Duke as the year turns

I saw the McMartin preschool hoax play out for five years in front of me (I lived in Los Angeles, and I told myself, Never again.

The problem is people who say, "Who cares?"

Like, for instance, Lawrence O'Donnell

Caught "McGlaughlin Group" last night. I don't have much use for Lawrence O'Donnell, but what he said was especially hateful. When asked his opinion on "The Most Overrated Story" of 2006, he responded: The Duke Rape Case.

"Let it play out," he said. "There's no need for examining it day to day."

No no no no no. A thousand times no. O'Donnell is a Washington insider who finds the whole affair boring, never mind the effect on these three young men.

This--once a dismissal comes, as it surely will--will be the bloggers' finest hour.

All of you: do not flag or fail. Keep up the pressure. Dismiss, dismiss, dismiss or let the heavens fall.

Saddam Hussein is dead

Details here.

Pour me a double.

North Carolina Bar issues Nifong complaint

About freaking time.

Four steps:

Removal as prosecutor in the Duke Hoax.

Resignation as DA.

Disbarrment.

Indictment.

Yankees get their guy

Now the Yanks have a Japanese pitcher of their own.

Unit to go?

Taylor and Johnson and Duke

A WSJ editorial on Duke by the two journalists most responsible: KC Johnson, whose blog has made mincemeat of the prosecution, and Stuart Taylor, whose August article in Slate helped nudge DA Nifong's misconduct into focus.

Money quote:

The case is now unraveling so rapidly as to be ridiculed on "Saturday Night Live." Mr. Nifong is on his way to being disbarred, unless North Carolina's legal establishment wants to be held up to national scorn. He faces lawsuits and at least a remote risk of federal criminal investigation. As for Durham's black leaders, and many in the media, and much of Duke's faculty, history will mark them down as enablers of abusive, dishonest law enforcement tactics. They will share responsibility for the continued use of such tactics, mainly against black people, after the Duke lacrosse players' innocence has become manifest to all serious people and the spotlight has moved on.

Read the whole thing.

Gerald Ford, RIP

My favorite Fun Ford Facts:

1. Ford's reputation as a klutz was, we all know now, completely false. Ford was, in fact, almost certainly the most athletic President of the twentieth century. Perhaps only Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush and Clinton come close, and not very. (Taft was morbidly obese; Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Nixon and Carter were all bookworms; Harding was sedentary; FDR was an upper-class dandy; LBJ was a slob; and Kennedy failed to earn his football letter at Harvard and was ghastly, and constantly, ill right up to the invention of cortisone, which in 1960 allowed him to gain weight and fill out that famous face of his, just in time for the first debate with Nixon.) As John J. Miller recounts, Ford was a lineman on two National Champion Michigan teams, this when colleges collected brutes and bullies for the football team, and didn't even require them to put up the appearance of going to class. Five Michigan jerseys have been retired; Ford's #48 is one of them.

2. Ford remains the only sitting President ever to appear before a Congressional Committee. He did so in 1975, to beg Congress to reinstate military aid to the South Vietnamese. However, the Democrats--who in the shadow of Watergate had added 75 seats to an already standing majority--were feeling their oats. Vietnam, which Kennedy had entered, where Johnson had fought and which Nixon had left, had become Nixon's war. No money, no arms--and so we got Boat People and genocide as a consequence. (The parallels to this very moment are clear, I think.)

3. Ford is the only man to become President without first appearing on a national ticket.

4. Ford's re-election was probably the most half-hearted modern (read: television era) Presidential campaign waged by someone who had a decent chance of winning. (Dole's odd little 1996 endeavor vs. the Clinton Machine may be tucked away in history.) He ran reluctantly, only as a means of pushing forward the legislation he thought necessary: whipping inflation and all that. (Anyone remember WIN? Whip inflation now?) He had reason to suspect his wife's difficulties, and--as recounted by his former Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney--ran the last week of his campaign, in a razor-thin match, on cruise control, while Jimmy Carter was putting in 18-hour days to stave of Ford's last-minute rise in the polls.

5. Every President has a legacy. Lincoln: saved the union. That sort of thing. Ford will be remembered for (and this was no small task) restoring some degree of confidence in the Executive Branch after Nixon shattered it. This is the popular myth, and it has the benefit of being true.

The latest on Duke

Mike Nifong has been dishonest, crooked and, at times, just plain weird.

But his dropping of the rape charge, and not the others, is the first action I would describe as "cute."

Drop the one charge--the central charge--on account of its being completely disproven, in the hope of proving the ancillary charges by a preponderence of the evidence?

Drop the rape charge and then say with a straight face that the DNA is "out of play," when the absence of of LAX players' DNA is perhaps even more exculpatory in the ancillary charges?

Cute. Real cute.

On a related note: Will KC Johnson be the first blogger to win the Pulitzer Prize? One can hope. His latesthere.

Texans 27, Colts 24

The biggest upset of the year, we're told.

I'm here to give the devil his due. Mario Williams played well. Ron Dayne, whom the Texans would not have touched had they selected Reggie Bush, was a man on fire: 153 yards, two TDs.

But. But.

Vince Young: two TD passes, one run. The Titans are about ready to make the play-offs after starting 0-5.

Matt Leinart: a brisk, efficient day before being removed for injury: one TD pass.

Reggie Bush: 130 yards, one TD.

Yearrgh.

And to all a good night

Ted Turner I don't have much use for.

But TBS does air A Christmas Story for twenty-four hours straight, every Christmas Eve at 7 pm CST to every Christmas Day at 7 pm CST.

Meaning?

All is forgiven.

Merry Christmas.

Larry Miller and the Academy of the Underrated

I sometimes think of Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy, and their "Academy of the Overrated" in the Woody Allen movie Manhattan.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gustav Mahler, to begin with.

Yeah, okay, I don't listen to classical music, but I've read basically every word still in print from Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned excepted), and, no, NO.

Which is probably what Allen intended. So be it.

What should exist is an Academy of the Underrated.

To whit, Larry Miller.

Miller was a stand-up comedian of several years who was more or less a constant presence in one mediocre movie after another throughout the nineties. To women who say, "Who?" when I mention his name, I always say, "The suck-up boutique manager in Pretty Women, which invariably elicits an, "Ahhh."

Little did I know, pre-9/11, that Miller is a writer as well, of of great profundity. And now, as I albatross around the city, my great pleasure is to read his book, Spoiled Rotten America. This is a book I enjoyed for the first sentence of chapter two:

"I saw Godfather III again last night, and it's still terrible."

Yes, and yes again.

Oh, and happy 500th post.

Pettitte: Clemens to Yankees

Details in the Post.

Pettitte goes to the Astros; Clemens follows.

Pettitte back to the Yankees. Clemens . . . ?

Look, I love them both, but, Christ, get a room, guys.

Nifong drops rape charge against Duke Three

The details here.

If Mike Nifong thinks he has reduced the scrutiny toward himself by dropping the one charge that has been absolutely disproven, he has another think coming.

In future years, the story of the Duke Three will rival that of the Scottsboro boys, the Guilford Four, the McMartin Preschool staff and Steve Pagones, who was the primary scapegoat in the Tawana Brawley hoax.

As always, the estimable KC Johnson weighs in, with at least six sensational posts today. To wit:

There is absolutely no justification for any continued allegations against any of the players; I suspect this is the beginning of the end for the case against them--and the beginning of the ethical and perhaps legal case against Nifong.

Dismiss. Dismiss. Dismiss on all counts. And then go after Nifong.

Hillary Clinton: the political USC?

Don't know what to make of this. From Sully reader JT, Politics as the new BCS:

John Kerry = Alabama, for some reason still thinks he should be considered anelite organization but each season becomes more and more embarrassing.

Barack Obama = Notre Dame, highly touted going into the season and will swayvoters based on name and mystique, but really no one knows if the praise is worthy and ends up unable to beat a quality opponent.

Mitt Romney = BYU, for obvious reasons.

Hillary Clinton = USC, one hell of organization, should contend for the title but could easily get derailed by a dispassionate offense and poor defense. Arouses mixture of loathing and envy from other teams' supporters.

Tryinbg to imagine Andrew Sullivan make sense of college football is half the fun.

