Attention is lavished on professional actors, and I’ve read a book about professional re-enactors (still living out the Civil War), but little is written about our professional reactors — those coaches’ wives, players’ moms and assorted other relatives who star in televised reaction shots during the NCAA tournament, self-consciously chewing their nails or clutching invisible worry beads.

All acting is reacting, and in televised sports, the best action is thought to be reaction. Hoping for a Spielbergian tableau of klieg-lit faces staring in wonder at a one-point ballgame, networks more often get a player’s uncle probing his nostrils with a trembling index finger.

Better still is the guy behind the reactor — the disembodied Arm, like Thing from “The Addams Family” — who taps the foul shooter’s Dad on the shoulder to point out Dad’s face on the Jumbotron.

This happened repeatedly to Stanford football coach Jim Harbaugh as he watched his brother-in-law, Tom Crean, coach Marquette against the Cardinal last week. The Arm kept chucking Harbaugh on the shoulder, and seemed to be miffed — insofar as you can read a forearm’s facial expressions — that the former NFL quarterback wasn’t all atwitter at the sight of himself on the scoreboard.

It is a permanent source of wonder to me that there remain people over the age of nine who are still excited to see themselves on a screen of any kind.

I refer to the guy mugging for the camcorder that’s hooked up to a TV at Best Buy.

I’m talking about the 40-something sales managers seated behind the announcers at basketball games who see themselves on the monitor and begin buffooning in the background.

I speak of the imbecile yammering into his cell phone behind home plate while waving to his dillweed buddy watching on TV. (At the risk of sounding like some reaction-shot reactionary, I am in favor of the ritual caning of these people.)

A few years ago, at a Twins-Tigers game at the Metrodome, an Arm behind me tapped my shoulder, notifying me that I was on the scoreboard Kiss Cam. It is to my eternal regret — and his everlasting gratitude — that I kissed the person on my left, my wife, rather than the person on my right, my Dad.

Mercifully, baseball season has returned, and with it the opposite of basketball’s reaction shots. Baseball loves the non-reaction shot of managers doing the only thing they do — hocking loogies — in response to anything that might happen, be it catastrophic ballpark conflagration or called third strike.

File footage of Terry Francona’s loogie-hocking might as well be spliced into live Red Sox telecasts, so reliable is that reaction shot. And the same may be said for most of his colleagues, the Salivation Army of baseball managers.

Indeed, my only other regret in life, after my Kiss Cam failure of nerve, is that Julio Lugo and Denny Hocking — in the five years that their careers overlapped — were never teammates, denying me, and all who care about such things, a loogie-hocking, Lugo-Hocking middle infield.

Instead, I content myself, as winter turns to spring, with memories of former Calgary Flames great Hakan Loob.

While looking for something else on the internet, I found this recipe called “Carpaccio of Alpaca with Avocado and Orange Juice Mayonnaise,” whose name alone has proven to be endlessly diverting. It’s a font of useless information, sure to fire your imagination.

What interested me most about the receipe’s name was not, as you might imagine, the alpaca part. I think we’ve all enjoyed an occasional al dente alpaca alfredo. Alfresco, if it’s summer.

Nor was I most captivated by the carpaccio part, though eating raw llama invariably means popping a few pre-emptive Alpaca-Seltzers.

Don’t get me wrong: Carpaccio is interesting. Turns out raw meat, sliced paper thin, was first served at the legendary Harry’s Bar in Venice in 1950. That year, Venice hosted an exhibition of paintings by the Renaissance master Vittore Carpaccio, renowned for his use of reds and whites. That first serving of raw shell beef in a cream-colored sauce resembled, on the plate, a Carpaccio oil. It’s been called carpaccio ever since.

We can only hope that movies will inspire similar culinary invention, and we will someday see a ralphmacchio of salmon, or a denunzio* of venison.

None of this, however, is what immediately caught my eye when I saw the name of that recipe. It wasn’t even the mention of avocado, though it turns out that word — avocado — derives from aguacate, the Aztec term for “testicle.” (Next time you ask the guy at Chili’s to “hold the guacamole,” he might reasonably reply, “Which one?”)

No, what interested me most about the name “Carpaccio of Alpaca with Avocado and Orange Juice Mayonnaise” was that last part — the orange juice mayonnaise. Orange Juice Mayonnaise is — I haven’t confirmed this, but it has to be — the full, formal birth name of USC guard O.J. Mayo.

Ninety-five percent of writing consists of not writing, and this is how I spend the bulk of my days, whiling them away in Procrastination Nation.
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*Noonan’s nemesis in Caddyshack, DeNunzio is perhaps best remembered for the line: “I ain’t paying no 50 cents for no Coke.”

On St. Patrick’s Day I wore a pair of shiny green Adidas with shamrocks on the insole and an angry, smoking leprechaun on either heel. While sporting them at a children’s fair last fall I had a clown whisper to me conspiratorially: “I really like your shoes.”

And though she was wearing size-24 clown shoes at the time, I accepted the compliment — and a wiener dog fashioned from balloons, and a squirt in the eye from her boutonniere — with as much dignity as I could muster.

