Office Pool

I make my living being a sports expert, so when it came time for someone to win the NCAA tournament office pool a year ago, it really shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone here who emerged on top. I'm just pretty good at predicting things. I know, for example, I won't be eating at Tom & Aida's house any time soon. I'm telling you, if someone had asked, I would have told them the Diamondbacks were going to win the World Series, the Grand Rapids Rampage would take the Arena Bowl, and Walter Ray Williams Jr. would roll his way to the PBA National Championship in Toledo.

March used to be maddening for Randy Edgar. When the NCAA men's basketball tournament rolled around, dozens of friends swamped his fax machine with bracket picks for what became known as the "Guru Pool." Duty called, so Edgar worked into the night, transferring picks to an Excel spreadsheet, drawing the brackets and faxing the results to about 40 competitors scattered around the country. The advent of e-mail reduced Edgar's workload, but "it was still horrible," the Oakland resident said.

I hope all of the people who constantly rip Bill Plaschke's ability as a sports columnist took the time to read his March 24 column regarding Connecticut's "Leprechaun," Joe McGinn. For a nice change of pace, I didn't have to read about Dennis Rodman at the top of the page again. Too often, these stories are overlooked. But I hadn't been that teary-eyed since I saw "Life Is Beautiful." Every time I've taken the Huskies in my office pool, they've let me down. This year I didn't even have them making the Final Four.

Jazz artist Joe Zawinul was one of the first people to pop into Robin Rich's mind Thursday after he and 11 colleagues from the Veterans Administration Medical Center won a $16.46-million jackpot in the California Lottery. To celebrate his $1.37-million share of the winnings, the 40-year-old maintenance supervisor from Van Nuys said his first purchase would be a compact disc featuring Zawinul, whom he saw perform at the Hollywood Bowl last month.

It was only seven months ago that Ricardo Velazquez's luck changed his life forever. That's when he won $16.4 million with a lottery ticket he bought at a Santa Ana liquor store. On Tuesday, with tremendous odds against him, the South Orange County resident was hoping to repeat his incredible good fortune by joining the millions of Californians buying chances for what could be the largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history. "I'll call you tomorrow when I win the lottery, OK?"

Let me make this clear to avoid an FBI raid, or a chat with the district attorney at this busy time of year when they're trying to fill out their own NCAA tournament brackets to enter the office pool. I will not be crossing state lines with anyone's money but my own. I have set aside $500, roughly 10% of my salary or so it seems, to bet $10 in Las Vegas on every one of the 48 games to be played during the first four days of the tournament, including a $20 wager on one team to win it all.

Three years after Margaret Hamblin was busted for running a $50 betting pool on football at the Elks Lodge, the 76-year-old grandmother believes she got some justice Thursday when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law reducing the penalty for participating in such office betting contests. The betting pool measure was one of 128 bills the governor signed Thursday as he cleared his desk of legislation that had been delayed as lawmakers grappled with the state's budget problems.

The Gallery column of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Sandbox.com is offering college basketball fans $10 million, and all they have to do is fill out a perfect, 64-team bracket for the NCAA tournament that begins in March. But it will take a miracle for anybody to collect. Mathematicians figure that picking all games correctly is more difficult than winning a pick-six state lottery twice in succession. Even a college basketball expert who can pick games at a 70% clip has only a 1-in-5.

Tenants in the Village Green Office Park said Monday they fear a flock of newly hatched ducklings living in a man-made stream that winds through the complex has perished since the water was recently drained. The business people, who have been putting out bowls and children's plastic pools filled with water for the ducks, said that Greenbrier Properties, the building's management company, drained the stream to clean it and replace a filtration system.

While a number of Times employees are contemplating buyouts offering two weeks' pay for every year of service, they have a much better retirement plan over at Kaiser Permanente in Garden Grove. They hit the lottery last week. Six lab techs and a receptionist each pitched in $3 to buy 21 tickets. Actually, one of them had only $2 and bummed a buck off one of the others. Had I been one of the other six, I wouldn't have let her in on the pot after we won.