Merry . . . ah, screw it

The last time I visited the notion of my workplace, two subjects were at hand:

1. My work environment. As I wrote:

My office was, until recently, a classroom. Now, thanks to the imposition of several portable dividers, none of them reaching to the ceiling, the converted space holds the dean, myself and another chair, the office manager to the dean, the office manager the other chair and I share, my associate chair, and the other chair's intern, and two receptionist/assistants. My desk sits in the center of the room, surrounded on three sides by dividers that lean sideways and, when upright, come up to my chest.

This is, of course, an absurd working environment for a college of 10,000 students. I was never one to hold out for the corner office, but as a chair I listen all day to complaints from students and sensitive matters with faculty, and when I really need not to be overheard (for, say, accusations of harassment) my only recourse is to take either my visitor or my cellphone out to the parking lot. Otherwise, all nine of us can hold a conversation in our normal speaking voices without getting up from our seats.

2. Administrative assistants' day. As I wrote:

Sill, as this day approaches, I have a bit of foreboding. Who gets invited, and who does the inviting? Our solution is that the Dean, the other chair and I spring for the rest of the gang: the associate chair, the intern, receptionists, and so forth. Of course, we leave out the campus receptionists, the work study students, and the adjunct faculty, on the grounds that you have to draw the line somewhere.

The second issue has to do with where we go. My office manager is an intensely private woman in her sixties. As she has turned down all lunch invitations extended by anyone over the past decade-plus--all but two per year, her birthday and today--I suspect that she views this as even more of an obligation that I do. But to point that out out loud--ick.

So we have lunch. But I eschew flowers. An Easterner by birth, in the great Eastern tradition, I give money. Money for everyone. At least that part is easy and (I hope) appreciated.

The two subjects converged quite messily in the months of April and May, and left me elated on the one hand and ashamed on the other.

Let me explain.

In May I moved to a new office, the fourth of the last 13 months and the best one at all. The I had gone:

*from a tiny cubbyhole with a west-facing picture window that, in the bright East Texas afternoons would beam Monetesque rectangles of sunlight on my text, beams so intense they literally burned spots in my computer screen and gave me daily headaches . . .

*to a windowless office opposite my first, something large enough for only one person, and with a computer its previous owner had left with a succession of irremovable porno pop-ups that would explode like Fantasia in the middle of an e-mail I was trying to type . . . .

*to the above-said desk-in-middle-of-the-classroom . . .

*to my present confines.

When, in April, I learned we were moving again, I knew our daily ritual would be rather simple:

9 am-noon: Shove crap into boxes.

Noon-1 pm: Lunch.

1 pm-5 pm: Shove crap into boxes.

The problem (if it could be called that) was that, having moved twice within a year, I had--like the boy in Faulkner's "The Bear"--stripped myself of all non-essentials. And--what do they call it now?, Administrative Assistants' Day?--seemed to fall under everyone's radar.

So nobody got anything. Our Dean (part of the move) was slowed to a state of trying to run the tricky wickets of finalizing the move; another colleague, a department chair like me, was going through a divorce that Mel Gibson should have filmed.

So? So nothing happened after . . . after whatever you what to call Secretaries' Day came and went. Weeks came and went, offices were changed . . . and nothing happened. None of us took anyone to lunch; none of us gave anyone any money. Weeks went by, nothing. Then, more nothing. No one seemed especially upset, but as the weeks went on, I felt worse. Finally, a fulcrum was crossed, a point where any mention of Secretaries' Day was an admission of defeat. To say, "We missed it!" was the worst eating-of-s*** one could imagine. So I clammed up.

I've written this before, and said it countless times. The office manager for humanities--the closest I will ever have to a secretary--is efficient, hard-working, and brilliant. I would--to borrow a clause from Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day--be lost without her. It was hellish to watch Secretaries' Day come and go, and do nothing, but that is what happened. So I gave her twice what she deserved this Christmas. I thought of saying, "Sorry about Secretaries' Day!" but I didn't. But she deserved whatever I gave, and twice again.

Merry Christmas.

Lupica on Zeke

The last few months have not been sports columnist Mike Lupica's best. He has been exposed as a thin-skinned bully by more than one "Sports Reporters" ex-colleague. And he has embarrassed himself trying to hang the contempt-of-court citations around President Bush's neck.

Still.

Still, he sometimes hits one out of the park. One of the guilty pleasures of Saturday night's Knicks-Nuggets brawl was knowing that Lupica would lay in.

And so he does, for the third day in a row, in what is the best of the three. A sample, in Lupica's pitch-perfect wise-guy prose:

I am standing in front of the Garden on Sunday morning, in front of the famous marquee on Seventh Ave., and remembering what it was like back in the '90s, when it would only say "Michael Jordan Tonight" on that marquee and this was the only place in town you wanted to be. You know when that will happen with Isiah Thomas in charge of basketball at the Garden? Never.

Now, in the aftermath of a fight that everybody but the commissioner of the NBA seems to know Thomas instigated, you wonder what type of further embarrassment it will take for Dolan to tell the guy to go back to Chicago or Indiana, go anywhere and get himself good and lost.

Read the whole thing.

Meet the New Lefty

Yanks get their guy from Japan.

Wang, Pettitte, Moose, Unit, New Guy.

This is a situation where Unit is no better than the fourth starter.

Sowell on Duke

It is now clear that revery day an rape indictment hangs over the three accused Duke lacrosse players is a travesty of historic proportions.

It is a matter of record that the District Attorney, Mike Nifong:

1. Showed the alleged victim a line-up featuring only white Duke lacrosse players, thus diregarding all norms of investigation, and the legal standard in the state of North Carolina;

2. Pursued an indictment against a lacrosse player who has a three-fold alibi (a black cabbie places him miles away from the scene of the supposed crime when the crime took place, and both a time-stamped ATM receipt and a time-stamped video camera place him at his bank);

3. Disregarded results of a negative DNA test against the accused, after assuring beforehand that said tests would demnonstrate innocence if negative;

4. Conspired with a DNA lab to keep from the defense a positive DNA result for three other men, none of whom are lacrosse players.

What is amazing is that, if Nifong could wave a wand and remove these four facts from public purview, there would still be enough to exonerate the defendants.

Thomas Sowell has the latest.

Sowell's conclusion matches mine, to a point. Nifong should be removed from office. He should be disbarred.

I would go further. When all is said and done, he should be caged.

Duke: the beginning of the end?

It appears the Great Duke Rape Hoax may be inching toward its proper dismissal.

Up until yesterday, the charitable characterization of Brian Meehan, head of DNA Security, was incompetence beyond words. That positive DNA matches of three men were found on the person of the alleged victim, none of them Duke lacrosse players, was withheld from defense counsel, would seem to be (in the best light) a huge blunder by a scientist unaware of of the rules of discovery.

Then this moment:

Seligmann attorney Jim Cooney: “Was the exclusion of material the result of a specific agreement between you and representatives of the state of North Carolina?”

DNA Security director Brian Meehan: Yes.

As always, the esteemed KC Johnson weighs in.

"We're Going to Win"

Via Fred Barnes, the first good news on Iraq in months. In short:

1. Iraq Study Group report (aka "Surrender with Dignity") goes into the trash. Good.

2. 50,000 more troops, mostly in Baghdad. Good.

3. The city is taken, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house. Good, if true.

The joke around the blogosphere this week was that if James Baker headed a commission to save Social Security, his first recommendation would be that Israel relinquish the Golan Heights and enter into negotiations for the partition of Jerusalem. The point is that words do not describe what a farce the ISG turned out to be, and how removed from reality their recommendations were.

It was a Democrat--Missouri's Ike Skelton--who first pointed out the crucial nature of Baghdad in the overall War on Terror. Baghdad is this generation's Marathon, its Saratoga, its Waterloo, its Gettysburg, its Midway. This is the tipping point of history.

Jeff Bagwell retires

Details here.

A Hall-of-Famer?

Yes.

And consider this scenario:

a) Bagwell goes in on the second ballot

b) Craig Biggio hits number 3,000 this season and retires

c) Joe Torre retires

End result? Bagwell, Biggio and Torre all go in together in 2012.

How much coolness does Jack Black have left?

