Welcome to the big leagues?

So I am pleased to be able to say that my first contribution to Yahoo! Sports' online magazine ThePostGame.com was chosen (and as of this post is still featured) as the main story on the home page, and has also spent some time as the lead story on Yahoo! itself. All I can say is... Yahoo!

Oh, by the way, the story is titled "The Blurry Line Between Sports and Assault," and was intended as a somewhat lighthearted look at a serious issue: the boundary between competitive drive and injurious intent that, frankly, can make much of sports appealing to so many fans. But apparently my observation—that throwing a solid object (like, say, a baseball) directly at someone with the intention, or at least full understanding, that it could hit him before he can get out of the way would be considered felony assault in the real world—really angered some people. I am flattered by the fact my story has gotten so many comments; less so by the general themes of their content. I have been called a moron and an idiot (or rather, "a idiot"), as well as both "retarded" and "pedantic." But this is one of my favorites:

how bad is the yahoo writing going to get before they get new people?

Awesome. I have written one article—which at that point had been online for maybe an hour or two—and I am already one of the grizzled old hacks who needs to be pushed aside in favor of new blood.

Ah, well. Guess I'll just shake it off and jog to first.

Intelligible player downfield...

Thankfully, now that the NFL lockout is over, we can get back to hearing SAT words being used properly and effectively. At least in certain cases. Today, there's this dispatch, on new Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Nnamdi Asomugha, from the Reading Eagle:*

"There was a market out there with numbers that the media assumed I wanted," Asomugha said. " It's funny, you know, you don't pay as much attention to it because everything happened so fast, but you heard the apocryphal stories about the things that I'm expecting as far as numbers."

Apocryphal. I had to check my tape recorder to make sure that's what he said. Then I looked it up to make sure again.

A star on the field, his vocabulary is apparently at an All-Pro level, too.

*I know, I know. For the record, that's the Reading Eagle, a newspaper from the town in Pennsylvania, not the "reading Eagle," as in "a Philadelphia pro football player who can see and comprehend written material"—though either, ahem, reading would be perfectly understandable here.

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