Five Years Later: What's really changed?

What you see in the background of that image there is what I refer to as "my journal." I bought it at a Borders or some other bookstore back in 2004, primarily for class when I was back finally finishing college. When I bought that hardcover item, I imagined that I would fill it out quickly and rush to replace it—repeatedly.

And nearly seven full years later, despite the binding falling apart and giving the appearance that it's been opened with far greater frequency, I'd say I'm a little more than halfway through it. Journaling every single day, as it turns out, is a routine I just never could get into.

Of course, the excuse that I make for not writing my private thoughts down on a more regular basis is because over time, I've developed a number of other places to publicly record them. My Tumblr has occasionally become one such venue for me in the past couple of years, but this particular blog has been another for five years now, today.

While I've made a note of this anniversary on one previous occasion, I don't think the past three years on BMC have really allowed me to post another "greatest hits" sort of series of links. Still, I do think it's appropriate to kind of look back, briefly reflect on what's happened and then get back to moving forward.

Things I made while offline: Sid Vicious

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: A charcoal and pastel sketch of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious

Oscar Nominee Reaction: A Perfect Ten (in the big category, at least)

Even I was a bit surprised to see I got all 10 of my predicted Best Picture nominees correct, and my overall 39 of the 45 nominees in the "Big Eight" was two better than how I fared last year. And indeed, like I had anticipated, when the nominations were announced that morning, I'd already seen seven of the pics.

So a quick visit to the Redbox took care of two more, and now I'm down to one last film that, as it turns out, is opening up at theaters in my area this weekend. So for once, I'll actually be able to fill out my hypothetical ballot and post reviews of all 10 nominated movies before the ceremony. (Last year, I was about two months behind in doing that.) At least, I should be able do all that in time this year.

Of course, there were a couple surprises in this year's nominations, but I suppose the one lesson I need to make a point of remembering is this: Mike Leigh gets nominated for his writing, not his directing or the performances he gets. I should have remembered this lesson from two years back, actually.

Final Thoughts on 2010 Chicago Bears: We have nothing to complain about

Keeping in mind what I had said at the beginning of this season, more specifically the not ruling out the idea of the Bears finishing in last place in their division, the fact that the team got all the way to the NFC Championship was a most pleasant surprise—regardless of the end result. This team thoroughly defied my expectations this past year, and if you wanted to attribute most of that success to luck, I wouldn't argue. And I suppose that would only be fitting that in the end, the luckiest team in the NFL all season long finally had the worst turn of fate possible, when they lost man at arguably the most important position any team has.

Naturally, Jay Cutler not being able to finish the NFC Championship led to immediate speculation and plenty of phony, overly macho chest-thumping about playing through pain. When the word "pussy" was able to be said or printed, it most certainly was. I wish I could say that it was uttered strictly by ESPN personalities who seem to make it a point to be as stupid as possible, but unfortunately I saw even some friends of mine that were supposedly fans of the team pinning this loss entirely on what they believed was a quarterback's personal decision to sit out the rest of the contest with the Packers.

I've already had my say on this, and I'll stand by those comments. But for the sake of this blog, a few thoughts on the year in general:

Oscar Nominee Picks: Or, "What I'll be trying to see in the next month"

Actually, thanks to my wonderful girlfriend's wonderful taste, I've been to the movie theater for actual good movies more often than in years past and thus will have probably seen a majority of the Best Picture nominees when they are announced tomorrow morning. Still, I'm almost certain that there's going to be a few movies nominated that I will either have to go way out of my way to catch before the broadcast or already have been in theaters and won't be out on DVD until afterward.

With football season now only being one game away from over, it's about time to transition over to something new to plaster this blog with, so get set for the movie reviews, folks. What gets nominated and I've already seen will probably go up first, but before we get to that stuff, here's who and what I'm guessing gets nominated tomorrow morning—with thoughts and commentary on the individual categories to probably follow in a later post:

Things I made while offline: Al Pacino in "Serpico"

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: A charcoal collage of Al Pacino images from the 1973 film "Serpico"

Conference Championship Picks: Cookie Cutters

It's possible I'd heard about it previously this year, but it didn't really register for me until this week that the NFL had redesigned a few logos this season—most notably, the trophies it awards for the Conference Championships about to be played. Perhaps it's just because I'm a cynical bastard, but the new designs resemble something more along the lines of what I'd see used to make Christmas cookies.

But the "cookie cutter" reference seems appropriate this week with the two early line favorites being popular consensus among most of the experts I track, and worst of all, being the exact same pick that Sports Illustrated scribe and Brett Favre ass-licking society president Peter King had forecast at the very beginning of the season. So if I'm pulling for any of the other three possible scenarios for any reason aside from my obvious fandom hoping for one of the two which would include the hometown Bears, it's to deny that tubby retard the joy of saying, "I toldja so." (We can always remind him that he also had Carolina as a Wild Card team.)

