UBC Thunderbirds baseball coach Terry McKaig often sends out notes to the media outlining results, highlights, notable players, etc, throughout the season, and generally they’re interesting reads. The most recent note, however, was somewhat… well… light on details:

Lost 17-3 to St. Martins.  No real highlights to speak of
obviously.

I’m sorry, I feel bad for the ‘Birds and all, but that press release was the most awesome thing I’ve read in months. 

The Rainflappers are on a five-game losing skid, having dropped frames to Fresno Pacific, Montana State-Billings, St Martins, and (since the email went out) West Oregon and the always tough Lewis-Clark State, which really puts paid to the four-game win streak they had going previously, but while we always knew this would be a rebuilding year after the great 2007 season, McKaig’s straight-shooting, no BS style will make it much easier to get through. 

Not so easy to get through is Don Taylor and the increasingly ridiculous CANUCKS1040 (sorry, I mean TEAM1040) radio day. After being subjected to weeks of "Hey, you’ve been spending a lot of time in Hawaii lately, what’s going on with that" - "Oh, you haven’t heard about the great real estate deals going on there right now?" routine, regular sports talk listeners then had to suffer through endless discussion about how Taylor was not just going to have a vasectomy (do I really need to know that?), but that he would be talking his listeners through the procedure with a series of infotainment ads, presumably as a means of cutting himself a better price with the surgeon.

Oh, joy. Five hours of discussion about whether Trevor Linden has lost his touch AND an in-depth chat about the inner workings (or lack thereof) of Don Taylor’s junk? Who says Vancouver radio is crap?

Well, the punchline wasn’t a long time coming (no pun intended).

During a commercial break this morning on Jim Rome’s show (which I always switch off after the first half hour, when it becomes a series of endlessly repeated one-liner emails) came the latest chapter in Taylor’s Junk Removal Adventure.

To wit: He’s backed out.

So now it’s not "I’m going to get it done by the most painless vasectomy surgeon in town" - it’s "we decided we weren’t ready, but when I am, I’ll be going to the most trusted guy in the business…"

Oh, unintended hilarity, thy name is Taylor.

First of all, who uses their radio gig to cut themselves a deal on a surgical procedure? You just KNOW that the surgeon didn’t come to the radio station, wondering if any on-air personalities were in the running for a snip - clearly Taylor went to the guy and offered him a deal, and the station (remarkably) saw nothing wrong with going along with it.

But for him to then back out after weeks of talk about how painless it was going to be, and how this guy was so good it’d be easier than getting a tooth filled, to back out of the procedure at the zero hour is just priceless.

Though, to be fair, it does mean he can use his lame "heshootshescores!" catchphrase just a little bit longer.

And I guess I’ll have to wait a while before I can start calling him The Empty-Netter.