Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I don't know if I'm more upset about the late bait 'n' switch or the apostrophe abuse in the B'O'B Bowl.

As far as I can tell from my five minutes of arduous internet research, the St. Petersburg Bowl has just officially named itself after a food franchise. I had never heard of this roadside eatery and it doesn't exist in New Jersey or most of the Northeast, but it seems to be extremely popular in the states that are featured in US obesity maps.

The style guide of Beat Visitor dot com assiduously avoids naming any corporate sponsors (e.g., we say Muffler Bowl of Charlotte, Pizza Bowl of Birmingham, etc.), but I feel like I have to mention "Beef 'O' Brady's" by name just this once in order to ask, "What the fuck is going on with the apostrophes and spacing around the O?" If it's the beef restaurant of a man named O'Brady, then there shouldn't be a space after the O'. If it's the slaughtered-cow bistro of a man named Brady and the o' is a contraction of of, then the space between o' and Brady is correct, but I can't think of a single reason (other than illiteracy) for an apostrophe before and after the 'O'. Can someone please enlighten me? (On their website they also use the superfluous plural apostrophe -- "Today there are Beef's [sic] popping up all over the country." -- so I'm going with the initial illiteracy theory until convinced otherwise.)

The full name of this fast-food franchise will never be mentioned again in this blog. Maybe the St. Petersburg Bowl will have to become the B'O'B Bowl, or maybe we can use an anagram of the franchise name and make it the "Obey Bad Refs" Bowl. In any case, it sucks. The only thing that the St. Petersburg Bowl had going for it was that it was not sponsored. To add a cheesy name less than two weeks before the game takes place seems especially sleazy.

Is it too late to switch with USF and go back to the International Bowl?

2 comments:

Mark said...

Ugh. No good can come of this.

The losses to Syracuse and West Virginia loom ever larger. Given that the bowl is in the middle of RU finals week, I wonder what the size of the RU fanbase will be at the game. Is there a sizeable number of students that even go to bowls, or is it mostly alumni?

Anyway, given the horse-trading that is involved in the bowl selection process, a less-than-stellar turnout to this bowl could carry over to next year's bowl selections.

And who knows what effect the extra 2-3 weeks of practice time that will be missed will have on next year's team?

Then again, last year RU played in a bowl after New Year's Day, and the extra practice time didn't seem to help this year's squad much.

Ugh.

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