Jack Black became cool in the last five minutes of High Fidelity, singing "Let's Get it On."

It was then we heard about Tenacious D, and OH MY GOD, he was a singer all along!

This was followed by School of Rock: very cool.

It started to go bad with Macho Libre.

His Tenacious D performance on "Saturday Night Live": Not good. In point of fact, if you're going to sing a song about Heavy Metal that simply persuades me to look for my Led Zeppelin tapes in preference to you . . . well, what good are you?

Now, his next damn movie.

Jack Black is squandering his coolness faster than anyone since Chevy Chase.

Durham in Wonderland

Ten years from now, an HBO film will detail every inch of DA Mike Nifong's ehtical lapses.

Fifty years from now, books will be written on this scandalous witch hunt.

KC Johnson should win a prize.

Lamar Hunt, RIP

Details here.

Lamar Hunt. Surely one one of the half-dozen most influential sports magnates of the twentieth century.

Both George Halas, who created the NFL, and Pete Rozelle, who created the NFL as we know it, owe Lamar Hunt a debt of thanks.

It was Hunt who brought pro football into regions the NFL would not enter: Dallas, Houston, Denver, Boston, and eventually San Diego and Miami. It was his success that forced a merger, his vision that created the Super Bowl as we know it. (Hunt even thought up the name "Super Bowl," a name much more congenial than the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game."

From Hunt's original idea of the American Football League, we now have the Kansas City Chiefs, New England Patriots, New York Jets, San Diego Chargers, Miami Dolphins, Tennessee Titans, and Denver Broncos.

Seven franchises that sell out every game.

Peter Boyle, RIP

Most of all, I’ll remember him in Taxi Driver.

Watch him in the “your work becomes you, you become your work” scene with DeNiro.

And, in the same movie, the best moment of Boyle's acting career: the cafeteria scene, when a half-dozen half-awake moonlighting hacks sit around a table. The subject of homosexuality comes up. Some Southern cabbie says, “You know, out in California, when two fags break up, the one fag has to pay the other alimony.”

A pause, as the group considers this. Finally, (the expression on his face is priceless) Boyle holds forth:

“Not bad!”

Southern guy: “Yeah, they’re way ahead out there.”

Oh, and one other memory: “Dueling Brandos” with John Belushi on SNL.

I would buy that entire season on DVD just to hear Belushi say, “Get the butter.” And Boyle, in a comic sketch with one of the kings, more than holds his own.

'United 93' wins New York Film Critics' Best Picture

Via The Irish Trojan.

Well-deserved, as far as I know. I never get to see enough movies in the theatre anymore; the only free time I seem to have is Saturday afternoons, which (thanks to college football) pretty much knocks out August 25th through December 5th. I had to take a personal day off from work in order to see Borat, which, along with United 93, Talladega Nights and Little Miss Sunshine, constituted the best of what I did see.

Just below that fabulous four is The Departed.

What I do want to see: the Bond film and The History Boys. Oh, and Rocky Balboa.

Gretzky v. Orr, part II

Nice quote:

What clearly separates Orr from Gretzky is his on-ice toughness. He fought, sometimes savagely, with a barroom Irish temper. If Gretzky was ABBA, Orr was The Clash. That's not necessarily an endorsement. It's just the way it is.

Orr or Gretzky?

Before I enjoyed any other sport, I was a hockey fan; and before a life's worth of sports heroes (Arthur Ashe, John Jefferson, Thurman Munson, Ron Guidry, Dave Cowens, John Havlicek, Larry Bird--and this brings me only to 1979), there was one who, for me, was first and above all.

Number Four, Bobby Orr. Defensemen for the Boston Bruins, who defeated the hated New York Rangers in 1972. As a six year-old living in the Boston suburbs, I was allowed to watch the first period of each of the final games (my mother explained to me what "best-of-seven" meant) and then had to go to sleep. And so I found out the Bruins had defeated the Rangers the way a six year-old usually does in these matters: I came down to breakfast, and to my mother with the paper--in this case, The Boston Globe.

I was too young even to know what "The Stanley Cup" was. But on page one of The Globe I saw what Bobby and the guys were holding up. And I was damn sure it wasn't the second-place trophy.

(Of course, to this day I wonder why someone didn't wake me up for the last few minutes of the previous night's game, as countless New England parents would wake six year-old sons a generation later, to celebrate the Boston Red Sox. But this is a small matter.)

In those days, there was no question: Bobby Orr was simply the greatest hockey player ever. Bobby Hull was a scoring machine, and some older fans would stick up for Gordie Howe or Rocket Richard.

However, as a complete hockey player--for speed, stickhandling, and a complete scorer's repetoire--no one touched Orr.

Not until Wayne Gretzky.

And now, with the issue of the book Searching for Bobby Orr, as they say on ESPN, let the debate begin.

On Jimmy Carter: "The man is an anti-semite."

It becomes harder and harder to disagree.

"Global warming is just guff"

Apparently cow farts contribute much more than SUVs. Details here.

My prediction is that, twenty years from now, we will have wondered what all the fuss was about.

I may be wrong.

But I'm not.

Reggie, Vince, Matt, and, er, Mario

Reggie Bush: 125 yards receiving, plus a touchdown. 162 yards of total offense in a thrashing of the formerly hot team of the week, the Dallas Cowboys.

Vince Young: a 39-yard gallop for a game-winning touchdown in overtime. To beat the Texans.

Matt Leinart: Two touchdown passes in a victory over Seattle.

Mario Williams. Three tackles in a losing effort. To Vince Young's Titans.

No: I'm never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, ever letting this go.

Titans 26, Texans 20 (OT)

The Titans score an overtime win, capped off by Titan quarterback Vince Young's 39-yard touchdown gallop.

Mercy, this is where I came in.

Dennis Erickson to Arizona State

Via The Irish Trojan.

An absolute slam dunk for the Devils.

Women aren't funny

Q: "How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

A: "That's not funny."

Christopher Hitchens weighs in.

"One move fills many holes"

Re Pettitte:

Jay Sherman of the Post gives his approval.

Filip Bondy in The Daily News is less enthusiastic.

Saturday afternoon

There are greater films than Remains of the Day, but few that run their length without misstepping once.

This is the the sort of movie for which a DVR was invented. Scene after scene, there is nothing to do once you've seen them, but see them again.

One good piece of news from Iraq

Via The Corner:

One of the most coveted jobs in Iraq does not yet exist: the executioner for Saddam Hussein. The death sentence against Mr. Hussein is still under review by an appeals court, but hundreds of people have already started lobbying the prime minister’s office for the position.

Vince Bowl: One day remaining

Simmons checks in, of course.

Money quote:

Hard to believe those reports that the David Carr era is wrapping up in Houston. It seemed so promising there for ... actually, wait, there wasn't a single moment when it ever seemed promising. Scratch that. Anyway, can you think of a worse turn of events for Texan fans than Reggie Bush's fantasy breakout week happening on the tail end of back-to-back "All Vince Young does is win football games!" weeks? Now they're about to get their butts kicked this week by the franchise that ditched them (the Titans) and the rookie QB they passed on (Young). On the bright side, if there's ever a week for somebody to hold up a "BRING BACK CAPERS" sign, this is it. I have my fingers crossed.

If I were at the game, I'd bring that sign

Pettitte to Yankees

For the sixteen million the Yankees were offering all along.

Strange, though. This may be the first free agent signing that hurts both teams. After Wang, the Yankee rotation goes:

Moose
Pettitte
Unit

A great rotation.

For 1997.

Holy crap!

I mentioned to Astro-Girl the other day, "It's just too bad. Ricky Bobby comes out, and everyone's talking about it. Then Borat comes along and blows off everyone's doors, and--have you noticed?--nobody's been talking about Ricky Bobby lately."

Wait: does anyone know that Frenchy the stock-car driver, aka Jean Girard, is played by none other than Sasha Baron Cohen?

When Talladega Nights first came out, Jim Emerson, filling in for the ill Roger Ebert, wrote this. Money quote:

And the way Sacha Baron Cohen, as Ricky Bobby's gay French nemesis Jean Girard, pronounces his name (something like "Yrikee Bubbee" may be the closest print equivalent) is, remarkably, funny every single time. If Cohen's Borat movie ("Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan") is anywhere near as amusing as this one, a movie star is born. Er, "boorn."