I'm perfectly happy to admit how wrong I was about my own predictions for this NFL season—more specifically the beloved Bears, since the team is now but one win away from another Super Bowl appearance. This year's team has completely defied many people's (myself included) ideas of what the team could achieve, and in what has been essentially an unpredictable season for the NFL, nothing could seem more appropriate than having the most popular prediction be completely wrong.

The Bulls' Second Quarter: Everything's coming up Rose's

For a team that's been at full strength for just nine games thus far this year, the Bulls have still looked pretty impressive when a lot of excuses could have been being concocted. Instead, I continue to be thankful that Tom Thibodeau's coaching this team and you needn't look very hard to see what effect he's had on this squad, as when it's on, the defense can be among the league's best.

Joakim Noah hasn't played since shortly after I posted the last quarterly update—and now he might not be back until March. Carlos Boozer finally did start in December, but just missed the Memphis game the other night. And still, despite problems with two big pieces being banged up, the Bulls keep on winning.

Looking over this last stretch of 20 games, the list of opponents doesn't seem quite that daunting, but who's really going to argue with the results? The only team with a bigger lead in their division is the Lakers, and while the Central might not field any more playoff teams other than the Bulls, it's certainly looking like Chicago will have home-court advantage for at least the first round of the playoffs.

Things I made while offline: Claudia Schiffer

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: A pencil sketch of model Claudia Schiffer 

Divisional Playoff Picks: Let's not get ahead of ourselves

There's already two divisional rivalry rubber matches set for this weekend over in the AFC, but around where I live in the Chicago area, many people are already giddy at the prospect of the Bears hosting an NFC Championship game against their longtime rival Packers next weekend. So while the Seahawks aren't nearly the moneymaker for local brokers that Green Bay would be, the games still have to be played and there's two teams that have alternate plans for what indeed would probably be a record television audience for next weekend if the Bears were to host the Packers.

To this Bears fan, there's been a little too much talk about that possibility. It's the not first time this scenario could play out that way, and it sort of leads me to believe that the amount of speculation about that NFC Championship game might make nice bulletin board material in the locker rooms of both the Seattle and Atlanta clubhouses.

The Chicago Tribune today ran a feature comparing this year's Bears team to the 2006 team that made it all the way to Super Bowl XLI. It's a little hard for me to believe that I was still in the first year of blogging here on BMC the last time Chicago was in the playoffs, and I apparently hadn't gotten into the predictions business as heavily and regularly as I've done in recent years. As best as I can tell, I didn't even talk about my Bears until they'd clinched that Super Bowl appearance. And then my couple posts probably jinxed them.

So forgive me for being a little more hesitant about buying too heavily into this Bears-Packers hype, since I seem to think that all the talk about it is only going to mean that next week's matchup will involve one, if not two, different teams. The divisional playoffs come first and just like 2006, let's concentrate on the possible joy involved in beating the Seahawks.

Things I made while offline: Old Surfer Guy

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: An ink & color pencil comic book cover of my Old Surfer Guy character 

Wild Card Picks: See, toldja the Saints would be the No. 5

We've entered the playoffs in the NFL, and I intend to follow the same schedule of reflections I did last postseason—not that I ended up doing all that hot when all was said and done last year, of course.

Anyway, looking back on how I did with my predictions before the season kicked off, I did far worse this year than last at having teams correctly slotted in their actual finishes. This season I had less than a quarter of the teams in their final spots, only getting seven of the 32 teams correct (AFC East: 2/4, AFC North: 0/4, AFC South: 1/4, AFC West: 1/4, NFC East: 1/4, NFC North: 0/4, NFC South: 2/4, NFC West: 0/4).

Yikes.

And this year, I only had six of the dozen teams that actually made the playoffs, with the Saints being the only team I had correctly seeded. So, Nostradamus I am not. Still, that won't stop me from forging ahead with more predictions, obviously.

For this Wild Card round, we'll ignore what I said at the beginning of the year to look back on that "My predicted record" for each team accumulated over the year as my opinion might have changed and imagine how the NFL standings would have looked had my predictions gone flawlessly with every team doing exactly as I had predicted every week during the season:

Week 17 Power Rankings: Worst. Year. Ever.

The saving grace to the final week of the regular season had to be that the downward scoring spiral of the past five weeks finally ceased with my picks being good for 108 points, one shy of my best score for the season.

 

Of course, when you look at the grand total of 1406 points on the year, that's the lowest score I've ended up with in any of the three seasons I've been posting my picks here on BMC. So in the end, if I was right about nothing else that I said at the beginning of this season (and I wasn't right about much), it was that this year was indeed as unpredictable as I felt it was going to be.

