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Predictions for the Year of the Biscuit – (you’ll have to read to the end to see why I gave 2004 that name) I’m not one who’s usually big on year end news wrap-ups, or inclined to make many predictions about the coming year. But for some reason, some trends or “predictions” have been running through my head lately. So just for fun, I thought I’d flesh them out a bit, and dump them in your lap. Later, you can throw them back in my face, when they prove to be way way off.

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I don’t normally pass on the many forwarded joke e-mails I get (or even look at half of them), but this one from Harold Tedford, my old theater professor at Wake Forest, was just too good to pass up today.

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Dumping Blogshares – I’ve mentioned this “game” once before, and how much fun it was. Was. My, how things have changed.

Each day, I get up to an e-mail telling me someone has pilfered my stock. This morning I woke up to a hostile takeover of Vodkapundit, Davezilla, and Instapundit. Blue chip stocks that I spent a lot of time collecting … gone. Other big stocks are constantly (almost daily) “restructured” via something called an “artefact.” I’d try to explain it to you if it had a remotely similar counterpart in the real market. But it doesn’t.

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Holiday Weekend Activities – “The best way for a man to carry a woman is to dangle her upside down over his back, with her thighs squeezing his neck and her arms around his torso [...] Estonian men turned up in this little farming village lugging their women upside down five years ago, and the sport of wife carrying hasn’t been the same since.”

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Check Your Wiring – Have you ever had someone ask you to write down directions, and when you draw them a graphic map with arrows and the like, they then take the paper, flip it over, and re-write the directions in words only? We humans are very variable beasts, and our brains each process information in unique ways, according to which sense is predominant, and how the two sides of our brain interrelate. A person whose right brain and visual sense are dominant will draw a graphic map, and their left brain auditory counterpart will repeat it in words only.

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BlogShares – I finally got into online gaming, but via an unexpected path. For the past month or so, there’s been an online stock market of sorts, and the stocks are web logs. It’s been in beta, but it’s been great fun.

When it started, I took a quick peek, but as you might recall, there was a war going on. I went back later and registered as a player, just to see what the deal was. I got a $500 stake for registering, and I was able to “claim” PhotoDude’s Web Log as my entry in the market.

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20-6 – All week, I’ve been talking about the crowd in Philly at Veteran’s Stadium. Terence Moore describes what happened: “The towel-waving crowd was wired from the time Patti Labelle spent a couple of days singing the national anthem. It was up to the Falcons to silence them.”

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Fan Advisory – From Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid, a request for the fans that you don’t hear in other NFL cities: “It’s also important that they’re there to watch a football game and not to be up there fighting … Cheer loudly, but please try not to kill or maim anyone.”

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More Tales of Brotherly Love – We’re back at Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia: “Don’t mistake the 700 level for the 700 Club. If the Oakland Raiders have their ’Black Hole,’ Philly has the 700 level, whose denizens are the kind of souls televangelist Pat Robertson hopes to save.”

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City of Brotherly Love, Part Two – In the runup to this weekend’s Falcons-Eagles playoff game, regional prejudices rear their ugly head, like the banner at the top of this page that reads, “We won the Civil War – so shut your redneck face,” as if William Tecumsah Sherman will be dug up and placed in an Eagles uniform Saturday night.

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City of Brotherly Love – It may be the only sports stadium in America that has its own jail. “’It’s an extremely tough place to play,’ [Coach Dan Reeves] said with a smile. ’[Fans] will tell you about your mother, and your father.’ [...] There have been instances in the past of visiting fans being beaten badly enough to be hospitalized.”

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I Like Mike – Some have already started calling him “the Michael Jordan of football.” Earlier this season, Atlanta Falcon Michael Vick became the first quarterback in NFL history to run for more than 90 yards in two consecutive games. In a league where running backs who average 4.5 yards per carry go to the Pro Bowl, Vick averaged 9.0 yards per carry in those games.

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Amazing Ascent – Have I mentioned Atlanta has a new rising star lately? Remember the name, Michael Vick. They sure do in Charlotte, home of the team Vick ran over virtually singlehandedly last Sunday.

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Tony and Bob – Sort of like Abbott and Costello … when they were feuding. "I don’t want children to see and hear Bob Costas and think that it’s okay to simultaneously nostalgize and sterilize popular sports and culture in such a way that you never want to look at it again for what it is: a child’s game played by immigrants who wouldn’t get a job wiping puke off of porcelain if it wasn’t for an abnormal pituitary gland, or in the case of baseball, defection [...] He makes Vin Scully sound like John Madden, Oprah sound like Ozzy, he gives milquetoast a bad name, he neither wears boxers or briefs for underneath his clothes are simply wires and switches and tube amps."

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Rising Star – Michael Vick is not only currently the leading rusher on the Atlanta Falcons team, Vick "has 24 carries for 184 yards, ranking him seventh in the NFC in rushing." That’s over 7.6 yards per carry, in a league where running backs are usually considered Pro Bowl material if they average 5 yards per carry. He’s on a pace to come close to a thousand yard rushing season, a goal for which all running backs struggle, but most don’t achieve in the NFL.

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Walk-Ons Blown Off – "’If you’re not going to get your uniform dirty during games, you shouldn’t be on the team,’ said McNeil, who is also the chairwoman of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s committee on women’s athletics. ’I believe there is still an opportunity for a walk-on to bloom on our teams, but there has to be a cutoff date for those who just want to hang around. We can’t afford it. It’s time to tell these students: ’You’ve got other talents. Go write about sports at the school newspaper, join the debate team, or maybe you’ve got a nice voice and belong on the stage. Some guys just like to be part of the group. Then 10 years later they will talk about being on their college team, when the fact is they never played.’ "

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Boys of September – And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout baseball. The NFL just finished its second week, and it’s already stolen what little interest I had in baseball. The two teams most favored to go to the Super Bowl are 0-2, the New Orleans ’Aints have put the ”S” back in front of their name, and the Falcons … well, they’re 0-2.

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Photoshop Gauntlet – Subtitled, ”And Now For Something Completely Different,” which will make more sense if you take a peek at the latest in Underground Photoshop Tennis, a battle of the Dual Domain Guys, PhotoDude vs. Phineas. Although it was more like ”Photoshop Chess,” given the length of time it took us to complete ten volleys. But there’s also an odd complexity that time allows. It was, as always, a blast.

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eBore Syndrome – "Do your friends nod off or walk away when you start talking about ASP, HTML or CPM? Is the local Starbucks still the only place you can properly brainstorm with your colleagues? Are you onto your 4th PDA?

If so, you might be suffering from e-bore Syndrome."

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Political Compass Test – To read the rest of the entries on the front page from the past few days, you might think I was a just another typical right wing wacko war monger.

Au contraire.

I took the Political Compass Test when it was first ”going around,” and for some reason doubted my results. Thinking I must have been in a particularly calm mood or something, I decided to try later. Weeks have passed, so I did it again. With similar results:

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