He says it there, it comes out here.

Spooky, bro.

Reggie? Vince? Matt? Er, Mario?

The debate rages on.

Gotta be global warming

A tornado hits London.

Andy Pettitte: Where we stand

Andy Pettitte's agents, the Hendricks brothers, are trying to get him $16 million for 2007.

The Yankees would sign for that today.

The Astros are holding firm at twelve.

Pettitte wants to play in Houston.

He also wants 16 million.

So this is where we stand.

Details here.

Four days to Vince

Outside of the New England Patriots (no front-runner here; I've been a fan since the days of Jim Plunkett and Randy Vataha) and my fantasy team (I benched Reggie Bush this past Sunday, a metaphor for my season), the NFL regular season is something I can take or leave. The exceptions are games that hold a certain intrigue, either of greatness or something else: two undefeated teams meeting in late October, a match-up between an established All-Pro quarterback and up-and-comer (Peyton v. Carson last Thanksgiving, for instance) or a late-season divisional match between bitter rivals (the Giants and Cowboys this past Sunday).

Then there is this Sunday's match between the Tennessee Titans and the Houston Texans.

As all the world knows, last January first, the Houston Texans lost 17-14 to the San Francisco 49ers, enough for a 2-14 record, enough for the worst record in the league and the first pick in one of the most talent-rich drafts in years. At Buffalo Wild Wings, basically the pulse of the Houston sports scene, the reaction of the assembled Texas faithful was unashamed joy, for it had been assumed for months that, with the first pick in the draft, the Texans would select the All-Everything tailback from USC, Heisman trophy winner Reggie Bush.

But a few funny things happened on the way to the coronation . . .

The first was the Rose Bowl, aka the Vince Bowl, in which Texas quarterback (and, by the way, Houston native) Vince Young ran over, around and through a USC team thought by many to be the greatest of all time. This was followed by Young's decision to leave school early and enter the draft. This in turn was followed by a huge groundswell of support for drafting young and jettisoning the incumbent QB, the talented but perennially underperforming David Carr. Young all but begged to be drafted by his hometown team.

What happened then everyone knows. At the apparent urging of incoming head coach Gary Kubiak, the Texans stuck with Carr, deciding to pay him an eight million-dollar bonus rather than let him go. Then, in the far more controversial move, they decided to bypass Bush as well, in favor of project defensive end Mario Williams.

Enter bedlam.

Seventy-five percent of the way through the season, the results are here. Mario Williams, after struggling early, has been a serviceable and improving defensive player. Reggie Bush has been good if not great, and provided what may have been a breakout game: four touchdowns vs. the 49ers. Right now, the edge would go to Reggie, but not by much, my previous huffing and puffing notwithstanding.

But all of a sudden, this is not the comparison/contrast theme of the season.

All of a sudden, we are back to Vince v. David.

The Texans are 4-8. In Carr's last two games, the Texans are 1-1. Carr has zero touchdown passes. Last week, he managed somehow to throw for negative five yards (Astro-Girl asked: "Was he facing the wrong way?") and lose two fumbles--and this was the game the Texans won. The Texans two touchdowns were almost entirely the work of special teams; for both TDs combined, the Carr needed to drive a total of five yards. The word coming out of Reliant Park is of Quarterback Guru Kubiak admitting to himself that he sorely misjudged what Carr was capable of; the rumor is that the Texans may use what will once again be a high draft pick for whatever quarterback will be available (Brady Quinn? Troy Smith?), even if doing so would be a tacit admission that he (and apparently last year's on-the-way-out Charlie Casserly) made a terrible blunder by not selecting Vince Young.

How has Vince performed? He has won one more game that Carr has while starting three fewer. The past two weeks, using both his arm and legs, he led the Titans to two multiple-touchdown comebacks against the Giants and Colts. He became the first quarterback ever to defeat quarterback brothers on consecutive weekends (the Mannings, of course). He has picked up right where he left off in Pasadena, and become a human hi-light reel.

And oh, yes, Young has done all this while playing for the Tennessee Titans, aka the former Houston Oilers. If any team is the Texans' archenemy, it is the Titans, a fact based in the person of Bud Adams, the person so despised that Houston refused to build the Oilers a new playpen in the nineties, almost in the hopes that Adams would take his team elsewhere and allow the city to start fresh with an expansion team. Adams never misses an opportunity to stick it to his old hometown; rumor was, it was spite alone behind Adams's command to GM Floyd Reece to draft Young, despite head coach Jeff Fisher and offensive coordinator Norm Chow's preference for Matt Leinart. (No one in Houston will forget Adams actually flying Young into Houston for a press conference the day after the draft, the ultimate Screw You moment if ever there was.) It the rumor is true, this may turn out to be a classic case of the right thing done for the wrong reason, for at the moment, Young, Fisher, Chow and the Titans offense seem an ideal fit.

And. And this Sunday, Young and the Titans return to Houston--to his home town, to a sea of burnt-orange Longhorn jerseys, to tens of thousands of absolutely furious Texan fans--in order to face the Texans.



Occasionally, a football game has as many subplots as an episode of "Seinfeld," circa 1994. This game is one of them.

Reggie's four touchdowns

Didn't get to this. As posted by The Irish Trojan, Reggie Bush scores four touchdowns in New Orleans's victory over San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Vince Young brought the Tennessee Titans storming back to victory against a second Manning brother in seven days.

At the same time, the Texans defeated Oakland despite the best efforts (negative five yards passing) of QB David Carr.

I counted three kids walking around this city wearing New Orleans number 25 this week.

And Houstonian Vince Young–who basically begged the Texans to draft him–comes home with his new team to play the Texans this Sunday. Reliant Stadium will bleed burnt orange.

Lord, to live in Houston now.

This doorstop

AS the saying goes, whatever Mark Steyn's drinking, pour me a double. His take on the Baker/Hamilton Comission:

"James Baker's "Iraq Study Group" seems to have been cast on the same basis as Liza Minnelli's last wedding. A stellar lineup: Donna Summer, Mickey Rooney, the Doobie Brothers, Gina Lollobrigida, Michael Jackson, Mia Farrow, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Jill St. John. That's Liza's wedding, not the Baker Commission. But at both gatherings everyone who was anyone was there, no matter how long ago it was they were anyone. So the fabulous Baker boy was accompanied by Clinton officials Leon Panetta and Bill Perry, Clinton golfing buddy Vernon Jordan, Clinton's fellow sex fiend Chuck Robb, the quintessential ''moderate'' Republican Alan Simpson, Supreme Court swing vote par excellence Sandra Day O'Connor . . .

"God, I can't go on. I'd rather watch Mia Farrow making out with Mickey Rooney to a Doobie Brothers LP. As its piece de resistance, the Baker Commission concluded its deliberations by inviting testimony from -- drumroll, please -- Sen. John F. Kerry. If you're one of those dummies who goofs off in school, you wind up in Iraq. But, if you're sophisticated and nuanced, you wind up on a commission about Iraq. Rounding it all out -- playing David Gest to Jim Baker's Liza -- is, inevitably, co-chairman Lee Hamilton, former congressman from Indiana. As you'll recall, he also co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, in accordance with Article II Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution, which states: "Ye monopoly of wisdom on ye foreign policy, national security and other weighty affairs shall be vested in a retired Representative from the 9th District in Indiana, if he be sufficiently venerable of mien. In the event that he becomes incapacitated, his place shall be taken by Jill St. John." I would be calling for a blue-ribbon commission to look into whether we need all these blue-ribbon commissions, but they'd probably get Lee Hamilton to chair that, too."

Don't get me wrong, I like a Friars' Club Roast as much as the next guy and I'm sure Jim Baker kibitzing with John Kerry was the hottest ticket in town. But doesn't it strike you as just a tiny bit parochial? Aside from Senator Kerry, I wonder whether the commission thought to hear from anyone such as Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore. A couple of years back, on a visit to Washington just as the Democrat-media headless-chicken quagmire-frenzy was getting into gear, he summed it up beautifully:

''The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail.''"

