At least you are back in states now to watch College World Series of baseball.  I am so glad there is another sport besides kickball and football.

"All is naught for not"

Or you can directly convert a NULL value to a string literal directly from the table with the ISNULL() function:

SELECT SUBSTRING(ISNULL(txt,'NULL'),1,2), txt from MyTable

One other point to consider is sentence endings. Normally there are two spaces at the end of sentences (for readability, etc., and yes, not everyone uses them. So...