By Brendan Loy

The pools are, as always, FREE to enter. Winners of the men’s & women’s NCAA pools will (eventually*) get a t-shirt or equivalent prize. More importantly, all winners will attain eternal glory.

Eternal Glory!

Complete rules here. Entry links below. Good luck!

Men’s NCAA Tournament Pool:
• Standings here!
• Scoring system: 3-4-7-10-16-24-33.
• View everyone’s picks as a printable PDF.
• NOTE: Pursuant to Rule 4 and Option 3, First Four picks have been “made correct.” This does not impact whether people get credit for their First Four predictions, but it means that if you picked, say, Cal to the Sweet 16, and USF goes to the Sweet 16 instead, you get credit for those later rounds as if you’d picked USF. (But you still don’t get credit for the First Four game itself. Make sense?)

Women’s NCAA Tournament Pool:
• Standings here!
• Scoring system: 4-7-11-17-24-33.
• View everyone’s picks as a printable PDF.

NIT Pool:
• Standings here!
• Scoring system: 7-10-15-20-25.
• View everyone’s picks as a printable PDF.

*I’m…uh…three years behind on championship t-shirts/prizes, I believe. Yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I’m hoping to finally catch up this month (but I said that last year too). So, bottom line, don’t play for the t-shirts; play for the Eternal Glory. :)

P.S. You can re-submit your bracket with changed picks as many times as you want (up until the deadline, of course). I will assume that the last bracket you submit is the “correct” one, unless you tell me otherwise. If you just want to make a few small changes to a previously submitted bracket, leave a comment here, or e-mail me at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com, and I can change it for you.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: If you make changes to any part of the bracket — including, say, the East Region?? — and you submit those changes AFTER some First Four games have already started, you will lose any points you might have gotten for those First Four games, even if your changes are unrelated. Gotta be consistent.)

UPDATE: The pools now have their own Facebook Page, which I think looks pretty slick with the new “Page” layout. If you’re on Facebook, I strongly encourage you to “Like” the pools’ Page, as I will be posting updates there (as well as here) during the tournament. You should also follow me on Twitter, @brendanloy and @MileHighMids, if you aren’t already.

By Brendan Loy

WHEEEE!!!!! We’re two days away from my favorite day of the year, Christmas morning Selection Sunday, and you know what that means: BRACKETS!!! Also, my 17th annual (free) Living Room Times Basketball Pools (Men’s NCAA, Women’s NCAA and NIT).

Come back here Sunday night or Monday to sign up. YAY!!! I. Can’t. Wait.

As a matter of fact, Loyette got so excited when she saw my Giant Bracket on the wall, she demanded to fill out a bracket immediately. So we’re doing a family Big East Bracket Contest. Here she is, updating Loyacita’s bracket this morning:

Right now, the preschoolers are kicking the grownups’ butts. Heading into the semifinals, the score is Loyette 17, Loyacita 17, Becky 15, Brendan 12. LOL.

By Brendan Loy

My trip to Arkansas is off, cancelled ~7 hours before it was to begin, after Denver’s season ended in heartbreak at the hands of Western Kentucky in the Sun Belt semifinals last night. Here’s video of my reaction to the Pioneers’ shot at winning or tying the game in the final seconds, and then WKU’s game-sealing free throws at the other end:

Sigh.

Meanwhile, the college my mom attended for her first 2 years (before transferring to Illinois), Western Illinois, stunned #1 seed Oral Roberts in the Summit League semis last night, and will play for their first-ever NCAA Tournament berth tonight.

By Brendan Loy

Tomorrow at 6:00 AM, I may be on board a plane departing Denver for Little Rock, Arkansas. Or I may not. I’ve already started packing, but I won’t know whether I’m actually traveling tomorrow until around 9:30 PM tonight — at which point I’ll be roughly six hours away from needing to leave for the airport, if I’m going.