There is also this nugget:

According to the New York Sun, ''An expert adviser to the Baker-Hamilton commission expects the 10-person panel to recommend that the Bush administration pressure Israel to make concessions in a gambit to entice Syria and Iran to a regional conference . . .''

Honestly, that sentence makes me physically ill.

Encouragement from the Desert

From Sundevil Joe. And this from Robbie-Boy, who lives and dies all things Tempe:

". . . Yours is a program the rest of us can only dream of being.

FIGHT ON!!!!!!"

Finally, my brother John called me up. I was avoiding all phone calls, but John kept ringing and ringing (five times) until I answered. He then proceeded to hold his cell phone to his TV while he played the DVD of the greatest "Bob Newhart" episode ever. This was when Bob and his bachelor friends are stuck in his apartment on Thanksgiving, whereupon they proceed to 1) get trashed on Jerry the orthodontist's hard cider, 2) engage in an on-going seminar of the knock-knock joke, 3) fail to thaw out a frozen turkey, 4) watch seven football games, and 5) attempt to order Chinese food while plastered out of their minds.

As I was out on the balcony, brooding over a post-game whiskey and cigar when John called, Astro-Girl's view of my laughter through the glass doors truly convinced her I was having a fit.

No, no, I'm fine, never mind how unable I am to explain the humor in Moo-Goo Guy Pan, or in this exchange:

"Whaddya want?"

"Sweet and sour pork."

"Make up your mind."

To go from the emotional nirvana of Notre Dame, to the despair of today . . . it is always important to remind ourselves, as the great sportswriter Red Smith often did, that these are games little boys play.

Fight on, indeed.

UCLA 13, USC 9

In retrospect, we should have seen this coming.

*The Ohio State-Michigan-USC-Florida debate had held in place for the past three weeks, with USC moving up (as everyone said it would) after a victory over Notre Dame. We'd gone too long without a surprise, and were due one.

*By all apparent evidence, USC is not the number two team in the country. It may not be in the top five. Since falling behind 33-10 to Oregon State, the Trojans had played a few feet above their heads, culminating in a 20-point win over Notre Dame that, it is now clear, emotionally exhausted both the players and the fan base. A let-down was inevitable.

*Something has been up with John David Booty since the first half of the Notre Dame game, something seemingly based in his plant leg that--more important than any physical ailment--sapped his confidence. I lost count of the number of times ABC caught him in a palms-up look of incomprehension aimed toward the sideline. It is hard for me to think ill of a young man barely half my age--he is what he is, and he gave it his best.

*Finally, kudos to UCLA, whose chief advantages over USC--defensive line speed and kicking game--became the stories of the game.

USC-UCLA

Early observations:

USC's defense looks good; UCLA ballcarriers must sometimes wonder if they have room to fall.

John David Booty, not so hot.

UCLA's first first down: 10 minutes into the game.

0-0.

Update: Bruin quarterback Cowen in on the sneak. 7-0, UCLA.

Update: After a safety, another punt. AHHHHH.

Update: At last a good drive. Gable in for the touchdown. 9-7, USC, at the half.

Oh, and a weekly Brent Musburger ho-ho-ho. Who is the ONLY Notre Dame coach ever to beat Pete Carroll at USC? Why, it’s Bob Davie, today’s color commentator! Who was such a good coach his ass is up in the broadcast booth! Who was such a good coach that NBC basically ordered Notre Dame to fire him!

Update: After a UCLA fumble, a punt. Then a UCLA lateral gone bad, USC ball . . . and a false start. 10-9, UCLA.

Update: USC stuffed on fourth-and-one, UCLA drives for a field goal . . . and this is GOOD news. 13-9, UCLA.

Update: While driving for the winning touchdown, Booty throws an interception.

Sun, dog's ass, etc.

On to the Rose Bowl.

"One for the Waste Basket"

NRO's judgement on the Report by the Iraq Study Group.

I have to say agree.

USC-UCLA

Strangely enough, the game seems to have lost much of its allure since the late 1980s, when Rodney Peete (USC) and Troy Aikman (UCLA) squared off at quarterback.

Still enormously important, though.

Norm Chow Arizona State?

So says the Irish Trojan.

I would wish Norm well in any situation, judging him one of the four men (along, of course, with Carroll, Palmer, and Leinart) most responsible for returning the Trojans to glory.

And I would love to see Arizona State (my second favorite team) return to its proper place as at least a second-tier national power (augmented with an occasional Rose Bowl and National Title run).

Something tells me, though, this isn’t the right job for him. The last dozen years have seen offensive geniuses a bit lacking in the charisma department crash and burn when given the reins.

From what I’ve read, though, I think he’s going to have to find this out for himself.

More Obama chic

Via Lowry.

Two thoughts.

First. Until this past month, the strategy for the Democrats in '08 was simple: find someone who could win every state that Kerry won, plus either Ohio or Florida. In the aftermath of the mid-terms, suddenly the Mason-Dixon line (Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri) is now in play, plus Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, maybe even (unless McCain is nominated) Arizona.

The up-for-grabs blue states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota) seem further out of reach for the GOP.

Meaning? Meaning someone who could win a few borderline and Rocky Mountain states 51-49% may the Dems' road to the White House. And a Mark Warneresque clone may not be necessary. If 150,000 American troops are still in Iraq in October 2008, or if an American withdrawal has led to a perceived Saigon 1975 Part II, sheer revulsion toward the GOP may be enough for 300+ electoral votes.

Simply pointing at Obama and chanting "liberal, liberal, nyah nyah nyah," won't cut it.

Second point. Should Hillary win in 2008, and serve two terms, the country will have been treated to 28 straight years of uninterrupted Clinton/Bush rule stretching over parts of four decades. This would mean the tied-for-second most dominant political families in US history--more dominant than the Adamses, the Harrisons, the Kennedys, second only to the Roosevelts--will have occupied the executive branch of government from the retirement of Ronald Reagan to . . . whom? Someone thirty-five years old in 2016 would have been eight when the Reagans boarded Air Force One for the Palisades.

I'm all for who the people want. But truly, is this what they want? Jeb Bush, who has never drawn a stupid breath (and for want of a few thousand votes in Florida in 1994, would probably be heading toward his own last two years in the White House), has, correctly I think, sensed a certain Clinton/Bush fatigue, and has taken himself out of the race. The thought of nine months of questions about Halliburton must exhaust Jeb as much as nine months of questions about the Rose Law Firm's missing billing records (never mind the thought of her husband set loose on the East Wing, playing slap-and-tickle with the interns) must appeal to Hillary.

So? So Obama is in play.

Two Americas, Indeed

John Edwards holds a book-signing in Borders instead of Wal-Mart, which of course is the anti-Christ.

Only one problem. Wal-Mart pays its employees more than Borders.

Go get 'em Johnny.

I'm back!

After four months of wondering why, I finally figured out why the address bar is so far beyond my means. I found it! I fixed it! Time to go back and be my boring self! So here it is:

A link to my great benefactor, The Irish Trojan.

Can't wait.

Koetter out

A day late, but: Dirk Koetter gone.

So, who? Recruiting starts NOW.

Over the last twenty-five years, ASU's pattern (Larry Marmie aside, God bless him) has been to cherry-pick successful coaches from less pretigious colleges who had achieved some success. Darryl Rodgers from Michigan State, John Cooper from Tulsa, Bruce Snyder from Cal, Koetter from--where, Idaho?

Robbie-Boy floated a Dave McGinnis rumor. Beyond that--having not ventured to the Sun Devil zone--I haven't any idea.

Beat the Bruins

Two years ago, when USC finished its 55-19 pasting of Oklahoma, and thus joined Nebraska '95 and Miami '01 as one of the three greatest college football teams of my lifetime, I called my local radio station to engage in some (I thought) well-deserved homerism, the two drive-time sports jocks on the other end had no wish to talk about Matt Leinart's sterling passing game, or Pete Carroll's stifling defense, or the simply reflect on the Trojans as a brilliant team that peaked at just the right time. No: instead all anyone wanted to talk about was: would Matt stay or would he go? I mean, we didn't get one day of glory before having to respond to the speculation.

So it is this week. With one of the most emotionally satisfying games in years in the books, 44-24, USC over Notre Dame, it appears that Trojan fans will face, once again, one of the most boring, boring recurring stories in college sports. Will Pete stay or will he go?

