Google trends will tell you that the flavor is as popular as ever. But I was convinced that its time had come and gone. So I set out to prove that the flavor’s heyday was over — by forcing myself to eat every pumpkin spice-flavored item I came across.
Rest In Peace, Vine.
Smart NCAA Predictions: The 64-Team Nickname Battle
They say this is the year to go crazy with your picks.
Six teams held the No. 1 spot this year, one off the record for most changes in a season. Every time a team seemed poised to make a run, they'd crash and burn in a national TV game, or be upset at home by a no-name school. So everyone keeps guaranteeing that this is the year for true madness, where up is left and down is right and Dick Vitale explodes in a puff of enthusiastic confetti.
Of course, everyone says that, and then they pick maybe a 13-seed in the first round, or a 4-seed beating a 1-seed, then call it a day. Everyone's too scared to really make the leap and pick a truly insane bracket.
Well, maybe not everyone.
This bracket is chosen entirely by a random qualifier: team nickname. With each matchup, I compare the two teams' chosen nicknames* as if they are real entities, decide which one would win in a fight, and advance that team to the next round.
*We're talking about nicknames, not mascots. Could the guy in the Notre Dame costume defeat the sleepy Gonzaga bulldog in a no-holds-barred, death-is-the-only-escape cage match? Let's not pause to imagine it.
There are worse ways to do this, really. Let's begin.
Gambling On The Oscars (For Free)
Predicting The Oscars, Again.
I haven't done an Oscar post in a while.
I mean, obviously. I haven't posted in an exceptionally long while, either, so a lack of general content is also going to lead to a lack of Oscar content. That's just simple math.
But of all pieces to come back and do again, this does not seem like the one a sane man would choose. Oscar prediction pieces are mostly dull and all read about the same way. Each year that I do this sort of thing, I try and find a new way to go about it, with varied success. Or lack of success, frankly. Whatever the trick is for writing one of these in a way that leaps off your iPhone screen, I haven't found it.
Early on, my goal was to try to predict the Oscars with near-certainty. A couple years in, I'd succeeded – I was getting 19, 20, 21 out of 24 categories right. I'd miss out on things like Documentary Short and maybe a Supporting Actor, and that would be about it. It turns out, predicting the awards is a fairly simple task. Most of the big awards have already developed frontrunners, and the smaller awards are usually capably broken down by Oscar experts like Mark Harris and Dave Karger, so you can just copy those in. Being right is fun, but it's notthat fun, unless you've got cash on the line.
Ooh, actually, that sounds like a fun angle. Let's do it that way.
