ESPN is saying that the Niners will go 13-3 this year! Good news indeed… although I can’t help but scratch my head over author Gregg Easterbrook’s decision to present his predictions in haiku form. I should note that Easterbrook claims to be “the first Brookings [Institution] scholar ever to write a pro football column.” That might very well be true. After all, there is some precedence for the confluence of the sports world and academia. I’m sure we all remember Keith Olbermann’s brief and ultimately tragic stint at the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy. Well, I’m sure those poor Micronesians haven’t forgotten, anyway.

Now if you want good haikus, you can do no better than the Periodic Table of Haiku. Yes, they have every single one. Yes, even dysprosium! (Everyone and their mother yammering about dysprosium these days, driving me crazy.) Heck, they even have haikus for undiscovered elements, including Ununoctium (oy, the scandal). Now that’s thorough. By the way, since I know everyone is worked up over the hot, hot Ununoctium scandal: does it make any sense, any sense at all, to falsify one’s data? I don’t know what this Victor Ninov fellow was thinking. Wasn’t it Lincoln who told us that you can’t fool all of the nuclear physicists all of the time?

Finally, don’t these guys seem like a really fun bunch of real-estate lawyers? I mean, don’t they? Eh? Well, maybe it’s just me. (Link, err, stolen from Who Stole the Tarts?.)