From the bottom of my soles I have always loved my various sneakers, even before they were called sneakers, when there were only two kinds of footwear: Church shoes and tennis shoes.

The pair of blue Adidas Gazelles my mother inexplicably sprung for before the family vacation to California were like a crushed velvet smoking jacket for my feet. I must have gazed at those Gazelles for a full two minutes in the foot mirror at Famous Footwear, obsessed with how my shoes would look to shih-tzus and supine drunks and anyone else regarding them from six inches off the ground.

I couldn’t imagine anything cooler, unless they were the burgundy Gazelles that my brother Toma somehow scored.

Usually, my mom bought the knockoff version of whatever we wanted: Shoes with four or two stripes when we asked for Adidas, Thom McAnns when we asked for Tigers. I didn’t care. I believed then, as I do now, the old Keds come-on: “Run Faster, Jump Higher.” New sneakers will make you do that.

Pull ‘em out of the box. Remove the wadded tissue paper and take a deep drag from the shoe, fitting it over your nose and mouth like an airline oxygen mask before assisting others. Save the shoebox for a school diorama, if there is still such a thing as school dioramas.

In high school I saved up for the same black Converse weapons that Larry Bird wore, and I scraped the soles with my palms the same way he did. It is a measure of Larry’s greatness that he won three consecutive MVPs while playing in those ski boots, each of which weighed two pounds.

At the time, rich kids wore Adidas Top Tens, a step up the prestige ladder from the shell-toed Adidas Superstars that had not yet been blessed by Run-DMC.

Endorsements, even implicit ones, were important. I had a pair of blue Pro-Keds that Warren Coolidge wore for Carver High on “The White Shadow.” I had a pair of red Chucks with cross-hatched yellow laces that were more Ronald McDonald than McDonald’s All-American, though I hadn’t a clue who Chuck Taylor was. I coveted, but never consummated, a relationship with the Puma Clydes even more than the crisp white Nikes worn by the laconic George Gervin in the iconic Iceman poster.

Shoelaces were also a statement of personal style, and we studied the line drawings of various lacing systems in The In-Your-Face Basketball Book. Even on a shoestring budget I could afford shoestrings, and I experienced a small frisson of happiness when I saw Tony Randall tell Johnny Carson that the name of the plastic tip at the end of a shoelace was called an “aglet.”

(In the same appearance, Felix revealed that the gutter running from your nose to your mouth is called the “philtrum.” What a strange child I was, who never forgot this.)

I did eventually step into nylon blue Pumas with a white stripe and a rubber-waffle sole and a clean ladder lacing system, in the way that my Dad, after 30 years of 12-hour days, traded in his Buick for a Cadillac.

I felt no less exhilarated last fall when I found my green leprechaun Adidas at an outlet store outside Boston, though — truth be told — every pair of sneakers I have ever owned eventually turned green, the result of serial lawn mowing.

That’s when you know the affair is over, when you no longer care that your sneakers have been sullied.

So this week, when the tournament starts, as I do every March, I’ll put on the blindingest pair of white sneakers I have and go out into the driveway to play one-on-one. And I will get physically sick the first time my opponent steps on one of my shoes. I will suspect it is a deliberate act of provocation, and refuse to keep playing, and threaten to take the ball inside until — eventually, and with much prodding and assurances that it will never happen again — my 3-year-old apologizes.

When a person says “I could care less” when he really means “I couldn’t care less,” I personally couldn’t care less, because I know what he means, just as I know what he means when he says at the end of a sentence, “Know what I mean?”

When someone says to me, “Know what I’m sayin?” the answer is almost always “Yes,” because that person has just said whatever it is he was saying before he got to “Know what I’m sayin’?” (Know what I mean?)

When a person uses “like” as a linguistic speed bump — as in “I, like, love you” — I don’t mind, especially if that person really does, like, love me.

I’m less fond of “right” as a verbal crutch, but only because my bladder is bursting and I’m trying to get directions to the nearest gas station: “Take a left, right? Then go three blocks and make a right, right? Then two more lefts, right?”

The person giving these directions often finishes by hooking his thumbs around his overall straps and adding, “Know what I’m sayin’?” After which I am forced to reply, “No, I’m afraid I do not know what you’re saying. But would you kindly direct me to the nearest Laundromat, my good man, so that I might dry my pants?”

I do not hold in low regard the person who says “irregardless.” The person who begins sentences with “Hopefully” is not, in my book, hopeless. When someone uses “literally” as an empty intensifier — “We literally got our butts handed to us tonight” — my undies are not in a bundle. Not even metaphorically.

When someone says, “Her and her mom are picking me up,” I might briefly wonder if Ben-Hur’s chariot will soon pull into the driveway, with ex-Cardinals’ second baseman Tommy Herr riding shotgun. But that’s all.

When I hear someone scolded for using a double negative, I picture the scolder singing a karaoke medley of “Is No Mountain High Enough” and “Is No Stoppin’ Us Now” and “(I Can’t Get Any) Satisfaction.” And I feel strangely satisfied.