To a certain extent, the speculation is understandable. This year was probably Pete Carroll's best coaching job of his life. Without a strong team identity (the offensive captain did not play a down in 2006) and with the departure of the non-wide receiving soul of the offense (drum role, please: Leinart, Bush, White, Lutui, Justice, Byrd--five All-Americans, if you need them), it was up to Carroll to send out the best eleven and hope the chemistry would kick in. What he had to overcome was an overwhelming sense of the blahs, one that struck between the victory over Nebraska in September and the 33-10 deficit against Oregon State two months later. At times, the team seemed to be sleepwalking--through the Washington and Arizona schools--and Carroll used the Oregon State loss to turn the season around. Stanford was a walk-over; Cal and Notre Dame were statements. Now USC has secured its fifth BCS game (tell me this isn't a record), and stands poised to position itself for the fourth consecutive national-title-implications game, as well as the third consecutive BCS Championship game.

So what do we hear? Will Pete Carroll go to the Arizona Cardinals?

Bleh.

This, with the Cardinals' skinflint ways that pretty much prevent any sort of success. In 20 years the Cardinals have gone to the playoffs once, and that was a sheer fluke, the act of a team riding the emotion of a whole city rising up to support (among others) local collegiate heroes Plummer and Tillman. The Bidwills are a blight on pro sports, and I would assume Carroll, who now sits astride the premiere college football program in the country, would have the sense to run a mile from them.

Furthermore, Pete Carroll belongs at USC for the next 20 years. His rah-rah-rah, sis-boom-bah attitude didn’t fly in the NFL. I buy into the belief that a certain brand of superlative college coach does not fit in the pros, either due to a certain arrogance of system and work habits (Steve Spurrier), a tendency to micro-manage (Rick Pitino) or too much naked enthusiasm (Carroll). The good news is, in football and basketball, these guys can still make a fortune. (Pity the poor college baseball coaching phenom.)

In point of fact, Carroll lost the better part of one-loss team last year, and as November turns to December he coaches another one-loss team toward–in the worst-case scenario–to the Rose Bowl. Meanwhile, pupil Leinart runs for his life in the desert.

If Pete ever goes, he goes. But it would be a huge mistake. And at USC he is a god.

And yet, this is all I hear lately.

USC and Arizona State: This is why we care

I walked around all day today thinking of the Texas Rose Bowl, and the wretched, inconsolable emptiness that accompanied me the rest of that night and all the next day, right up until the moment I won five hundred dollars in a poker tournament (and it still hurt). To want something that badly and have it denied, and have it denied in precisely the manner you thought it would be denied (the Trojans' soft defense, minus the four All-Americans from the previous year)--for all this to happen made me question the very act of rooting for a team at all.

The one inescapable truth of sports is that it feels worse to lose than it feels good to win. So why do we torture ourselves? Why do we care?

Last night was why we care.

USC-Notre Dame, second half

Okay, I settle in just in time to see the Trojan babies push another one across. Back before the kickoff, I thought, "Okay, if USC scores to start the second half, no matter the score, that's excellent good news for the Trojans."

I say it here, it comes out there. Most important drive of the season. 28-10, USC.

Now, the (as the Irish Trojan puts it) Pete Carroll Second Half Magic.

Three-and-out, with a sack. Demonstrating, at least now, that counting on your passing game will exhaust your o-line by the middle of the third quarter. So far, anyway.

Now: USC, third and one. Didn't make it. Gotta punt.

Update: Booty to Jarrett, extra-point missed. 37-17. Beat the Bruins.

Update: 44-24. All else evens out. Beat the Bruins.

Footballapalooza

ASU-UA at a standstill.

ND goes for it on fourth-and-nine, fails. USC quick first down.

Observation here: a team that thinks it can simply pass into isolation coverage against USC will soon end up sleeping in the street. Pete Carroll--I've said this before--understands the entire sixty minutes of a game better than any coach I've ever seen, save Bill Parcells and Bill Belichek. (He is limited in other aspects of game strategy, but not here.) Pass block? Fine. Pass block for two-and-half quarters and check with your o-line.

Booty. Touchdown. 7-0, USC.

Now what's this at ASU? Ball at the half-line? After UA wins a reversal? Oh well, touchdown, ASU. 27-14, awaiting the extra point.

Update: USC, great punt return, great play selection, TD pass to Jarrett. 14-0, USC.

Update: I think I have a man-crush on Terrell Thomas, cornerback extraordinaire. Stops a TD. 14-3, SC.

Arizona State grinding down minutes. 28-14.

Update: Wow, that Lane Kiffen is some player. Oh, wait: USC scored while we were treated to a shot of Lane Kiffen in the booth. 21-3, SC.

Now Brady Quinn, first down, runs for 60 yards. Go figure.

Meanwhile, the state of Arizona has just gone to bed. 28-14, Devils.

Back at the ranch . . . Notre Dame, first and goal. Darius Walker fumbles . . . SC recovers.

Mercy.

Update: USC , three and out. Blocked. Punt. Touchdown. 21-10.

And in the most boring ASU-UA game ever (thank you!), ASU leads 28-14 with two minutes remaining.

Update: ASU wins, 28-14. Wonderfully tedious. Meanwhile, USC works around two Booty interceptions. Still 21-10.

Right now, I want to do a half of a Clara Bow and have sex with USC's defense, which is basically responsible for the lead right now.

Good night, Footballpalooza. We go to the second half.

Arizona State-Arizona underway

A few observations:

*Where in the world did Arizona get those ugly-ass uniforms? Red shirts with blue helmets and blue pants? They look like the prisoner team in Longest Yard II, and I don't mean the re-make. And . . .

AAAAAH! Touchdown, ASU! 7-0!

*Where was I? I was about to write, if Rudi Carpenter can get in a groove against Stoops's gambling, swarming defense, this might work. I say it here, it comes out there.

Update: Arizona State goes for it on fourth and short, results in a touchdown . . . and a vicious, late, punk-ass forearm to the windpipe of Carpenter by a ScumCat defender. I'm sorry, but try that against Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or Brett Favre in the NFL, and you'll find your ass in the locker room awaiting the news on your fine.

Update: I like baseball more than college football, only because you walk away from a baseball game often saying, "I never saw something like that before." Well, I've never seen a punter punt the ball twice, as the UofA punter just did. ASU ball, first and goal . . . and in. 21-0.

Update: Excessive celebration leads to a deep kick-off, a return to midfield, a called fumble (correctly reversed--apparently even the good calls go against ASU). Soon enough, touchdown, UofA. 21-7.

Update: What a crap call! UA's Tuitama gets a clean hit, his head snaps back, bangs against the helmet of a Sun Devil defender . . . the announcers basically admit that, yeah, the hit was clean, the contact incidental, but if you knock heads "with a kid who had two concussions . . ." With a kid who had two concussions? What is this, gridiron affirmative action?

Update: So it goes. For the past three decades, Arizona State has had the superior talent, all the starters on a combined team featuring all the Arizona schools, all but the rare future NFL star who inexplicably showed up in Tucson (Chuck Cecil, Rickey Hundley, Teddy Bruschi, No-Bowl Bobby). The talent has, with rare exceptions, been on ASU's side, and the breaks have fallen to Uof A. Such is life. So it happens that two ASU blow-them-off-the-ball drives are flattened by two turnovers, and what might have been at least 28-7 ASU is now 21-14 at the half. Brother.

One-Month novel

Over 28,000 words. 50,000 seems out of reach. But I'll be close, and it'll be good.

College Lame Day

Nothing tops USC fans (who can hardly be roused out of bed before noon to make it to class) halfheartedly going through the motions on "College Game Day." When you consider that the game in question is a good eight hours away . . . Yah-Dude. Whatever.

Ah, that's the alma mater I love.

There was this good sign: "CHARLIE ATE THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY."

Ate the chocolate factory. Now that's funny.

