The other day I watched a rerun of Baltimore Colts at Buffalo Bills from last season on the NFL Network. The sight of two mediocre teams trying to find a way a to win served as a harsh reminder of the fact that the New England Patriots one day will return to mediocrity. It’s unavoidable. Here’s how it could happen:

1) Quarterback Tom Brady retires after the end of the 2010 season, his right shoulder shot, tired of chasing that elusive fourth Super Bowl victory.

2) Head Coach Bill Belichick decides to follow suit when he realizes his personnel cupboard is empty, his roster stocked with aging veterans and young players with little promise, and his budgets ever stingier because of unexpectedly weak profits generated by the Patriots Place shopping center. “Belicheat Beliquits!” blares NY Post’s front page.

3) The Krafts realize the gravity of the situation but fail to re-staff the football and personnel operations with adequately competent leaders. Instead of coveting a chance to play for the Patriots, veteran free agents shun the franchise for being cheap and in disarray. In 2013, the Patriots go 5-11. The Revolution’s 2014 home opener draws a bigger crowd than the Patriots’ 2013 season finale.

Well, such a development would still be better than those dreadful pre-Kraft years, that’s for sure, but I really hope the franchise finds a way to rejuvenate once the Belichick/Brady era comes to an end.

We don’t have enough jobs!

We don’t have enough workers!

2007 edition.

2006 edition.

It’s almost surprising that there still are businesses on the Cape that caters to tourists, isn’t it? Other than for the area’s enormous popularity with tourists.

Dan Kennedy has a write-up on Adam Gaffin and his site Universal Hub in the latest issue of MassINC’s magazine Commonwealth. Universal Hub is a bit of a big deal for many of us bloggers in Boston and people who cover or influence the city for profit should probably follow it on a regular basis. As Kennedy mentions in his article, Gaffin is a pretty old-school journalist who won’t serve you any silly bloggers-shall-rule-the-Earth rhetoric.

Kennedy and Gaffin were both members of a panel at a MassINC sponsored event last year that discussed young adults and their news consumption.

Tom Casale claimed on PFW In Progress today that Comcast in New England used a generic show description in its program guide for the episode of South Park last week that called New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick a cheater. According to Casale, an unnamed source at Comcast believed an episode-specific description wasn’t “appropriate for this area.” (You can listen to the show here (South Park is discussed in the last five minutes or so)).

The episode, “Eek,a Penis,” was, in my opinion, hit-and-miss, as is often the case with South Park. What probably annoyed me the most was that Eric Cartman (posing as Cartmenez, a Chicano-nationalist teacher) said the Patriots violated league rules by videotaping opposing defenses. In reality, they violated the rules by video taping opposing teams’ coaches on the sideline. However, the line How do I reach these kiiids? is a definite keeper.

Boston’s second free daily newspaper, BostonNow (or perhaps it is, or was, Boston Now) has folded. It launched last year, backed by an Icelandic company, with the nominally rather ambitious goal of marrying and blending web and printed content in one extensible orgasm of professional and amateur journalism. In reality it became an almost indescribably awful rag. The professional journalism in the newspaper was abysmal and the thoroughly mediocre excerpts from various local blogs embarrassing. BostonNow occasionally carried full-page four-color ads from H&M featuring hot babes, which prompted the obvious joke: I read if for the H&M ads!

Reactions to the newspaper’s demise:

Local freelance writer says see ya!

Dan Kennedy - incredibly - says Mission: Accomplished. OK, he actually says a bit more than that.

Will Iceland now return to pre-industrial poverty?

Boston Magazine does the cha-cha on Now’s grave.

Final words: It’s now been proven beyond a doubt that Mainland Scandinavians (Swedes and Norwegians, specifically) rule New Media. Eat cod, ye volcano islanders!

Last night I watched some of the Texas Longhorns’ spring game on the Fox College Sports channel. It wasn’t uplifting. Longhorns run a variation of that awful West Virginia offense which is basically little more than pickup basketball with a little bit of blocking and tackling thrown in for the heck of it. Almost every play the Longhorns ran looked the same: Three wide receivers, one tight end, shotgun and a runningback, with the quarterback showing a handoff - fake or actual - to the runningback before running in the other direction.

I saw two different reverses. On one the quarterback lateraled the ball to a slot receiver who took it around the corner and almost scored a touchdown thanks to great blocking downfield by a wide receiver. The other was a hilariously stupid play where the quarterback handed off to the runningback before rolling right, the runningback then lateraled it to the slot receiver who was promptly slammed to the ground by the left defensive end who had - as one could have foreseen - been led to the point of attack by the quarterback rolling out (since the fake hand-off rollout is standard fare in the West Virginia offense defensive ends tend to guard against the quarterback roll).

I assume the execution will get a lot better as the season rolls around and progresses, but fundamentally the Longhorns’ offense strikes me as laziness that will be camouflaged by athletic superiority ten times. Ten times. Not eleven, not twelve, not thirteen and sure as heck not fourteen times. Ten.

The player who impressed me the most was a kid named Kirkendoll, a sophomore wide receiver who caught an ill-advised pass on a third down and long situation. The right guard on first-string quarterback Colt McCoy’s squad showed good mobility, power and balance on one of the running plays (I don’t remember whether McCoy played for “Pride” or “Tradition”, as the Longhorns spring-game squads are known).

