Weak For

I bought myself one of those fancy new high definition television sets last week. There were some pimply boys from some group called the "Geek Squad" who wanted to help install it, but they wanted money. Instead I gave some guys down the street a case of Maker's Mark (a gift from my good friend Pat Summerall) to set it up for me and it's working great. The key is to let those guys do a shot first, then they're hooked on the flavor and they'll get it up and running in a hurry.

This all started when I was having a drink or three with my good friend Chris Fowler a couple weeks ago. He told me that hockey looked great on high definition and I was looking forward to the Penguins' season anyway.

After we got a bit further along he said "Beeno, I've been meaning to tell you for some time, I know the real reason ESPN took you off their telecasts".

"Okay, Chris, I'm all ears. And neck".

"That's ironic, Beeno, that was the reason. They were shifting to these new high-def broadcasts, did some test-marketing, and realized that your neck, chins, and pockmarks on a screen in that much detail would scare away viewers. Your career was done in by HDTV".

Now I've heard of House and Garbage Television, HGTV, but I've never heard of this HDTV network.

I asked my good friend Mike Tirico if he'd heard of HDTV and he started talking about this on demand service and how he liked to call it "creaming video". I don't understand Mike at times.

Thanks to the higher quality image, I'm now able to read the ESPN scroll, also known as "the crawl", at the bottom of the screen, the one with all the college football scores. And just like with the acronym HDTV, I am not certain about some of the school acronyms they're using.

I get the obvious ones like Fresno State University and U-Cal Los Altos. But lots of schools have changed their names of late.

I saw that Kansas was playing the Sam Houston Institute of Technology, but never saw the score on the crawl. I asked my good friend Lee Corso where I could find the Sam Houston Institute of Technology's acronym and he said "all over my glass coffee table". I don't understand Lee at times.

Lots of schools have changed their names, that's part of the confusion. Kent State became Kent then became Kent State again. Just about every directional school in Louisiana has come up with a new name. And who can forget when Western Texas decided to become the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP?

I usually keep up on these things, but I saw a score on the crawl that confused me. AIR FORCE was locked in a tight battle with UTAH. Finally I realized that there must have been another name change and our flyboys were taking on the University of Texas at Houston.

Meanwhile, from the looks of things, the regular TEXAS team was playing against Rhode Island Continuing Education, or RICE. I didn't even know that they let night students have football teams. Pretty soon that University of Phoenix is going to get into football in a big way, they're so loaded I bet they can even build their own stadium.

I must apologize for an error I made last week. I said that Tennessee had blown out Alabama at Birmingham. I have been informed by several of you that there is a satellite campus for Alabama, located in Birmingham. This Alabama University-Birmingham played a tight game last week and LSU narrowly beat AUB.

The Big Ten vs. MAC challenge concluded on a good note for the MAC, with Notre Dame losing to the Michigan State Fighting Chippewas. I saw on the crawl that Michigan was playing Brigham Young East, but I never got a result on that matchup. And Purdue knocked off the Semen U Leaky Trojans.

Speaking of Trojans and the Big Ten, I notice that Ohio State had a rematch against the same team that beat them a week earlier, only this time in Ohio Stadium. It used to be that teams worked out three-game deals with opponents, with the winner of the first game getting to host the third game, but those games were played a year apart. I'm not sure about this week to week rematch policy, and I guess that the rubber game will be hosted by the Trojans.

This week's Song Girl is Megan from the 2001 squad. Megan, a very bright gal and a pre-med student, became famous during the USC/UCLA game that year. Informed that the game was informally known as "The Cheerleader Bowel", she decided to raise awareness, sedated her teammates, and performed colonoscopies.

There was a tragic ending to the well-intended event, as instead of using the usual fiber optic equipment to do the procedures, she borrowed one of the ABC cameras. Let's just say that one month later the rest of the squad wasn't able to perform at the bowel.