The meanest rivalry, part two

As I had hoped, Robbie-Boy checks in:

"One more thing about today's game. Devil fans are in a once-every-14 years situation today. WE are the underdogs. It makes me sick when the cats rise out of their traditional 3-8 type seasons and hit the .500 mark and Sun Devils lower themselves to the .500 mark. Which is where we are today. Which is why the chorus of "fire Koetter" is ringing loud and clear. Some see today as a win/win game. Beat the rats, and well, we beat ua. Lose, and well, Koetter is gone!

"Kind of funny, a local fish-wrap writer said today that former Cardinals head Coach Dave McGinnis(a well liked and actually pretty good coach, for having the typical Bidwell roster while he was the cards head man)would be a perfect fit for the Sun Devils. McGinnis wants to be a head coach again, and wants to return to the valley. McGinnis.....hmmmmmm...sounds like a poor-man's version of Pete Carroll.

"Stayed tuned."

The greatest rivalry

Rivalries ebb and flow. A few years ago, the September tilt between Florida State and Miami was virtually the National Championship Semi-final; these days, it's a 13-10 offense-free shovathon in which the winner is as disgraced as the loser. In the decade before Bob Stoops and Mack Brown, the Oklahoma-Texas game was irrelevant, then a one-sided Sooner laugher. Since last year, it's become The Testing Ground for Texas.

And so it is with Notre Dame-USC. The game had a special meaning for me long before I entered USC (I did in fact grow up rooting for Notre Dame). The first football game I ever read about in Sports Illustrated was of the 1974 contest, coincidentally the most famous game in the rivalry's history. This was the game, everyone remembers, where USC trailed 24-0 in the second quarter and 24-6 at halftime, whereupon Anthony Davis returned the second-half kickoff for a touchdown, and the Trojans were off to scoring 55 unanswered points for a final score of 55-24.

55-24. As Frank Deford once wrote, it is not often people remember football scores. Last year's Super Bowl? 21-10, Pittsburgh, though it took you a second. The Notre Dame-USC game had been going on for decades, there had been Gifford and Garrett and OJ and Lujack and Huarte and Hornung, but this was the fulcrum. This was the game that introduced American to Traveller, the great white horse that encircled the field after every Trojan score. This was the game that send Notre Dame's Ara Parsegian into retirement--supposedly, in part because he never wanted to look at that damned horse ever again. This game was one that signaled one of the great period in the school's rivalry, one that featured the arrival of Joe Montana (1977), the Komeback Kid Thwarted (1978), and Win One for the Fat Man (the 1982 game that was also the last of John Robinson first tenure). What began in 1983 and lasted for over a decade was one of Notre Dame hegemony, which roughly coincided with USC's, then Notre Dame's, slide into mediocrity. The few times the schools met for large stakes, the game was almost always a laugher--in 1988, when No. 1 Notre Dame met No. 2 USC, the Irish won a 27-10 laugher. Even when USC was very good, and during the Rodney Peete years they were, Notre Dame could not be beat; as a starter, Peete was 0-3 against the Irish, including the '88 debacle. In 1996, when USC finally broke through and ended 13 years of 0-12-1 frustration with an overtime win (this was the year of the $8 million-dollar missed extra point, if you remember), it did not escape anyone's attention that the victory merely salvaged a 6-6 Trojan campaign. What followed was a half-decade of futility on both sides. Notre Dame struggled under Bob Davie, while the Trojans, who learned all the wrong lessons from Keyshawn Johnson, became worse than bad; they became punk-ass.

For all intents and purposes, the modern Irish-Trojan rivalry returned to its importance in 2002, when, for the first time in ages, the both teams entered the game in the top ten, with a BCS game on the line. This was the game remembered for Ty Willingham's defensive schemes being totally exposed by Norm Chow and Carson Palmer, or as the game that won the Heisman Trophy for Palmer. Taking the longer view, this was the game that signaled that Irish-Trojans once again mattered.

It mattered a great deal more last year, when USC (thanks to Matt Leinart first finding Dwayne Jarrett in man coverage, then benefiting from a Bush Push a few plays later) squeaked out a win in The Greatest Game Ever Played. It matters still more today, as the two teams take the field for what is (or should be) a worthy companion to last week's Ohio State-Michigan game: in so many words, the national semi-finals.

A old friend from school e-mailed me this week expressing 1) she was sick, physically ill thinking about the game; and 2) that she hates Notre Dame: "Hate is too weak a word."

Which only means one thing heading into today.

Perfection.

Beat the Irish.

The meanest rivalry

Tomorrow the college football nation will be treated to a special game: the, by all available evidence, meanest rivalry in college football.

Arizona State v. Arizona.

There are older rivalries (Lafayette-Lehigh, Harvard-Yale). There are more historical rivalries (Army-Navy). There are rivalries with more National Championship implications (Ohio State-Michigan, Notre Dame-USC, Texas-Oklahoma). And there are rivalries that produce better games (Notre Dame-USC again, plus Oklahoma-Texas again and, until recently, Miami-Florida State).

For sheer unvarnished hatred, however, perhaps only Alabama-Auburn can crowd the annual Thanksgiving-weekend tilt between the Sun Devils and Wildcats.

This fact may come as a surprise to most people, who associate Arizona with Lute Olson's basketball teams and think of Arizona State as the place Pat Tillman attended two decades ago. But as a veteran of USC-UCLA, USC-Notre Dame, and as someone who has seen both UT-A&M and Ohio State-Michigan fans up close, I can testify: nothing, nothing matches Arizona State-Arizona for sheer unvarnished ugliness.

My younger brother Robbie-Boy once put the ASU-UA game in perspective. He told me he'd spoken to an alumnus of the so-called Big Game, Stanford-Cal, and was told, "Sure, it's a rivalry, and we want to win. But we have friends on the other side from college and we spend the days before the game wine-tasting and going out to dinner. It's part of the fun." Such behavior would be unthinkable between Sun Devil and Wildcat fans, who, starting four hours before game time, begin eyeing one another from one tailgate party to another like panthers circling the same watering hole.

The fist-fights come later, on and off the field.

The hatred has grown in two stages, and its story is a lovely sliver of college football history. The man most deserving of credit (or blame, as you will) is Frank Kush, the coach who put ASU on the football map in the late sixties and early seventies. It was Kush--along with a slew of quality quarterbacks, including Danny White, Dennis Sproul, Fred Mortenson, and Mark Malone--who made Arizona State a football power. A writer in previous generation had once said, "For me, college football gives out west of New Haven and doesn't pick up again until Palo Alto." In Kush's early years, the flyover area was shorter: college football gave out west of Lincoln, Nebraska, and didn't pick up again until Los Angeles. And so it was, until Kush's Sun Devils emerged in the desert and introduced not only to a team but an entire region to the rest of the country.

I was barely old enough in the middle seventies to remember the extent of the bias against Arizona State and other small schools in distant regions. Today's so-called East Coast bias (it is really an L-shaped bias, starting in Ann Arbor, stretching south to Austin, then east through Alabama to Gainesville) has not a patch on football in the seventies, during which the NCAA held a stranglehold on television rights and restricted broadcasting not only to a handful of games, but the same games every year: USC-Notre Dame, Ohio State-Michigan, Pittsburgh-Penn State, Oklahoma-Nebraska. Arizona State was turning out first-rate team after team in virtual anonymity; two months into almost every season, Kush's teams would be 6-0 and perhaps eighteenth in the country, behind many teams with one loss and a few (an Alabama or an Ohio State) with two. A single loss, and ASU would drop out of the Top 20 (as it was called back then). It is hard to remember, but well to remember, that much of the reason the Fiesta Bowl came into being was to gain Arizona State national exposure; the original contract was for the Fiesta Bowl to feature "the WAC champion," but in those days everyone knew who that would be.

It is also well to remember that, in those days, the hatred between Arizona State and Arizona was mostly confined to one day a year. Frank Kush did his level best to express his loathing of all things Bear Down: refusing to land at the Tucson airport when recruiting the latest stud from Amphitheatre High School, for instance. But mostly the fans of both teams (the Devil fans especially) wanted their school to beat the other without wishing the other school ill against, say, UTEP. As a kid whose parents took him to ASU games six Saturday evenings a year, I remember when the PA announcer at Sun Devil stadium would read the days' scores, an Arizona win would be greeted with general applause.

