeling Robert Rosebrock had when he looked up and noticed the red, white and blue street-lamp banners outside the Department of Veterans Affairs' West Los Angeles Medical Center were in disarray - tattered, tangled around the poles or flapping upside-down in the breeze. "It was disgraceful," said Rosebrock, a 71-year-old U.S. Army veteran who arranged for the flags' installation 11 months ago using $12,000 donated by Metabolic Studio, a charitable arm of the Annenberg Foundation.

After spilling coffee onto my couch, I craved an expedient solution to the bane of small-space dwellers: Where to place a cup of coffee when scanning the morning news? I loathed the idea of a side table with gangly legs. I covet every inch in my 550-square-foot, one-bedroom Los Feliz flat. Solution: Convert a leaded glass window into a shelf/table using wall brackets as support. I wanted the support brackets to be as unobtrusive as possible so the shelf would appear to float.

College of the Canyons will host Moorpark in a first-round game at the Southern California regional tournament of the state community college basketball playoffs Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Canyons (8-2, 19-9 overall) will be representing the Mountain Valley Conference and Moorpark (5-7, 16-10 overall) will be representing the Western State Conference.

Re "Details, Mr. Romney," Editorial, Sept. 11 In reducing tax rates by 20%, the rate reduction is greater for those in the higher brackets. For example, income once taxed at a marginal rate of 25% would be taxed at 20%, while the 36% bracket would go down to about 29%. As for the loopholes, Mitt Romney will have a far harder time getting a fractious Congress to agree on which ones to close if he doesn't identify and discuss them now than he will if he discloses and discusses them now, wins the presidency and has the specific public mandate he campaigned on. Robert Silver Los Angeles ALSO: Letters: Telling a 9/11 story Letters: AEG's hold on City Hall Letters: Breakfast in the classroom

Whether you're constructing a deck, adding a porch or building a gazebo, the job begins with footings that penetrate your climate's frost line. In many cases, a simple posthole footing is ideal. This type of footing is quick, easy and relatively inexpensive. If you plan on an enclosed addition, of course, you'll want a continuous footing that surrounds a crawl space beneath the floor. Anything short of a major structural addition will rest on simple posts and spot footings.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Lorenzo Brown hit three free throws in the final 10.6 seconds and North Carolina State conjured up its glorious tradition with a 66-63 upset of third-seeded Georgetown in a Midwest Regional on Sunday. The Wolfpack (24-12) advance to play the Purdue-Kansas winner on Friday in St. Louis. A lowly 11th-seeded team coming in, they had to survive a furious comeback by the Hoyas (24-9) and only were assured of the win when Greg Whittington's hurried three-point shot from the right wing was off the mark at the buzzer.

Writers from around the Tribune Co. discuss likely upsets from Thursday's NCAA men's basketball tournament. Feel free to join the discussion with a comment of your own. Chris Dufresne, Los Angeles Times There is plenty of potential for busting Thursday's bracket in the 12 versus 5 games, starting in the Midwest with Oregon against Oklahoma State. In fact, I wouldn't even consider this an upset. The Ducks, as Pac-12 Conference tournament champions, should be miffed they garnered so little respect from a selection committee that did not factor how much better they are with freshman guard Dominic Artis back in the lineup.

President Obama correctly picked the winner of the NCAA men's basketball tournament just once during his first four years as president, choosing North Carolina to win it all in 2009. He predicted a better track record in his second term, starting with his choice of Indiana to win it all this year as he revealed his bracket to ESPN on Tuesday. “I think this is Indiana's year,” Obama said. The president chose the Hoosiers, the top-seeded team in the East bracket, to defeat Louisville, the No. 1 seed out of the Midwest, in the championship game.

WASHINGTON -- If the world's major economies had a competition like the NCAA basketball tournament, the U.S. would enter as the No. 1 seed -- but a leading business group said the nation's corporate tax policies would get it bounced in the first round. The Business Roundtable is using the start of March Madness this week to push Washington to reduce corporate tax rates. The group has created an interactive, 16-nation bracket to compare the countries' corporate tax policies. Despite being seeded No. 1 because of the size of its economy, the U.S. gets upset by No. 16 Norway.

The NCAA men's basketball tournament, aka March Madness, kicks off in earnest with 16 matches Thursday and 16 more Friday. How do you keep up with all the games -- let alone watch them all? Here are some apps to help cope with all the madness. NCAA March Madness Live If you want to watch the tournament from your smartphone or tablet, you can do so with NCAA March Madness Live. The app is free to download and lets you watch games shown on CBS at no charge. Users have to sign in with their cable provider in order to watch games broadcast on TBS, TNT and truTV.

Mathematician Tim Chartier has the best job on Earth once a year: when the NCAA men's basketball tournament begins, so does March Mathness. His telephone rings, he's on the radio, he's talking to ESPN, and for once he can explain what exactly he does for a living at North Carolina's Davidson College. “For the first time in my life I can talk about what I'm doing, on a higher level, and people understand,” Chartier said. What Chartier does is use complex math to win the Final Four pool on a regular basis.

Think this is the year you're going to fill out that perfect NCAA tournament bracket? Think again, Einstein. R.J. Bell of pregame.com has released some pretty astounding - hilarious really - bracket facts and figures. There are 9.2 quintillion possible brackets. In long form that's 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. How big is this number? --If everyone on Earth randomly filled out a bracket the odds would be more than 1 billion to one against anyone having a perfect bracket.

Big, burly bodybuilders generally don't do them. Neither do little old blue-haired ladies. Nor does anyone in between. That's because, as strength training goes, the pull-up, the king of the back exercises, is quite difficult. But the benefits of this rigorous, compound body-weight movement -- which targets the latissimus dorsi along with a host of supporting muscles -- are so pronounced for posture, balance, flexibility and overall upper-body strength that everyone should try to do at least one or two at home.

On reading your Jan. 8 editorial ("Saving Social Security: a Role for Stock Funds"), I wondered whether I am the only person in the country who understands that the basic problem with the Social Security system is that the federal government has taken the surplus generated year after year and replaced the cash with an IOU. I knew the interest the fund was credited with was small, but was even further dismayed to find that it is a ridiculous 2.3%!...

I know the look. For the last three decades, every year at this time, I get the look. A friend or family member will slowly approach with a piece of wrinkled paper, a chewed-off pencil and a wistful stare. It's always someone who doesn't follow sports. It's often someone who doesn't know whether a basketball is inflated or stuffed. I know the look. I call it Bracket Eyes. "Hey, can you help me with my pool?" It is a question about the NCAA basketball tournament, otherwise known as This Country's Biggest Sports Event for People Who Don't Like Sports.

  Join Times college basketball writer Chris Dufresne and college basketball editor Mike Hiserman at 11 a.m. today for a live video chat as they discuss the upcoming NCAA men's tournament. As Dufrense wrote on Sunday , "Louisville deservedly and emphatically garnered this year's top overall seeding after elbowing its way to the Big East tournament title. "This turned out to be a not-very-controversial Selection Sunday in a wide-open year when it was tough to find 68 qualified applicants.