That’s because my travel plans hinge on whether the Denver men’s basketball team beats Western Kentucky in a Sun Belt semifinal tonight. Full explanation here. Complete coverage over at my DU hoops blog, Mile High Mids.

I’ll be live-tweeting tonight’s semifinal (tip-off is 7:30 PM MDT) and, hopefully, a trip to Arkansas and tomorrow night’s championship game (winner goes to the NCAAs). We shall see. Anyway, here’s the liveblog window:

By Brendan Loy

All I can say about this is…

[WARNING: profane tweet after the jump]

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By Brendan Loy

By popular demand (by which I mean Becky said I should do it), I’ve set up a Live Chat for tonight’s Academy Awards after all.

More on that in a second, but first, join my 8th annual Oscar Pool!

The ABC broadcast starts at 5:00 PM Mountain Time, the actual awards at 5:30 PM, but you can start chatting whenever you want. To participate, you’ll need to log in below via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (does anyone still use MySpace?) or OpenID.

(The chat will also auto-import tweets with the hashtag #LRToscars, as well as any tweets by, or mentioning, Becky or me.)

Whether I live-update Oscar Pool results remains to be seen.

By Brendan Loy

I’ve very, very late to this… so late that it’s already Oscar Day on the East Coast… but it’s time to (quickly!) sign up for the 8th annual Living Room Times Oscar Pool!

Frankly, I completely forgot until late in the week that this was coming up, and then I was too busy to get it set up, until tonight. I had almost given up on doing a pool at all… until I started getting Twitter and Facebook inquiries… and then Becky convinced me that “you can’t just not have an Oscar Pool!”

Anyway, the deadline to enter is Sunday at 5:30 PM Mountain Time. Entering the pool is, of course, free. The prize, as per usual: eternal glory!

As always, contestants are urged to enter using their full name, or alternatively, a Twitter handle, or other readily recognizable partial name or nickname/pseudonym. After all, what’s the point of “bragging rights” if I don’t know who you are?

The scoring system, once again, is 12 points for Best Picture, 9 apiece for the directing and lead acting categories, 6 each for the supporting acting categories, 4 each for the screenplay categories, 2 each for documentary feature, animated feature, foreign film, cinematography and original score, and 1 per award for everything else.

I’m unlikely to do a “liveblog” this year [LIVE CHAT HERE!], but if nothing else I will post results here next week. So: get in the pool!

P.S. Some Oscar-prediction resources:
• Roger Ebert’s predictions
• GoldDerby summary of experts’ predictions
• Doc’s Sports Oscars odds
• EasyOdds Oscars betting

By Brendan Loy

Tonight, starting sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 PM Mountain Time, I’ll be live-tweeting from a Colorado GOP Precinct Caucus at Denver West High School (PDF map) as an “observer.” (They allow that.) Then, I’ll drive two miles down the road and, continuing my rally-hopping ways, I will attend Mitt Romney’s victory party. Should be fun! My tweets will all appear here, along with any tweets directed at me, and anything I retweet:

By Brendan Loy

I haven’t blogged here very much this season about University of Denver basketball — I’ve kept that over at Mile High Mids and the Mid-Majority — but Saturday’s game experience was pretty epic, as Denver upset Middle Tennessee State in front of a national TV audience, and the students (and DU Bally and I) rushed the court. You can read all about it here.

By Brendan Loy

For most of us, myself included, today is Super Bowl Sunday. But for some in the quirky Mid-Majority cult community, it’s the start of Last Man — or, if you prefer, #lastman — the annual game of trying to avoid learning the result of the Super Bowl (a.k.a. #TheKnowledge) for as long as possible. You might remember this from last year.

Kyle Whelliston, the originator of the game, apparently will not be publicly participating via Twitter this year, but some others will be. I’ve created a liveblog window to track all tweets (give or take a few that CoverItLive drops; its Twitter search engine can be a bit wonky) using the hashtags #lastman, #findthelastman, or #theknowledge.

Good luck, Knowledge Runners! And to everyone else, enjoy the game! Go Giants!

