A blue leather suit? I'm there.

During this interminable winter, it sometimes takes a little something extra to get me motivated enough to leave the relative comfort of my office. The best lure would be cold hard cash. However, in the case of the The New York Times, which, somewhere along the line, say 1970, decided that its dayrate was just dandy, has to rely on charm. This time, it was "well, there's this guy who has a blue leather suit." Good enough.
Dolph Pulliam is the voice of the Drake University men's basketball team who, out of nowhere, find themselves in the top 25 and bound for the NCAA tournament for the first time since Mr. Pulliam and the Bulldogs competed and actually went to the Final Four, barely losing to UCLA, in 1969.
As nice as he is tall, Mr. Pulliam did actually show up in his vaunted suit, which is seen as a good luck charm for the team. Now, do I wish it could have been bluer, perhaps even battery-powered? Just like my visions of spring, a boy has to dream.

Aquaman and me

I don't recall any career counselor ever telling me, "Here's a job you'll love. You're going to don a scuba suit with a professional golfer and wallow around in a murky public golf course pond in Wichita. Oh yeah, you'll have to make a nice portrait of him before he strangles you."

Woody Austin, left, is a top-30 PGA golfer who, unfortunately, took a dive into the water when he fell chipping out of a pond at the 2007 President's Cup. His fellow pros and the golf press have since dubbed him Aquaman. He's a good enough sport that we were able to, first, get him into the scuba suit, and, most importantly, get him in the water in public. I think having his wife there to cheer him on helped a lot.