It’s Academy Award nomination season again – the time of year I reveal how few new movies I watch. Let’s just hope I have improved on last year’s dismal record.

Thank goodness for Inception. If it weren’t for that, I’d have been shutout two years in a row. I want to see Toy Story 3, Black Swan, 127 Hours, The Fighter, and True Grit, which would bring my grand total up to a monstrous (for me) 17. But only the first of those is out on DVD (it’s at the top of my queue). Maybe it’s time to go to the theater. Or search for leaked screeners.

I tried to make a conscious effort to split my time half-and-half between fiction and non-fiction this year. I started out the year with three non-fiction books in a row, so I obviously didn’t get off to a great start. But I ended the year with 6 fiction and 9 non-fiction (if you count my still-ongoing reread of Lord of the Rings as a single book), so I don’t think I did too bad.

• As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires by Bruce Weber - This story changed the way that I think about baseball. There aren't two teams on the field, there are three. And one team can never win, they are only ever ignored or reviled. And the challenge before them is just as hard as the one the actual players have to do.
• Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven Levitt
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
• The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
• Rework by Jason Fried - Wins the coveted Logan's Favorite Book of 2010 award, and is a strong early favorite for Logan's Favorite Book of the Decade. The philosophy that the guys behind 37signals operate their business under resonate incredibly deeply. When I run a company, this will be my bible.
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice
• An Imaginary Tale: The Story of i by Paul Nahin
• The Algorithm Design Manual by Stephen Skiena
• The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams - This was the last remaining book of his that I had never read. Reading the two Dirk Gently books has been a treat. It was something like finding an unknown painting by an old master. It's the same tilted voice I grew up loving, but with a story I wasn't familiar with.
• The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever by John Feinstein
• The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
• The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien - This is a re-read. Every time I read these books, I'm reminded how much of an amazing trilogy the movies were, but also how much of a pale imitation they are of the depth of the books. (I'm still reading Return of the King.) I have a four-volume boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. One of my earliest memories is my dad reading me the passage through Mirkwood out of this book. This fall, I thought I had left The Hobbit in a hotel room in New Hampshire, and I got surprisingly emotional about it. Luckily, it just slid under the driver's seat in my car.

See also 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

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?

Since April 19, the Yankees are 71-47, Rays are 72-47, and the Red Sox are 70-48. It’s not that the Sox have been bad. In fact, in 2009 between games 13 and 131 they were 70-48, and in 2008 they were 69-49. They have been just as good as in previous years. The problem is that the team fell to a quick deficit and has been trying to catch two other extremely good teams. There’s a good chance the AL East will finish the year with two teams with 100+ wins, and Boston with 90+ wins. I’m almost certain this hasn’t happened as long as there have been divisions (1969). The closest I can find is 1977, when the top three teams in the AL East finished with 100, 97, and 97 wins respectively. But remember, that was a six-team division, not four.

To look at this season and draw the conclusion that we’ve had a bad year is to ignore the actual facts. We just haven’t had as good of a year as we needed to have in order to make up our losses in the first couple of weeks.

Tomorrow, it will be 2010.