By Brendan Loy

With the GOP race still nominally undecided (though, c’mon, we all know how this ends), the Colorado Caucuses next Tuesday have become important, and as a result, we’ve got candidates in town! Yay! For a political junkie like yours truly, this is obviously exciting. So, on Tuesday, I went to a Ron Paul rally in Denver, and on Wednesday, I went to a Rick Santorum rally in Colorado Springs. :)

Lest you think this is odd, recall that I went to an Obama rally and a Palin rally in the last three days before the 2008 election. Heh.

Anyway, after the jump, via Storify, my archived live-tweeting of both rallies (including selected replies), with lots of photos and some videos. (Just keep scrolling, and the embedded Storify window will keep expanding as you scroll down.)

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By Brendan Loy

On this night of Gingrich triumph and GOP establishment #PANIC, it’s worth looking back to last May, when Newt’s campaign was an unmitigated disaster, and a subject of abject mockery from sea to shining sea, as best represented by this utterly hilarious Stephen Colbert / John Lithgow clip:

P.S. Romney’s still gonna win the nomination, y’know. Still about a 90% chance of that, I’d say, Intrade’s crazy numbers be damned. And the idea that Gingrich will win it… that’s still so implausible, I staked a dinner bet on the fact that it won’t happen.

By Becky Loy

I’m a big Costco fan. I’m pretty sure that I save money going there. And frankly, who doesn’t love buying 200 rolls of toilet paper at a pop so you don’t have to think about it for a couple of months? I tend to hit Costco every 6-8 weeks and when I go, I stock up. This is where you have to take a long term vision of your grocery budget because if you’re stuck in a $75 per week place, you’d never go to Costco.

There are a few staples that I love to buy at Costco that I save a pretty penny on. For example, I nabbed 10lbs of sugar, 50lbs of flour, 6lbs of tortilla chips, 3 lbs of coffee, 4lbs of shredded cheese and 2.5lbs of peanuts, among other things. The tab for food stuffs? $191.51. We’ll see how that jives with our grocery budget over the next few weeks.

This week, our meal plan looks like this:

Thursday: grilled cheese, tomato soup and apples
Friday: pizza and pears
Saturday: sausage, mashed potatoes and oranges
Sunday: Ethiopian lentil stew, rice, green beans and cantaloupe
Monday: chicken and broccoli casserole, rice and cantaloupe
Tuesday: black bean and quinoa burritos with guacamole, oranges
Wednesday: leftovers

The tab at my grocery store? $47.05.

So, for those of you keeping score, I’ve spent $378.51 out of the $400 we have budgeted for groceries this month. Clearly, we’re going to spend a bit more than $400 since I plan to go to the grocery store one more time this month. But, I’ve set myself up beautifully to be under budget in February because I have the house completely stocked after my Costco trip. That’s where a little bit of long term vision is an asset.

You may also notice that we don’t eat a ton of meat. That’s true. We go meatless about half the time. Ever since I had massive tofu cravings during my third pregnancy (yes, I know that’s strange), I’ve had less of a taste for meat so I tend to cook and eat less of it.

Anyway, my savings tips this week?

If you have a club membership, exploit it for bulk savings. I save a ton of money buying things like artichokes and peanuts in bulk.

Use coupons. I subscribe to my Sunday paper for the coupons. When online coupons become more digitized and less piss-away-your-printer-ink-for-$.35-off-your-yogurt, I’ll make the switch. Anyway, for $54, I get the Sunday paper year round. I save an average of $3/week off my groceries by using coupons, occasionally much more. That’s about $160/year. Minus the cost of the paper, call it $100. Does it take a little effort? Yup. But I’m not the type to see $100 on the ground and walk by it because I’m too lazy to bend over.

You can check out websites like coupon mom that match the coupons in your Sunday paper with sales at your local grocery store to get the best savings. I get a lot of free toothpaste that way.

Happy eating!