I'm still at least two weeks away from recovering from my "cyber-burnout", so the Ticktionary's benefactor Devin Pike will be dishing out the Weekly Special in my absence. And get this, he's talkin' sports!. -- Joe Lopez

Well, Junior Miller may not want to take over Blackie Sherrod's "Scattershooting" concept while he's still kicking around. I'm a little less patient, so...

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Ruth Buzzi:

• Yes, I watched the '60 Minutes' interview with Latrell Spreewell -- for about three minutes. "It's not like I was trying to choke P.J. or anything..." "Yes, I said I wanted to kill him, but I didn't really mean it..." Folks, I like science fiction a lot. Suspension of disbelief is something you have to do a lot of in sci-fi. It was not something I could achieve while listening to Spreewell.
  
• Question is, why is it so tough for the sports-watching community, by and large, to take Spreewell at his word? Maybe it's because there's a bigger belief that the climate for choking -- oh, I'm sorry, Spree, love-tapping -- a coach exists than a coach belittles a player under his watch so much that person snaps beyond the point of reapproach.
  
• Should we, as Mike Rhyner so eloquently put it, cede the whole thing to the gangsta hoopstas and ignore the NBA? Looks like it's already happening. Ratings for NBA coverage on both NBC and TNT are down from this time last year, and the Spreewell arbitration verdict won't help matters.
  
• The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament could not have come at a better time... to take the focus off of the travesty they committed last month with the US Women's Hockey Team. You know, the team we sent over to Nagano that actually DID the job they set out to do, and brought home the gold medal (unlike their tantrum-prone pro counterparts)? Well, the folks at Wheaties wanted to pay the women their due by putting their mugs on a Wheaties box.
  
  Not so fast, said the old white crones at NCAA... college players Jenny Schmidgall, who will be a freshman at the University of Minnesota next year, Brown sophomore Tara Mounsey, Providence sophomore Sara DeCosta, and Harvard seniors A.J. Mleczko and Angela Ruggeiro can't be on the box. That would be an endorsement of Wheaties, they said, and that's against NCAA regs.
  
  Oh, bite me. It's not an endorsement by the players of Wheaties, it's General Foods honoring some of the best athletes America has to offer. Just one more piece of evidence that the NCAA is a waste of human flesh.
  
  
• Flipping around the Sunday satellite offerings, and up pops... Cubs baseball. Spring training game against the Athletics in Arizona. Sorry, kids, but the world seems more right all of the sudden with baseball's opening day just around the corner. I stood in line in sub-freezing weather last month when individual game tickets went on sale, and the only thing I regret was that I couldn't buy more. Bring it on, bruthah!

--Devin Pike

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