One reason why it's easier than ever to be an American living in a foreign country:

March Madness On Demand. (www.ncaasports.com/mmod)

Listen, I feel confident saying that, at least until the next annual Apple convention, the NCAA Tournament is the best thing humans have ever invented. Sliced bread used to be No. 1, perhaps, but then the tourney came along and vanquished it like some trembling 16th seed.

But every year, watching the tournament presents a couple problems. CBS sometimes sticks you with the local games when, somewhere far away, a No. 2 seed is fighting for survival in overtime. Or, sometimes, you've got two games racing simultaneously to the wire, and you're left only to follow one of them in that translucent grayish box on the corner of your TV screen.

Maybe you've suspected that we deserve better.

The solution is here. March Madness On Demand allows anybody -- even blokes in Australia -- to call up a real time NCAA scoreboard and click, instantaneously, on whatever game suits the fancy. You can get Craig Bollerjack one moment, Gus Johnson the next. You can spend four straight games in Tampa. Or you can hop from Raleigh to D.C. and back. I daresay, following the tournament via On Demand beats watching the games on television.

Fears that I'd miss everything were greatly overstated, it turns out. In the past couple days, from the office computer in the Tely, I caught the final two minutes of any close game around. (So long as it happened in the evening time slot in the U.S.; afternoon games finished here before sunrise.) By the way, my bracket's still intact. Fared quite well, actually. I nailed the WVU-over-Duke pick. I'm in something like the 96th percentile. Clearly, I'm telling you this because there's still one downside to following the tourney while abroad: It's much harder to find people interested in your bragging.