Everyone into the pools

A dual announcement:

First of all, it's never too early to announce that the BigFlax.com NCAA Tournament Challenge is returning for yet another installment. All are welcome (again, as long as I know who you are in at least some vague fashion), but be prepared to send five bucks through the mail in some form (unless you're Drew, I guess). To sign up, drop me a line at you know the place - bigflax at gmail dot com.

Second, a free pool. I believe that earlier I mentioned the "Last Guy to Get a Hit" award where the songs on my iTunes playlist were concerned. While we're still not quite at 20 or so songs left, we are getting much closer than we were (the total number unplayed is now at 996, or about 44% of the total). Meanwhile, "congratulations" to A.C. Newman's "The Battle for Straight Time," which at 9:00 this morning, just a couple minutes after I got to work, became the first track to play five times.

But I'm rambling. The point here is that, based on an idea from Drew, there will be a little contest to guess the last song to get played. (And don't worry, I have no intention of fixing the results by playing songs outside of shuffle. On the rare occasions I do such a thing, I always stop it before the end so that the play doesn't register with iTunes.) I'm a little unsure of how to go about it, though. Ideally I'd like everyone to choose a different song, but is a first-come, first-serve thing totally fair? I don't know. I also feel like I should award some kind of prize, but I'm not sure what exactly that would be. "A CD of my most-played songs," for example, is fitting but seems more than a bit lame, though it does have the added benefit of not costing me anything. I suppose it could be something like "a CD of 'Songs I Think You Should Hear,'" which could be tailored at least somewhat to the individual (depending on who it was). That at least could be somewhat interesting, and people share mix CDs all the time (Greg had a whole thing on his blog about it a while back). By the way, don't you love how I basically think out loud as I type in a lot of these entries? Anyway, feel free to sign up in the comments or via e-mail if you're interested in participating and if you have ideas regarding prize or format.

In other news, several movies I haven't yet seen because I'm an idiot won awards at the Golden Globes last night. My one comment on the matter is this: no matter how many Johnny Cash songs Joaquin Phoenix sang, Walk the Line is not a fucking musical, and it's absolutely scandalous how the Golden Globes lets movies get away with this ridiculous gerrymandering year after year (see: Ray just last year, among others) just in the name of winning awards. (Which Walk the Line did, taking Picture, Actor, and Actress, with absolutely no competition in each field.) I don't care if it's about a musician; Walk the Line is clearly a drama taking advantage of antiquated category names (how many musicals do we see a year now? One? Two, tops?) and it should have been forced to compete against its own kind, where presumably it would have been washed away by Brokeback Mountain's near-landslide. At the Oscars, where the categories are combined, Walk the Line will - I'm going to go ahead and guarantee it right now - be the only "Musical or Comedy" competitor from the Globes that gets so much as a nomination for any major award (with the possible exception of Best Actress which is, almost without exception, a thin category in most Oscar years, or maybe Screenplay only because they have so many spots to fill). It'll also be telling to note where Witherspoon goes; an Actress at the Globes because she was such a cinch under Musical/Comedy, it'll be interesting to see if she is pushed back to Supporting. Based on the Actress nominees at the Globes, though, I'm not sure there's a performance out there scary enough to back her off - the Actress in a Drama category looks shockingly weak, even by Hollywood standards.

Either way, I really need to see some movies in the next month and a half so I don't just feel stupid on Oscar night.