The Celtics of Boston.

It doesn't happen very often but once in a while it does. Either because I'm tired or lazy, I succumb to a sporting event on television. It happened this weekend, twice. The Knicks, the basketball team of my youth were in the NBA playoffs against the great, but aged Celtics of Boston.

"I fear the Indians of Cleveland," the Old Man said in Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea."
"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."
"I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland."
"Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago."

This was to be epic, in other words. Hemingway-esque. My resurgent Knicks of New York against the hated Celtics of Boston.

So I watched.

Watched the Knicks get treated like an old dishrag. Thrown around willy-nilly. Meaningless. Beaten. Trampled. Eviscerated. Schmised.

One thing you see on TV nowadays, however, made me think about advertising. There is an absence of anything but noise. The commercials, the announcers, the arenas. They are noisy. Noise fills every vacuum. The noise overwhelms everything.

Noise is the antithesis of thought. And it's what we prize above all else.