The game tonight was fun, although an early downpour made things in the stands a bit wet throughout the game—because of the humidity, nothing seemed to dry out. Pretty much as I expected, the Rebels took out their frustrations on ULM, and there were fewer dropped passes. The secondary still gave up some big plays that they shouldn’t have (including two 20+ yard TD passes); however, the run defense continued to impress, holding ULM to 39 yards on 30 carries, including stopping ULM from getting a first down on the ground from both 3rd and 1 and 4th and 1.

Jamal Pittman continued to make his mark at RB, seeing action in the 3rd and 4th quarters—while you could credit some of the offense to a somewhat tired ULM D, Pittman put together a string of strong runs from scrimmage unmatched by McClendon, Turner, or Pearson.

Both Micheal Spurlock [sic]* and Ethan Flatt saw time at QB; Spurlock played the end of the third and much of the fourth (and went 3-4, 35 yds passing with one TD, although he mostly handed off to Pittman), but Flatt came in with about 6:00 left in the game (and continued handing off to Pittman). The Manning-Collins connection was on fire as always (2 TDs), but Taye Biddle also caught several long passes (like the one he dropped in the Memphis game), one of which went for a TD. Manning (22-26, 356 yds passing) passed for 3 TDs and scored a rushing TD on a five-yard, third down scramble.

The Rebels [2-1/1-0] now have an off-week before facing Texas Tech in Oxford on September 27. Although gametime is currently listed at 6:00 (same as ULM), campus scuttlebutt has it that kickoff may be pushed back to 8:00 (Central) with the game televised on ESPN2. Anything beats 11:00 am in my book…

Around the rest of the league, Auburn racked up an impressive win over Vandy (helped in no small measure by stupid penalties on the part of the Commodores); Auburn’s defeat of Vandy puts them in a tie for first in the west with Ole Miss. Alabama handled Kentucky at home, giving Mike Shula at least one more week in Tuscaloosa (Alabama and Kentucky are ineligible for postseason play and the conference title, making the game essentially moot in the standings). In the East, Georgia took the early-season conference lead after handing the South Carolina Gamecocks a defeat, moving to 3-0 overall.

In non-conference action: Arkansas defeated ex-SWAC foe Texas in Austin, 38-28, in what may be the upset of the day in college football. LSU took care of I-AA foe Western Illinois while Florida brutalized I-AA Florida A&M. And, in a game that just went final, Tulane edged Mississippi State 31-28 in N’Orleans.

In a major breaking news story from the Commercial Appeal, former atheist Chuck Davis finds Jesus.

Davis says some of his old friends still don’t understand his conversion and some don’t accept it.

But Davis explained, “Jesus is like a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich. People can tell you what it is, but you don’t know what’s it’s like until you try it.”

I’ve made a few minor changes to the stylesheet and underlying code:

• Entries are now color-coded by author, comme le Volokh Conspiracy: I’m this color, while this is Brock’s color. No, I’m not identifying the colors by name, since Brock and I may decide to change them around a bit.
• I’m now using borders for link underlining, like Matthew does at A Fearful Symmetry. I haven’t decided if I like it yet or not; there may be more experiments to come.

A final note: some people seem to find the default font size of Signifying Nothing too big. This is apparently the result of two factors:

1. Browser default font sizes are too big in general. IE, Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird default to a 16 point font, which is close to reasonable if you are legally blind or your monitor is a JumboTron, but otherwise a tad on the large side (I usually adjust it to the 12–14 point range).
2. Because of the first item, many people include FONT tags or CSS to reduce your font size to something that’s reasonable (Outside the Beltway does this noticeably, rendering it mostly unreadable using my default font size). Unfortunately that shoots to hell the accessibility advantages of CSS over proprietary tags.

I don’t have any perfect advice here. No browser that I know of lets you do CSS or font size overrides for particular sites, which seems like an odd oversight, since CSS is designed to allow user overrides of settings. However, all major browsers have font size adjustments in their menus you can use on an ad hoc basis to compensate for font drift between sites.