Retractions, Vol. 1 (and useless rambling)

So it's time to start what I'm sure will become both a longstanding and time-honored tradition here at the JCCW ... yours truly carefully extracting his well-wedged foot from his mouth.

You may recall earlier today (OK, yesterday by the time anyone reads this) I called out the Birmingham News's Mike Perrin for apparently writing a feature story on BSC's Bucky McMillan that took less time to read than your average road sign. It was so short I wondered if it might have been a mistake in the web posting, then ignored that perfectly legitimate question to go into ALL CAPS MODE. The people deserved more Bucky, dammit!

Of course, yesterday afternoon, I got an e-mail from one of my "many" (read: "only") Birmingham readers letting me know that Perrin had of course written a full-length feature that had of course only gotten partially posted to the web site. In retrospect, seeing as how Perrin has been a professional journalist for many, many more moons than I have and also provides far-and-away BSC's best media coverage, giving him the benefit of the doubt would have been just a teensy-bit better move.

So anyways, in the extraordinarily slim chance that anyone's taking my opinion seriously, Mike Perrin wrote what I'm sure was a great article and I appreciate his effort.

But while I'm here, can I pointlessly gripe about something else? ESPN's ticker runs BSC scores beside the abbreviation "Birm. So.," and the joy of seeing the Panthers appear in Joe Lunardi's projection Monday was somewhat dulled by seeing it use the same code, which makes it look like Illinois is playing the University of the Phonetic Alphabet. Now, obviously Birmingham-Southern is too long and BSC would make sense to approximately .000000000003 percent of all viewers, but check it: Lunardi uses "Northwestern St" and "Northern Arizona," the first 15 characters with spaces and the second 16. "Birm.-Southern" or, even better IMHO, "B'ham-Southern" would require only 14, and in the process would look like the actual name of an institution of higher learning as opposed to a brand of Mongolian beer. Of course, now that I think about it, I think Northern Arizona goes by N. Arizona on the ticker and Northwestern St. does get abbreviated somehow. So pardon me: I think I'm just still scarred from those first few weeks of the DI transition, when just seeing BSC on the ticker was reason enough to bust out the kazoos. At least, until that fateful first ticker appearance on ESPN2, when I realized they'd labeled my school "Bir So," no periods, which ... you know, I don't even have an analogy here.

Recaps of Monday's action coming soon.