Tag Archives: prediction

World Cup recap: I called it

Germany beat Argentina in the World Cup final today, and I totally called it. Before the opening ceremonies, I had correctly predicted that it was going to be Argentina vs. Germany, and that Germany was going to win one nothing in extra time. Here’s an excerpt from my notes written last month:

It’s totally going to be Germany up against Argentina, with the Germans scoring the lone point during overtime. I tell this to people and they think I’m crazy, that there’s no way Brazil isn’t going to make it at least to the finals. But I’m telling you, I I had a dream the other night, the ghost of Pele warned me that two of Brazil’s top players are going to be injured. I know I don’t really follow soccer at all, but I just have such a strong gut feeling that my prediction is accurate. I guess a month from now we’ll see, right?

Right. I’m actually a little shocked. I mean, I make crazy predictions all the time. I predicted (incorrectly) that the New York Giants were going to win the Superbowl. I foresaw (also incorrectly) that I was going to beat my little brother Joe in a footrace at my parents’ house, down to the lake and back. He totally cheated, and so sure, I can call bullshit all day, but I technically didn’t win, and so I can’t say that I called that one.

But this one, wow, the World Cup. I called it. Are there any editors at any top tier soccer magazines or web sites reading this blog? If so, I’m going to have to ask you to all line up politely as you scramble to beg me to start writing for you. I’ll get back to all of you eventually, I just urge patience.

Anyway, I’ve never been more confident in my prediction skills now that I’ve successfully intuited a month in advance the results to one of the biggest sports events on the planet. I’m confident enough, actually, to make another claim: that this year, the New York Islanders are going to crush the Minnesota Wild to win the 2015 Stanley Cup. It’s going to happen. I’m calling it. I’m on a roll. It’s going to happen.

This is not the Super Bowl I predicted back in November

I made a big deal about predicting the winner of the 2014 Super Bowl way back when the New York Giants were 0 – 6. There was this whole blog post about how they were going to come back, make a run for the playoffs, and somehow win. And for a while anyway, it looked like I was right. Week after week, the G-Men racked up the wins, and sure, it was against mostly bad teams, but whatever, I looked like Nostradamus. I kept posting stuff on Facebook like, “I called it! It’s happening!” But then, toward the end of November, despite a ridiculous two-point conversion late in the fourth quarter, the Giants failed to stop the Cowboys from marching across the whole field to score a season-ending three-point goal.

It was humiliating. First of all, I don’t really know anything about football. And every time I talk about football, if the conversation gets past the three or four very current football talking points that I have memorized from a few carefully followed Twitter feeds, this fact becomes painfully obvious.

I’m trying as hard as I can to keep up. You know, besides actually watching entire football games, I’m really making a solid effort to stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the NFL. I joined a fantasy league. So yeah, I wanted to win that, I mean, there was money on the line. But even with my fantasy team, I found that it was easy just to read fantasy blogs, to copy the strategies of real football fans, people who really watched football games.

And it worked, kind of. I made it to the playoffs. But then I got knocked out of the playoffs. Now there wasn’t anything left to really ground my interest in the rest of the season. If only the Giants had lived up to my prediction, I probably would have been paying more attention.

I’m kind of an accidental Giants fan anyway. Up until two years ago, I never even tried to be a football fan. I think I went to a few Super Bowl parties, but I remember it being like ever year, I wouldn’t know who was actually playing in the Super Bowl until a couple of days before the big game.

Two years ago I decided to really try to get in on the action. All of my brothers watch football, so do my friends. Nothing was worse than hanging out with a bunch of people when all of the sudden the conversation takes a turn toward football. Someone would say something and it would snowball into an all-out, hour-long NFL debate. And I’d stand there and try to look engaged, all while paying attention for any window where I might be able to steer the conversation toward a direction where I could contribute something more than standing there awkwardly and smiling.

I committed to watching the Sunday games, and I found myself with a pretty big dilemma. Which New York team would be my team? The Jets or the Giants? I decided that I’d give both teams the entire season to convince me. And as the 2011 season dragged on, I’d hem and haw, “I don’t know, I haven’t made a decision yet, I think I’ll need another week.” Even after the Jets got eliminated, I’d say stuff like, “Well, I’ve seen how the Jets react to losing. I want to see if the Giants are sore losers.” Bullshit like that.

In fact, I never really planned on picking a team, I wanted to extend the theatrics year after year, forever playing the role of an annoying neutral sort-of spectator, but that year the Giants won the Super Bowl, so it was kind of like, all right, if I didn’t pick the Giants, well, I’d just be a dick. I could picture Eli Manning being like, “Dude, you gave us each a season to prove it to you, and we won the Super Bowl! Come on man!” So yeah, color me blue, I’m an accidental Giants fan. Which is cool, I mean, it actually makes some sense this way, almost like I was destined to be a Giants fan.

