"I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb -- and I'm also not blonde."

Well, it's that time of year again, when even people who have no interest in college hoops fill out their brackets and those who follow Mizzou or the Illini or SLU are going crazy.

• The odds of a perfect bracket - 9,223,372,036,854,775,808/1 or nine quintrillion to one.
• The FBI estimates that $2.5 billion is wagered on the tournament annually, only 4% bet legally.
• The farther a team has to travel to the Final Four site the worse the odds of winning.
• No. 16 seed teams are 0-92 against No. 1 seeds.
• The term "March Madness" is a trademark jointly held by the NCAA (Brent Musburger becan using the term in a 1982 broadcast) and the Illinois High School Association (who've used the term since the 1940's). In a precedent-setting court case in 1996 the legal concept of "dual-use trademark" was created.
• Last year American businesses lost an estimated $1.2 billion in worker productivity during the tournament.
• Texas-Arlington made the field for the first time in school history in 2008. The team doesn't have a basketball arena or gym - it plays its home games on a theater stage.
• Alex Hermann, an autistic teenager from Chicago, correctly picked all the winners in the first two rounds in 2010. The odds of accomplishing this are one in 13,460,000. It's easier to win the lottery twice. Among his unlikely upsets he correctly picked Northern Iowa to defeat the Kansas Jayhawks & Cornell to knock off Wisconsin.

So, don't feel too bad if your alma mater, a 16 seed, loses to Duke by 38 or that the office nerd, Chester, wins the office pool for the third year in a row. It's March. Let's play!