Wednesday Links (10/22)

You may remember my story last month about driving to Columbia for the South Carolina game and having my cell phone stop working along the way. As it turned out, I had to send my phone to Nokia to be fixed, as T-Mobile refused to help me out.

So off my phone went -- just three days after Georgia beat South Carolina -- to the Nokia repair facility in Huntsville, Ala., complete with a detailed description of the problem. Basically, when you turned the phone on, the screen was blank. I'd had this problem before.

Nokia said the repair time would be seven to 10 days. Three weeks later I got a letter -- A LETTER! -- in the mail saying I owed $75 for physical damage to the phone. I knew this wasn't true, so I called Nokia for an explanation. They told me the camera lens was scratched, and that was the problem with the phone. Now, I'm no mechanical engineer, but I think a scratch on the camera lens isn't likely to cause the entire phone to stop working.

I explained to them that I had sent a detailed description of the problem and the camera wasn't it. The woman at Nokia assured me she would return it to the repair department and it would be ready in -- you guessed it -- 7-10 days!

A week later I got a phone call. It was Nokia. They wanted $75 for physical damage to my phone. You see, apparently the camera lens was scratched. As you might imagine, I was a bit upset. The woman assured me she would get to the bottom of this problem and call me right back.

In the meantime, T-Mobile charged me $105 for the loaner phone they gave me to use while my phone was being repaired. It had been gone so long, they just assumed I wasn't bringing it back.

Two days later I received a second phone call. To my surprise, I was informed the problem with the phone was that the camera lens was scratched. At this point I offered to drive to Huntsville to explain the phone's damage in person in a less than pleasant way, and the woman at Nokia seemed to understand that we'd all be better off if that didn't happen.

And that's how we had left it until last night, when like Ed McMahon knocking on your front door with a giant check in hand, my phone finally arrived, repaired and working again. It was a glorious moment.

In the time my phone was being repaired, A.J. Green has 432 receiving yards and caught 28 passes, "Tropic Thunder" earned $110 million at the box office, and our country suffered through its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. David Price, who saved Game 7 of the ALCS, was still in the minor leagues when my phone was shipped off for repair.

So, needless to say, I'm pretty excited today. I plan to make dozens of unnecessary phone calls and pepper my friends with pointless text messages, just to make up for lost time. In the meantime, here are some links for the day.

-- The AJC's Chip Towers takes an interesting look back at the 2006 recruiting class. It's amazing how crucial that class was to Georgia's success and how deep the talent was.

-- Chip also answers some common fan questions/complaints in his latest blog.

-- ESPN's Chris Low deciphers Georgia's path to the BCS national championship game. HINT: It starts with winning this week.

-- Meanwhile, BamaMag.com calls this week's game an elimination contest between the Dawgs and LSU.

-- The Ravens have put a bounty out for former Bulldog Hines Ward.

-- Get the Picture offers some encouraging numbers for the UGA-LSU game, while Lucid Idiocy isn't quite as convinced.

-- College Football Stats takes a look at which teams do the best job of stuffing the run -- i.e. bringing down a runner behind the line of scrimmage. Interestingly, Georgia ranks third in run defense, but doesn't crack the top 20 by CFS's numbers. I think part of the reason for this is the lack of great penetration the DEs have gotten, but the supurb lateral pursuit from Georgia's LBs that have kept teams from breaking big runs.

-- The Banner-Herald's David Ching says this week will be the first true test for Georgia's offensive line. It's a big test, I'll admit, but I think me and Terrence Cody would argue the FIRST test came a little earlier in the year.

-- David Paschall writes that Georgia running backs coach Tony Ball is interested in the head-coaching job at Tennessee-Chattanooga.

-- The Albany Herald says Georgia's season seems unfulfilled to this point.

-- I hate Brett Favre.