Until recently, I was unacquainted with the ouevre of Flo Rida, the rapper who introduced himself, quite literally, on “B****, I’m From Dade County,” the wedding song of countless couples lucky enough to be hitched in the summer of ‘07.

Mr. Rida — and Greg Kelly still insists the New York Times refers to Meat Loaf, on second reference, as Mr. Loaf — reached number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 with “Low,” the most digitally downloaded song on iTunes in November.

And yet what interests me about Mr. Rida is not discography but geography: I like his name. The list of celebrities named for places is a short one, consisting principally of musicians (like Dallas Austin) and athletes (like Tyler Houston) christened for two cities in Texas.

Rarer still are those performers, like Mr. Rida, whose entire name announces him or her as not just someone but somewhere.

I think of Lorne Guyland, the aging and egomaniacal actor in the Martin Amis novel “Money.”

In the ’70s, the first (and last) decade in which I heard any new music, charts were dominated by Boston and Chicago, Kansas and Nazareth, John Denver and England Dan.

Because I favor a return to that musical era, I’ve composed a list of stage names — and ready-to-wear press bios — that Rand McNally would endorse.

Mrs. Sippy: An older-skewing Missy Elliott-style rap diva with ubiquitous pimp chalice; sometimes duet partner of zydeco king Lou Zeeanna.

Chad: Cher-like mononym whose hit EP is the club staple “Get Djibouti on the Dance Floor.”

Bela Rus: Eastern European troubadour and gymnastics coach, and creative engine behind the hard-to-find — but not-hard-enough-to-find — LP “Bela Rus: At the Ballet Russe.”

Elle Salvador: Central American swimsuit model turned pop flyweight and WBC lightweight.

Ken Tucky: Country balladeer (sometimes recording as Kent Ucky) whose biggest hit was “Mountain Music” (featuring Wes Virginia), a cover of the single that originally charted for . . . Alabama.

There’s an Erykah Badu video in heavy rotation right now in which she is flouncing through what used to be called a record store, pulling albums that look familiar – Ohio Players? Grace Jones? De La Soul? – but on closer inspection feature Erykah Badu on each of them.

It got me thinking of the record store near my K-through-8 that we’d sometime walk to after basketball practice. It was actually a head shop, though I didn’t know that in 7th grade, despite its name – High Times – and its heady aroma of incense, vinyl and B.O.

High Times sold every conceivable implement through which one could inhale marijuana, including, almost certainly, the rolled-up R. Crumb posters binned in a wastebasket shaped like a giant Schlitz can. Those posters bore slogans that meant nothing to me then, and still don’t: Keep on Truckin’?

Doobies were not what drew me there, however. Unless you include the Doobie Brothers – and every other band whose album covers we had come to peruse, LPs by ELP and EWF and ELO, whose logo was a spaceship, like Boston’s and just about everyone else’s at that time.

It blew my mind when some elderly Talmudic scholar of 16 revealed to me that the Boston spaceship was also an upside-down guitar, in the same way that 5318008 on an upside-down calculator spelled BOOBIES.

(A few years later, I thought Journey’s album was called ESC4P3, the name on its spaceship-themed cover, until some older, wiser person told me disdainfully it was “ESCAPE, dumbass.” After which I spent several weeks thinking it was callee “Escape Dumbass.”)

To my buddies and me, in our Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary uniforms, the albums at High Times were more illicit than the pipes and black-light posters. The cover of “Honey,” by Ohio Players, captured an ostensibly nude woman slathered in the title substance, presumably just before she was attacked by bees or bears.

These images, among countless others, remain burned into my brainpan:

*Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America,” the World Trade Center slightly obscured by the orange juice glass held aloft like Liberty’s torch.

*“Hotel California,” which I now know is the Beverly Hills Hotel. (You can check out any time you like, as long as it’s by 11 a.m., after which you’ll be charged a full night’s stay.)

*Cheap Trick “Live at Budokan” or anything else with the band’s name on the cover in that typewriter font of theirs.

*REO Speedwagon’s “You Can Tune a Piano But You Can’t Tune a Fish,” which had a tuning fork stuck into the the mouth of a trout.

*Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” whose cover featured the style of art that was then popular on the sides of vans, the kind of vans that were carpeted inside and had a small tinted porthole on either side near the back. These vans also, inexplicably, had a hooked swimming pool ladder running up the back door and onto the roof. Why?

*Funkadelic’s “Uncle Jam Wants You,” on which George Clinton posed in the kind of high-backed, fan-shaped wicker chair that was favored by Mr. Rourke on “Fantasy Island.”

*Shalamar’s “Big Fun,” on which Jody Watley and the Two Other Guys rode leaping aquatic mammals in a swimming pool overlooking Los Angeles.

These covers instantly evoke a specific time: Everything about my oldest brother’s copy of “Worlds Away,” by Pablo Cruise, says 1978. The cover – the typeface, the palm tree, the sunset – resembles every T-shirt I got on a family vacation during that era.

These covers gave my life purpose. These covers – in the case of Shalamar – gave my life porpoise.

High Times? You’re damn right they were.