Round 2 of the Blazer’s Edge Best Things Ever Tournament has entered its final quarter-bracket. For those who have been sleeping over the last few weeks, we’ve assembled 64 of the finer things in life, chosen somewhat randomly and arranged even more randomly into a 64-team March Madness bracket. Every day we highlight two posts, each offering a head-to-head choice between these good things. You pick one to advance and one to go home. At the end of the process we’ll have our Blazer’s Edge Best Thing Ever for
2026. It’s a way to keep conversation going during the slow days of NBA summer.
Today the normal ease of the process gets disrupted a little bit. The first round featured an interesting matchup between Doughnuts and Cell Phones. As it turned out, the vote ended in an exact tie.
Several options were available to me. I could have broken the tie with a personal vote. I could have eliminated both, making Round 2 a bye. Instead, I went with the third option: promote both to the second round and make this contest three-sided.
Therefore in this post you will choose between three contestants: First-round winners Cows vs. Cell Phones vs. Doughnuts.
Cows seem like humble creatures. Without them, though, we wouldn’t have milk, butter, cheese, hamburgers, steaks, leather, or cowboys. (The Dallas Sheepswappers doesn’t doesn’t have the same ring to it.) Many of the finer things in American life rely on the grass-and-grain-munching bovine. They might quietly be one of the best things ever!
But Cell Phones have changed the way we communicate. Like regular old phones, they allow you to call people. But you can text, look up information, map journeys, use GPS, surf the internet, watch videos and movies, create social media masterpieces. A tiny computer brings the world to our hands. Modern life would change radically without them.
Against these two comes the mighty doughnut. Round, rectangular, or twisted, with glaze, frosted, or sprinkled, with holes, without holes, or only holes, the unmistakable taste and smell of a fresh doughnut will change your day, if not your life. They’re Homer Simpson’s North Star for a reason!
You can weigh these things however you like, but however you do it, it’s time to choose who will advance to the Sweet Sixteen: Cows, Cell Phones, or Doughnuts. Share your vote and reasoning in the comments section below and be sure to check out our other tournament posts up and down the page!
