Good morning Hank; it's Monday. Today's video is like Voldemort's soul: It comes to you in seven parts. Part one: Butler. Hank, my hometown Butler Bulldogs are in the men's basketball final four for the second consecutive year, an astonishing achievement that looked like this at the bar where I watched the game. (Incoherent cheering and screaming, John jostles the camera a lot and screams.) I watched all the previous rounds at home, they mostly looked like this: Matt Howard, your sister is a Nerdfighter, you can hit this free throw, you can! YES! (John sits on Elmo, who says something) You're ruining it, Elmo. You're ruining it. By the way, Hank, Butler star Matt Howard's sister Laura really is a Nerdfighter. Sports and Nerdfighteria, Hank, the connections are endless. Part two: Brandishing. Hank, on twitter Samisemicolon writes “I love when at realjohngreen brandishes random things like black Santas in his videos.” Brandish. Brandish. Brandish! Part three: a definition. Hank, it belatedly occurs to me that some Nerdfighters might not even know what basketball is, so let me define it. Basically there's two hollow cylinders and one sphere and you're trying to put the sphere in one of the hollow cylinders without having it go in the other hollow cylinder. It's essentially participatory geometry. Part four: Finalists. So Hank, this sparkly little number "Will Grayson, Will Grayson," which I co-wrote, is a finalist for the Children's Book Choice Award. Hank, actual teenagers pick the winner of this award, so if you are an actual teenager go to the link in the doobly-do and vote for your favorite book of the year. Also also also I just learned that my new book is definitely coming out in March! Not like, in the next two days, but, you know, we got another March that's gonna come around. That one. Ohhh, I should probably settle on a title soon. Part five: an imaginary conversation with LeBron James. Hi LeBron James, so what do you do for a living? “I insert spheres into cylinders!” Wow, that sounds extremely tedious and probably not very lucrative. “Actually it's incredibly fun and I make millions of dollars.” Huh. I wouldn't have thought that job pays well. Part six: Titles. So Hank, Nerdfighteria generated more than two thousand titles for my new book, many of which were very good, but none of which I'm going to use. My original title idea was to call the book “The Hectic Glow” after the great Thoreau quote “decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish or the hectic glow of consumption”, but the problem with “The Hectic Glow” is that it's like the rural juror of book titles. You say it and people are like “What? The Metric Snow? The Hectic Blow?” I don't want people to think I wrote a book called the Hectic Blow! Then I thought I might call it “Omnis Cellula e Cellula” and the nice folks at Penguin were like, “You know what doesn't smell like a bestseller? Latin.” So I still don't have a firm title. If you have any new suggestions, feel free to leave them in comments. Part seven: “Sports is like life also poop” is a great quote from Esther. Anyway, Hank, I would argue that sports matter. So like if you're really into Harry Potter and you got an email from JK Rowling, that would be amazing, right? Like imagine that moment. That would be a great moment. But for some people those awesome moments are different, like the Cubs winning the World Series or a bunch of unheralded kids from a liberal arts school in Indiana going to the Final Four. Hank, we choose what we care about, and while there are better and worse choices, I would argue that caring about sports has nothing to do with LeBron James or participatory geometry. Ultimately, it's about community. I'd argue that caring about sports is actually a lot like caring about Harry Potter or Dungeons and Dragons or Nerdfighteria. Caring about stuff binds us to the other people who care about that stuff, and that creates the communities that make life worth living. So Hank, that's my defense of sports. Go Bulldogs! I'll see you on Wednesday.