The University of Alabama Jefferson County Alumni Chapter is screening the film “Red Tails” Friday at 7 p.m. at the Patton Creek Rave Theater, according to a Facebook event invite. It’s the movie Coach Nick Saban showed the Alabama football team the night before the 14th National Championship against LSU.

Watch the first public promotional trailer for the feature film above, and notice the commander says: “We need pilots who will put bombers before themselves.”

Another indication that an individual sacrificing for the team is NOT Socialism, as some Republicans and conservative news outlets would have you believe.

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Tom Campbell

A Saban Hoodoo Wink?

Alabama Crimson Tide Once Again Invited to the White House

President Barack Obama called University of Alabama football Coach Nick Saban on Thursday to congratulate him and the university on their BCS National Championship and their exceptional 2011-2012 season, according to an e-mail press release from the White House.

The President said that he watched the entire championship game and could not have been more impressed with the Crimson Tide’s performance.

Mr. Obama commended the coach on his outstanding record and said that he looks forward to congratulating the team in person at the White House.

Glynn Wilson

Click on the images for a larger view

A pair of Alabama yellow hammers, otherwise known as the Northern Flicker [colaptes auratus], visited the back yard to feed on Sunday. I have been trying to get pictures of this pair for years. They finally cooperated today. Maybe they were so hungry they didn’t pay me much mind.

While you can see the yellow tail feather in the shot up in the tree, where you would expect to find a woodpecker, see the shot on the ground below. According to scientists, flickers eat mainly ants and beetles, digging for them with their unusual, slightly curved bill. These seemed to be interested in the nuts all over the ground. There are so many this year the squirrels have not been able to bury them all to store up for the winter.

Out West, these woodpeckers tend to have a few partially hidden red tail feathers, thus the name red-shafted flicker. In the South, they have yellow tail feathers, which you can only see from certain angles, so they are often called yellow-shafted flickers.

These birds have a special place in state lore going all the way back to the Civil War, and it is the state bird of Alabama.

More below…
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Can We Focus on Public Policy Now?

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

So much for the “game of the century.”

Maybe if the LSU-Alabama game had gone into four or five more excruciating overtimes it might deserve that distinction. No game without a single touchdown deserves the label, however, although it was an epic battle of two great defenses.

Alabama should have won the game. The Tide offense got into a position to score points far more times than the Tigers. But with two missed touchdown passes in the end zone and four missed field goals, and that one bad call on the goal line, Alabama did not deserve to win.

But hey, it’s not the end of the world. At least not yet.

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We Will See

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

SOUTHSIDE BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — They say it is a small world, but what do “they” know? I say the cliche is even more true today with modern social networking technology like Facebook.

I was just chatting with a blonde from Germany over my second cup of coffee in the Hippie Tree House, upstairs in the Hippie House on Birmingham’s Southside.

I crashed last night on the new couch in Hippie Stew’s place, and felt right at home. Maybe that’s because I was born five blocks from here in the old South Highlands Hospital, the first hospital Richard Scrushy purchased to create the outpatient and sports medicine empire known as HealthSouth.

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We Will Likely Never Know

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Sometimes it pays to wake up early. Other times, it would be far better to roll over and go back to sleep.

Like the English proverb, “The early bird catches the worm. But the second mouse gets the cheese.”

Tom Campbell

The Nick Saban Wink

It may be fodder for a blues song, but I woke up way too early this morning and started thinking about the predicament we’re in over a pot of aromatic coffee. You know what they say about thinking. “It can be a dangerous thing.”

As usual, the second thing to do after cranking up the coffee pot is to turn on the Mac and login to Facebook. One of the links I ran into first was the latest Rick Bragg column in Southern Living. He writes about football this month, which is fitting, considering that most of the radio commentary in a land that still loves radio has already turned to the upcoming football season.

That prompted me to Google the 2011 Alabama football schedule, which includes seven games in the newly expanded Bryant-Denny Stadium plus five road games, highlighted by a non-conference matchup with tradition-rich Penn State on September 10. Alabama will host Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Tennessee and LSU and travel to Florida, Mississippi, Mississippi State and Auburn in conference play.

Alabama opens league play with Arkansas on September 24 and plays five straight games against SEC competition before an open date on October 29, then finishes at home against LSU, on the road at Mississippi State, and home against Georgia Southern before the final contest of the regular season at Auburn this year.

There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about any of this, except for this surprising item, which comes as news to me at least. The 2011 season opener on Sept. 3 features head coach Nick Saban facing his alma mater, Kent State, perhaps more famous for the infamous Kent State shootings than the national success of its football program.

Turns out Saban graduated from Kent State in 1973, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in business.

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In Case You Missed It

The President welcomes the Auburn Tigers to the White House to honor their 2010 BCS National Championship.

Editor’s Note: You won’t see this on TeeVee news, or read it in the newspapers.

David Underhill

New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox

Guest Column
by David Underhill

NEW YORK – In baseball the New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox has the passion and jagged edge of an ancient cultivated rivalry like Alabama vs. Auburn in football.

With this difference — to get a ticket you don’t have to be a cousin of a university trustee, or be a legislator with a grip on the schools’ funding, or dangle on a waiting list for generations. If you happen to be in New York on a day the Yankees and Red Sox are playing, you can get a ticket that morning, though the stadium will be sold out by the time the umpire hollers “Play Ball!” that evening.

Major league baseball shuttles through spacious stadiums daily for six months every year. You can always snare a seat, often in the cheap(er) outfield bleachers, and at the stated price, not jacked up scalpers’ rates. But when the Red Sox come to town, the bleacher tickets are long gone, and your only chance is the gilded sections behind home plate.

Everybody’s list of things they’d like to do before saying goodbye is distinctive and quirky. But if New York against Boston at Yankee Stadium is on yours, and you have a chance to check that off, even at a plastic-money-melting price, you don’t let it pass. This puts you in socially unfamiliar territory.

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