 

Still, it was nice to sneak back into the top three on the final game of the year and I did manage to win each pool twice (tops for both in Week Nine, but first in PoolHost for Week Three and first in Yahoo for Week Seven). So despite the accurate subtitle to this post, it's not as though this season was completely without its moments for me.

The Bears' Fourth Quarter: Being lucky still better than being good

You can't complain when you're the recipient of good fortune, but this year's Chicago Bears team didn't suffer any of those critical season-ending injuries that typically ruin NFL teams. It's not to say that the Bears weren't good in certain facets of their game, but their defense got to line up against a few third-string quarterbacks, they had a few calls go their way, and it was other teams around the league—and in their division—that suffered the injuries.

The result is an NFC North title that nary a soul in this city would have predicted after a distinctly poor showing in the preseason. Things have certainly come together for this Bears team at the right time, and the result after playing the full slate of 16 games is another week of rest in preparations to host a playoff game at Soldier Field as the No. 2 seed in the conference.

And all of that said, I'm fairly certain that on a national level, the Bears probably have to be the most doubted team of the four getting byes this weekend. But this year's team has seemed to thrive on ignoring their critics and defying the expectations. At this point, why couldn't they go all the way to Dallas?

The Blackhawks' Second Quarter: Outside looking in

It's hard to hate on the many in Chicago who've seemingly hopped off the bandwagon as quickly as they jumped aboard last June. After all, the biggest act in town still is (and always will be) the Bears, and despite the pessimism there, that team's in the playoffs. And the Blackhawks' traditional winter sports roommate at the United Center, the Bulls, are off to a far better start to their own season. At least there's playoff talk there.

So much like the first quarter to this season, the Blackhawks' second quarter of their Stanley Cup title defense has felt pretty lackluster. I'm trying to keep in mind how much roster turnover was involved heading into this season since I was generally a fan of most every move general manager Stan Bowman made to put the team under the salary cap. Additionally, it just seems like too convenient of an excuse to pin all the blame on new faces for the team as to why the champs are underperforming this year. Surely, fingers should also be pointed at some of the returning veterans that have underwhelmed as well.

But the bottom line remains that the 'Hawks are no longer the scrappy little bunch that's fighting for respect. Now that they came out on top of the league last season, every opponent has seemingly brought their best game when facing the champions. That's something that's not likely to change any going into the second half of this season either.

Things I made while offline: Sheryl Crow

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: A pencil sketch of musician Sheryl Crow 

Week 17 Picks: Put a little more thought into it

I have watched my weekly scores decline each and every week for the past five going back to Week 11. While I've somehow been able to maintain a second place standing in the Yahoo pool, I've now slipped into fourth in the PoolHost league. And with one last weekend of the regular season, I had to strongly consider how I wanted to approach this final week.

Was it worth it to pick a few upsets in hope of moving all the way up to first? Or would it be smarter to play it safe and hope that, in the spirit of the pool, just my lowest ranked games ended up being the upsets?

At the conclusion of the season, I'll divulge more about my methodology this year—a formula I devised last season and pretty much maintained all throughout this 2010 regular season, give or take a few weeks. But for Week 17, ™ was in town and I couldn't spend too much time scribbling out numbers from the Power Rankings or such, so I quickly checked how the other four sheets would look, took those into account, and decided how to place my bets completely on my own with teams still playing for something usually given the most favor.

Otherwise Meaningless Championships: Another Fantasy Update

Your author is hard-pressed to think of something that can cause an immediate loss of interest quite like hearing about someone's fantasy team. Having friends and co-workers recite their rosters with no real purpose other than to gloat about conquering leagues you're not involved in seems quite banal and pointless, no?

That said, the author knows full well that you the dear reader probably also couldn't give two shits about whatever fantasy team he's gone and created after so many years of taking that road less traveled where non-participation seemed cooler. Now the author has multiple fantasy teams, and while he tries mightily not to bring those into the other posts here on BMC that you might actually read, every once in a while, if for no other purpose than to help him remember who he had on such teams in a given year, he likes to keep a recorded entry of how he's done.

This is one of those times. Your non-interest in the remainder of this post is understood.

Week 16 Power Rankings: Re-forgettable

I'll probably be a little unnerved about posting picks before taking any "breaks" in future NFL seasons, seeing as I did even worse with my Week 16 Picks than I did in Week 11 when I took a week off for Thanksgiving. The Christmas weekend games were equivocal to quite a few lumps of coal for me as my confidence pool picks were worth an otherwise ho-ho-hopeless 66 points.

After nearly everybody maxed out on Pittsburgh's real gimme on Thursday night, David Buehler gave the Arizona fans quite the holiday gift by fudging an extra point and costing me more than most with the 10 points I'd had on Dallas. From there, the Dolphins, Chargers, and Eagles all resorted to their Grinch-like ways by costing me even more points. At least I had ™ around to help take my mind of another disastrous performance late in the season.