Boy did we get a harumph out of that guy.

I now will be annoying the Barnes & Noble staff to no end every day until it comes in, as I do every year at about this time.

Me: Do you have Phil Steele’s 200x College Football Preview yet?

Bored-Looking Bookstore Employee: Steel what?

Me: Phil Steele’s 200x College Football Preview.

BLBE: Hmmm . . . never heard of it. I don’t think we carry it.

Me: I’m sure you do. I’ve bought it here before. Several times.

BLBE (skeptically): It’s a book?

Me: More like a magazine. It’s usually in with the other college football previews like Athlon and Lindy’s, but I didn’t see it there.

BLBE (unenthusiastically after “college football” finally registers): Okay, let’s go check in the magazines.

Me: I already looked over there, but all right . . . .

BLBE: I don’t see it here.

Me: Right. Neither did I–that’s why I came to ask you. Can you look it up?

BLBE (sighing): Okay.

BLBE (goes back to register/computer): Huh–it says we do carry it after all . . . .

Me: (eye roll)

BLBE: It also says we have it in stock–go figure. Just a second.

(goes back to magazine area with me following, goes to back room and comes out with a stack of glorious, new, shiny Phil Steele bibles)

BLBE: I guess we just didn’t have them stocked on the shelves. Here you go.

(curtain)

Replace everything after the eye roll with “I guess it hasn’t come in yet–you can try back later” and you have a decent approximation of a go-round with a new clerk just about every day until I get it. Then all is forgiven.

A few years I’ve found myself shelling out for multiple copies, such as last year when I was in the airport on my way to Manhattan in June and realized I accidentally left my first copy at home, which I had just purchased a couple of days before.

Ahhh, Orson, you are one privileged guy.

I didn’t have us winning either of the last title games but I’m not so sure this year. This team might actually be title-worthy. Remember, we have to go through USC in Los Angeles to get to Miami. That’s about as quality of a non-conference win as you can get these days.

On the other hand, he thinks we are going to win the ACC, so who am I to question his genius.

Steele seems to be the football analyst version of the techie in commodities trading, ignoring the effect of the civil war in Country X on future cocoa prices, in BC’s case last year, Matt Ryan, or in Clemson’s case this year, Tommy Bowden.

Aha, but it looks like PSU will be running a dual-QB system in ‘08. That’s one too many QBs for JayPa to screw up leaving him befuddled, baffled, bewildered and reduced to sucking his thumb in the corner. Advantage; Penn State. Believe the #10 ranking and fear our defensive front twelve.