Yes, yes, my algorithm did even worse at picking the outcomes of various football games than I usually do. After a woeful 7-9 week, my record stands at 59-45. I'm approaching .500, and that's scary. I promise when I worked for Student Life I won the staff NFL Picks. Lucas went 9-7 to continue his yearlong pasting of me. He is a much-less-woeful 73-31.

I recently finished reading the book The Bourne Identity, which many of you will remember was also a movie early this year. I saw the movie before reading the book, which is usually the way to go because invariably the book is better than the movie. In this case it's just...different. And by different I might wildly different. If you look at the cast of characters on the movie page, for instance, only two of those characters (Bourne himself and Marie) even appear in the book, and Marie is similar in name alone. Which begs the question: why do an adaptation of a book when you're not even going to remotely stick to the plot? I like when movies portray things differently or add the visual quality to the action of a story, but they basically took the character of Jason Bourne and put him in an entirely different story with entirely different characters. Why then even use the Bourne name? Why not just go all the way and make a movie that people won't automatically write off as a "bad adaptation of a novel", which is usually what people think of movies based on books? I compare this to myself writing a screenplay called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", about a young wizard named Harry Potter who attends Washington University in St. Louis and must juggle homework and WashU's complete lack of a dating scene while ridding St. Louis of car thieves and rap stars. Sure it's the same character, but it's a whole different environment and story about the character. In a word: FanFic.