To me organized sports should be about practice and preparation augmenting talent, but the West Virginia offense and its off shoots are more or less just displays of talent. Read one guy and run. That’s pretty much it. Not terribly impressive, but perhaps all that can be handled in today’s Division-1 football with its draconian restrictions on scholarships and practice time.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s blatant lie that she had to contend with sniper fire or the threat of sniper fire when she landed Tusla in Bosnia in 1996 could be seen as an example of her rotten, devilish, say-anything, no-good soul. That’s not how I think of the Senator, and I that’s not what I think the episode tells us. No, I think her lie more serves as an example of how many of us don’t have any particularly exciting stories to tell. So we embellish the meager stories we do have.

My personal whopper is the story of how I saved a dog from drowning. I did actually save the dog from something - mental stress and physical discomfort at minimum - but death probably wasn’t it. Harm and injury? Sure. But death? Probably only if the dog didn’t know how to swim or if its collar had strangled it (which, granted, could have happened, but probably wouldn’t have). But still, even if you allow for the possibility that the dog had died had I not come to its aid, it’s not that much of a story, is it? It doesn’t exactly make me a Raoul Wallenberg or Carl Gustav von Rosen, does it? Yet, that’s the story I’ve got and I swear to God I’ll use if I ever run for office (”What a cute puppy you’ve brought to my campaign rally! I once saved…”).

When asked to examplify the violent environment Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick grew up in in South Side Chicago he responded that a gang member once tossed a soda can at his head. That’s the kind of story you’d expect a kid from Concord to tell in an earnest effort to relate to the hardships of growing in South Side Chicago. I’m guessing the Governor will recall a few more exciting stories in his book, scheduled for release in 2010.

It’s not surprising that police officers, firefighters and combat veterans usually have the most exciting stories to tell. A friend of mine served in the Vietnam War. His armored unit ran into an ambush in Cambodia. It was wild scene. RPGs disabling the tanks, machinegun fire cutting up crew members as they were trying to drag wounded soldiers to safety. I’m sure it looked like a war zone, as people are apt say when they describe a burnt-out apartment building.

Few people have experiences like that to talk about. So we embellish. Of course, what is more common is that people embellish the packaging of a story. They might for example say “I once saved a dog from drowning” but when they they tell the story its filled with excitement-dampening qualifiers.

Senator Clinton’s story was a bit egregious in that she didn’t just embellish the characterization or context of her story but also almost all of its contents, which is a bit worse than merely hyping it. But what the heck, when you’re out campaigning, speaking and speaking and speaking, you’re bound to screw up one way or another, either by sticking to the script or straying from it. Back in my days of political activism I was told the story of a fellow party member who’d fallen into delivering his stump speech of talking about the importance of freedom to choose where to live. Only he delivered the speech in a prison, addressing inmates. Which reminds me of the time I rode in the back of a police car in Washington, D.C., looking for a burglar…

Fred Kirsch mentioned today on PFW In Progress that the official website of the New England Patriots, Patriots.com, suffered a slight decline in traffic from March 2007 to March 2008, the first time ever traffic to the site declined year-over-year. I suppose there’s perhaps a bit of fatigue on the margin among Patriots fans after two heartbreaking season-ending losses.

Today’s show also includes snippets from last Thursday’s outstanding argument between Tom Casale and Paul Perillo which was an off-shoot from an argument between Perillo and Kirsch about, hold on to your hats, the force-out rule. PFW In Progress is great entertainment. The Golden Age of Podcasts, really.

Here are a few pictures my dad took last summer in the Old Country. A couple of birds were released into the wild by Nordens Ark, an organization that works to preserve and strengthen endangered species.

We can use the updated county population estimates that were released by the United States Census Bureau last week to calculate metropolitan Boston’s estimated population in 2007.

A metropolitan area has an urban core of at 50,000 people and consists of the the surrounding geographic components that are linked to the core through commerce, commuting and other activities. A micropolitan area has an urban core of at least 10,000 people but less than 50,000.

The 800-pound metropolitan gorilla in New England is, of course, Boston, or as the Census Bureau elegantly calls it, using the definition created by the federal Office of Management and Budget, Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH. It consists of Suffolk, Norfolk, Plymouth, Middlesex, and Essex counties in Massachusetts, and Rockingham and Strafford counties in New Hampshire. It is divided into Boston-Quincy, MA (Suffolk, Norfolk, and Plymouth counties), Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA (Middlesex county), Essex county (MA), and Rockingham County-Strafford County (NH).

The estimated population for metropolitan Boston in 2007 is 4,482,857, which is 17,183 - or 0.4% - more than in 2006. The estimated population growth from 2000 to 2007 is 2.1%, or 91,513 people.

The table below shows the population estimates for metropolitan Boston and its main geographic components from 2000 to 2007.

Abbreviations:

B-C-Q, MA-NH = Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH.
B-Q, MA = Boston-Quincy, MA.
C-N-F, MA = Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA.
Essex, MA = Essex County, MA.
R-S, NH = Rockingham County-Strafford County, NH
Cen. = 2000 population count.
% = Percentage change 2000 (census) - 2007.

[3/27/2008 update: Don't take my word for it. Here's the Census Bureau's press release with links to relevant tables.]

(You can of course come up with your definition of what metropolitan Boston is and isn’t. For example, Massachusetts’s legislature has created what it calls Metropolitan Area Planning Council, where the “metropolitan area” covers Boston and 100 surrounding communities (yes, exactly 100 towns and cities). But that’s not the definition used here).