Anyway, this year kind of sucked for the G-Men. Although, Eli Manning’s brother Peyton is in the Super Bowl. What if something happened to the Broncos? Like, the entire team? I don’t want to say plane crash, because that’s really morbid, I don’t wish them lasting harm. But maybe like a really bad flu. The whole team gets it, they’re in no condition to play. Could the Broncos sign Eli and the rest of the Giants to temporary Broncos contracts?

If this happened, and then they won the Super Bowl, would my prediction still count? No, that’s crazy. Is it crazy? Yeah, it’s crazy. I’ll just have to be content in the belief that, somewhere out there in a parallel universe, the Giants are getting ready for the big game. Despite a terrible start to the season, they rallied, they did it.

“And this one guy called it, he wrote about it on his blog when they were 0 – 6.” That’s what all the sports anchors would say. Somewhere in the multiverse, I have to be famous for the prediction. Because, man, that would have been awesome.

NFL prediction: The Giants are going to win the Superbowl

The New York Giants are 0-6. It’s not looking good. But it’s going to start looking good. Yup, you’re hearing it first, right here, I’m calling it. The New York Giants, after a dismal start to the season, are about to go on an unprecedented winning streak, coming back from their lowest point in recent history. They’re going to win every single game, starting this Monday, culminating at the Super Bowl. It’s totally going to happen.

It’s going to start this week against the Vikings. Not the first half though. The first half is going to be a rough game of football for the G-Men. It’s going to be everything that you’ve come to associate with the 2013 Giants, interceptions, incomplete passes, just bad football. The Vikings will be up at the half.

But that’s it. Once the third quarter starts, that’s the last that you’re going to be seeing of a losing football team. They’re going to come back and crush Minnesota, I’m thinking a final score of like 37 – 17. And it’ll feel good, finally, after seven weeks, a win. It’ll take a lot of the pressure off of Eli, maybe he’ll sleep a little better this week, maybe Coughlin will stop calling him up every hour, “Eli. Are you studying those plays Eli? Because you said you’d study them last week and we still lost to Chicago. Eli?”

Giants fans will let out a collective sigh of relief, but it’ll be anything but a celebration. One out of seven is hardly anything to get pumped up about, and they’ll go online after the game and all of their Jets fans friends will still be posting really annoying status updates on Facebook, like, “Hahahah too bad I wanted to see the Giants go 0 – 16, J-E-T- …” you know how it goes.

And even after the next week, when the Giants beat the Eagles, New Yorkers are still going to be a little wary. And can you really blame them? I mean, it would foolish to get your hopes up after only two wins, wins that were preceded by six consecutive losses. I still remember back to week three, and I read something like, OK, the Giants only have like a nineteen percent chance of making the playoffs. And then the next week, when they lost again, I read that the Giants haven’t been 0 – 4 since the early nineties. And then week five, week six, I’m sure it was something equally abysmal, like, statistically speaking, the New York Giants aren’t even predicted to finish the season at all, like somewhere around week twelve, they’re all just going to give up.

But three weeks from now, when the Giants destroy the Raiders, fans might finally start to allow themselves to enjoy maybe just a few fleeting minutes of subdued optimism. Three in a row is pretty nice, those losses start to recede in the rearview mirror of the city’s memory, and plus, remember how I said destroyed? It’s going to be a huge victory. It’s going to be like one of those 37 – 0 games that, by the end of the third quarter, people won’t even really be paying attention to the TV anymore, it’ll be too much of a blowout.

You’ll see the negativity, stuff like, “OK, whatever, the Raiders suck, and so do the Eagles. Let’s see the Giants against a real team.” And then week ten’s going to roll around. Packers: destroyed. Week eleven. Cowboys: obliterated.

You guys starting to get a feel for where this is going? The Giants are going to go on such an unstoppable tear, that nobody’s even going to remember those first six games. It’s going to be all about, who can possibly defeat the Giants? And only once the playoffs start, once they start making those video montages of the entire season, that’s when the early season difficulties are going to make for a nice narrative arc.

“Everybody counted them out,” that’s how it’s going to go, playing highlights of interceptions and sacks before detailing their unprecedented winning streak. And I’ll watch the video and think, everybody counted them out but me. I knew they were going to come back. I called it.

And this is me, calling it. When everything happens just like I’m saying that it’s going to, I’m probably going to be visited by all sorts of government officials and scientists, they’ll be like, “Do you have access to some sort of time machine that we’re not aware of? We’re going to have to bring you in for some studies.” And I’ll go, I don’t care. Because seriously, fuck the Broncos, fuck every other team, it’s going to be the Giants, winning the Super Bowl in New York. Definitely.

