Yesterday, the Patriots went into halftime with a 14-10 lead. They didn’t score once in the second half, and went home on the wrong side of a 14-28 game. I said at the time that it reminded me a lot of last year. I pulled up some numbers to be sure. (The following stats are for all of 2009 and 2010, including both regular and post-season games. That’s a total of 19 games.)

• In regulation over that period, we were 11-7-1. The one "tie" went into overtime and the Broncos won on a field goal. (Don't get me started on sudden death overtime.)
• If the games had ended after one half, we would have been 14-3-2 over that period. If they'd ended after three quarters, we'd have been 14-5-0.
• Our total point differential has been 154 points in the first half, and -28 in the second half.
• The point differentials have been 38 in the first quarter, 116 (!!) in the second, 3 points in the third, and -31 in the fourth quarter.

Maybe we can lobby the league to switch to a 45-minute clock when they go to a 20-week/18-game schedule?

The Academy doubled the number of slots for Best Picture nominees (to ten!) but it hasn’t really helped my Oscar scoresheet. Just like past years, I’ll go over the nominees and admit exactly how many movies I haven’t seen this year.

Goose eggs, across the board. In fact, the only nominated movies I saw this year were Coraline (Best Animated Feature Film), Sherlock Holmes (Art Direction and Score), and Star Trek (four nominations, all FX-related). But like usual, there are a whole bunch of movies that are high on my list: Up, Inglorious Basterds, District 9, and The Blind Side (Best Picture? Wow. I loved the book, so I need to see it.)

If I see all of those before March 7, I’ll finish with 8 points, which would tie with my final score last year.

Update: I did manage to see all of the above-listed movies. Expanding Best Picture from 5 to 10 let some great-but-not-fantastic movies in. District 9? Blind Side? Who really thinks those might deserve Best Picture?

Looking back, 2009 was great year for my reading list. Although I only read three fiction books (not counting the collection of Science Fiction I used as waiting-for-inter-library-loan filler), they were all remarkably good. Next year’s list is likely to be very interesting. Not only am I trying to figure out how to fit my new Kindle (thanks, Mom and Dad!) into my reading habits, but I also hope to get fiction recommendations from other people for 2010 so I can try to divide my time 50/50. Right now there are four books on my nightstand, and they’re all non-fiction. What a bad start to that New Year’s resolution.

Here are the books I read this year, and my thoughts on some of them:

• The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
• The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman - Probably my favorite book of the year. It's got a superheroes-are-imperfect Watchmen vibe going on, but it's less of a distopian view and more of a "day in the life of" the participants. I'm also apparently a sucker for novels with an alternating first-person gimmick (see also The Time Traveler's Wife). I'd be lying if I said I didn't visualize Neil Patrick Harris as the super-intelligent villain.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - This is the first book that I think I've read that has colored the way I read other non-fiction books. How Bill Gates got a lot of computer experience in High School in the 70s was an especially interesting bit.
• Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen
• The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: 25th Annual Collection by Gardner R. Dozois
• Born to Run: The Rise of Ultra-running and the Super-athlete Tribe by Christopher McDougall - Started out slowly with some interesting ultra-runner stories, and escalated into a fantastic tale about the author taking part in a 50-plus mile run in the Mexican desert with some professionals and some legendary native runners. Makes a persuasive case that long-distance running is the reason humans started walking upright.
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy - No, wait, maybe this is my pick for book of the year. The Road was intense and bleak and depressing. My favorite thing about this book is that McCarthy didn't try to give it a story arc or a moral or a hero. It's just a guy and his son trying to get by in an impossible situation. So real, so tragic.

See also 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.