Predicting the iPhone 5

The iPhone 5 is set to be announced today. When I say today, I mean two weeks ago. But I write these things in advance, and by the time this blog post goes up, right now, it’ll already have been old news. People definitely have them already. I’m sure there were lines of people gathering outside of Apple stores around the country, people spending actual days out of their lives making absolutely sure that they could be granted the privilege of forking over hundreds of dollars for a product, probably only marginally cooler than last year’s model, that I could get just as easily by walking into any cell phone store the next day. These things never sell out.

But to have it first. That’s the dream right? Even if it’s just twelve hours, that’s twelve hours of getting to walk around town with an iPhone 5, making everyone using an iPhone 4S, or worse, and iPhone 4, or even worse, an iPhone 3GS, or even much, much, much, worse, some sort of an Android phone, feel like the complete losers that they know they already are.

But this isn’t about making fun of those losers without the iPhone 5. This is about me predicting all of the cool new features the iPhone 5 is going to have. I’m calling them right here, and like I said, I’m writing this before the announcement, so when I naturally call everything correctly, everyone is going to be like, “Yeah right Rob. I don’t believe you for a second. You probably wrote this after the announcement.” Whatever. Haters gonna hate, right?

My first prediction involves the screen. Specifically, instead of having a screen on one side, and a glass coating on the other side, the new iPhone is going to have a screen on one side, and another screen on the other side. That’s right, two screens. It’s going to be so cool. When you’re walking around with your new phone, you’ll be able to program all sorts of cool stuff to be displayed on the screen facing the rest of the world.

Like you could have the screen be an image of the iPhone home screen. And could you walk around going, “Hello? Hello?” really loudly. And some passerby might come up to you and say, “Hey, buddy, I think you’re holding your iPhone backwards,” and then you can just flip it around, revealing the other screen, and you can say something like, “Gotcha!” and that person will instantly realize that you’re using the iPhone 5. Classic. And then that person will take out their own much inferior phone, and they’ll look at it, unlock the touch screen, and then flip it around, just imagining what it would be like to have two screens, but their imagination isn’t capable of doing it, nobody’s is really, so they’ll just keep standing there, flipping it back and forth, not able to comprehend what it must be like for you, with your iPhone 5, two screens, playing pranks on random strangers.

And that’s only one possible application of the second screen. You could make the other side look like a picture of your ear. So that way people would think that it’s just a piece of glass, like looking right through the phone to your ear. They’re going to call it chameleon mode. It’s going to be nuts. Or, you could make it look like a picture of your brain, and people would say, “Whoa! I can totally see right through to your brain!” That’s going to be sick.

But the only problem is going to be the edges of the phone, the metal border. Honestly, what’s the point of having two screens if you have to look at a stupid piece of metal holding them together? That’s why on the iPhone 5, the border is going to be a screen also. It’ll be really thin, obviously, but it’ll be an actual screen. And there’s no limit to what you’ll be able to do with this wraparound screen. You could have a line of text scrolling around the edge, like a marquee, like if you’re on the phone and somebody walks up to you to try to talk, you could just run a loop of text, something like, “Uh, can’t you see that I’m on my iPhone 5?” And they’ll read it and get the message, literally.

But the iPhone, well, sometimes it’s a little two-dimensional, don’t you think? Haven’t you ever seen those phones that open up, and inside there’s like a keyboard or something? Well, I’m pretty sure the iPhone 5 is going to open up in the middle, but keyboards are so primitive. Inside there are going to be two more screens. So you’ll really have four screens. Four and a quarter screens if you count the screen that wraps around the outside of the phone.

Why four screens? Isn’t it obvious? How many times do you see people who have dropped their phones, and the whole screen shatters and splinters? It still works, but it’s really ugly and broken looking. With four screens, your iPhone should theoretically last four times as long. All you have to do is flip one of the halves inside out.

But it gets even better. The two halves can actually separate into two thinner independent phones. So if you’re really bored, all you have to do is find twenty-six other people, get them together, and you can all run this app where each half becomes one card in a deck. That way you can all start playing card games. Well, some of you can take turns playing card games. I don’t know any twenty-six person card games. But, bonus, if you find hundreds of people with iPod Nanos, you can program each Nano to look like a poker chip, and you can use those to gamble.

Yeah, you’re probably reading this and thinking that there’s no way that I called it all. But I did. I’m telling you, they’re not launching the iPhone 5 until later today. I’ve written this before, but it’s worth repeating, that right after Steve Jobs died, his genius energy must have been transferred by the universe into me, because there has to be one genius inventor alive at all times, and I’ve been selected, because I totally called it.