That all changed when the rivalry moved uptown, in successive stages. Stage One was The Game, which featured The Catch. In 1975 Arizona State came into the game 10-0 and flirting with the outer edges of the Top Ten for the first time ever; Arizona, for its part, was 9-1 and ranked 17th. This was the first time in the rivalry where a victory by either side would secure a bowl berth. What followed was the greatest ASU-UA game ever, a 24-21 victory by Arizona State featuring a lunging, diving touchdown catch by sophomore wide receiver John Jefferson. (It was a foretelling of the bitterness to come that, starting then, and to this day, certain Wildcat quarters claimed the catch was a trap.) In the Fiesta Bowl a month later, Arizona State pulled off not only a fabulous upset, but one of the most consequential games in college football history, a game to rank with Notre Dame's defeat of Army in 1920, or Miami's upset of Nebraska in the 1984 Orange Bowl. ASU's 17-14 victory over Nebraska was consequential in the way the other games were: not just introducing a heretofore unsung football power, but literally moving the center of the sport. Notre Dame introduced the country to the football of the Midwest, and specficially to Knute Rockne's Irish; Miami established the primacy of Florida. In the final 1975 tally, Arizona State jumped from number 7 to number 2 in the rankings (many said it deserved the whole macaroni); more importantly, its victory introduced an entire nation to football in the Mountain Time Zone, to Arizona and Colorado State, to Brigham Young and Utah, to Boise State and Air Force. Every time one of these schools finds itself on ESPN or in a BCS Bowl, it should throw up a silent prayer of thanks to Frank Kush.

The events of 1975 were far-reaching in another way, and became the catalyst for the Pacific-Eight to extend an invitation to ASU and Arizona to enter the conference, thus becoming the first of the large conferences to alter itself in any meaningful way. Over the next thirty years, the Big East would be formed, Penn State would join the Big 10, Arkansas would leave the Southwest Conference for the Southeast Conference, the Big Eight would become the Big 12, the SWC would be smashed into half-a-dozen pieces, and--in the last few years--a dozen schools would switch allegiances for an upgrade in status.

It was this trade-up in class that brought the rivalry to Stage Two. Suddenly, both teams were fighting for the Rose Bowl--or rather, Arizona State was, and Arizona was obsessed with playing the spolier. The nastiness reached its present level in the early 1980s, when twice (1982 and 1985) ASU needed to beat or tie Arizona to advance to the Rose Bowl. Both times ASU lost, and both times the sheer joy Arizona took in denying the Sun Devils laid the hatred bare. It was along this time that Arizona State began losing almost every year to Arizona--usually under the most freakish circumstances--that it became clear that Arizona, a basketball school in a football conference, saw its entire season in terms of a single game, Arizona State on Thanksgiving Friday or Saturday. This, then, has been the dynamic of the ASU-UA rivalry for going on a quarter-century: Arizona State, almost always the better team, looking to use the game for a stepping-stone to a bowl, or a better one; and Arizona, almost always the weaker team, taking malicious delight in every bad bounce, every tipped pass, every bad call (and in the Pac-10, the calls can be atrocious).

I have been to four Fiesta Bowls, two Rose Bowls, a Cotton Bowl. I have been at Yankee Stadium for a Yankees-Red Sox double header, been at Fenway Park when Jose Canseco came to bat, sat in the bleachers to watch the Angels come to within one pitch of the World Series, and lose. I have seen Cubs fans up close, and learned the truth of the adage that the Cubs aren't a baseball team so much as an excuse to drink in the afternoon. And nothing--nothing--beats the sheer raw hatred of Sun Devils for Wildcats, or vice versa. And at 5 pm central time tomorrow, I'll turn on my TV and feel a little of that hatred for myself.

Three words.

Skin the Cats.

While the pumpkin pie bakes

I baked my first pumpkin pie at the age of ten. Thanksgiving. I forget how this came about; either I expressed a willingness to help out of my mother decided to make me useful. The pumpkin part came out of a can; everything else--the eggs, spices, half-and-half, sugar, salt--was added by me, under her direction. Thereafter, save for a few years in graduate school, when I was at the mercy of relatives and (one year) an old high school friend, then living in the Bronx, where the grocery stores did not carry Libby's pumpkin pie pack--all except for those few years, two nine-inch pumpkin pies became my specialty.

My pumpkin pies are the best, and are simultaneously my only culinary achievement not involving a grill. From my chair, right here, I can smell the pies baking in the oven and feel decades drop away. I think of my parents and brothers and I, the five of us in Phoenix, Arizona, in a house on Second Street, eating in a large room--part dining room, part living room--more than a thousand miles away from any other of our relatives. Sunset came early that part of the year; my parents would open the curtains of the arcardia door, and from where I sat I could see over the table, past my father's head, over the back fence to the summit of Squaw Peak three miles away.

Later on, Thanksgiving became less a holiday of pies and mashed potatoes and more, as I grew older, more of a rest stop as the fall semester headed home. In graduate school I taught at one college in the morning, another in the evening, and in the afternoons I sat through literature seminars and fell asleep with my head in my hand; late I night I studied for my doctoral comps until I fell asleep in my books. And between the tenth and twentieth of November everything would pile up: essays and mid-terms to be graded, plus essays of mine that were due, all of it keeping me up until two a.m., in on the weekends, pushing me past exhaustion. Those last few weeks, the image that kept me up and kept me going was of surrendering my body utterly to my airplane seat, and then five or so hours later to the sofa in my parents' living room.

My Aunt Peggy once told my mother a doctorate was the closest thing a man will ever come to giving birth. Much like a mother of a ten year-old child, it is hard to remember the pain of wondering if my seven years of studying would end favorably. Always another semester to get through, another shelf of books to read, another set of papers to grade--and right toward the end, the sofa in my parents' living room (by this time, Seventh Avenue) where I could stretch out and fall in and out of sleep to the sounds of Brett Summerall and the image of Texas Stadium. Yes, and those pies.

Gobble, Gobble, Gobble

My novel, which has consumed me in all the best ways, stands at 27, 002 words.

50,000 by month's end?

Maybe not, not now. But close.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

If often stated that, in a perfect world, we would celebrate two holidays: Thanksgiving and St. Patrick's Day.

Christmas is too expensive. Easter too uncomfortably strained between the traditions of the past (tric-or-treating) and the future (parties for all). The Fourth of July is too boring, waiting for the fireworks, and where I live it's too hot. Memorial Day and Labor Day are slightly more tolerable: one celebrates the start of summer and one the end.

New Year's Eve? I'd rather go to bed early.

Easter? Worried about my weight. At least Thanksgiving features lean poultry before loading on the starches and pies.

And Easter has no football.

One-Month novel

This has taken over my life, and not for the worst.

25, 891 words.

BEHIND!

One-Month novel

24,ooo words on the button. Time to ride the bicycle.

One-Month novel

22,029 words.

11 days to go. 2,500 per day. ULP.

USC 23, Cal 9

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2006 Pac-10 Champions.

Astrogirl was strangely confident the entire game, saying, "You know they're going to win, they're the Trojans!"

Just a new generation of them, actually.

There have been greater games and prettier games. None more satisfying, really, since that 55-19 beat-down of Oklahoma two years ago.

And I'll tell you something else. I woke up this morning all full of justifications and fulminations about why the Trojans (if they beat the Irish and Bruins) belong in Glendale. And then I sat down and realized, you know? I . . . I was going to type "I don't care," but no, that isn't it. It's not that I don't care, it's that I can't stand for distractions like these to take away from the accomplishments of the team, much like will-he-or-won't-he took away from Matt and the guys two years ago.

We'll crap about the BCS another day--including the revolting development that the BCS has turned the Rose Bowl into the consolation game. Today is the day to salute a bunch of kids who were asked to fill the shoes of rock stars (Leinart, Bush, White, Bing, Justice, Lutui) and found themselves equal to the task.

University of Southern California. 2006 Pac-10 Champions.

It never, never, never, never, never gets old.

One-Month novel

18,017 words. Almost back on track.

My novel

16,919 words as we speak. About 8,000 words behind, though.

The one-month novel

10,018 wwords as if last night--and I'm actually behind the pace.

I feel a good stretch coming.

Borat punched out by annoyed New Yorker

1. Borat is the funniest movie in the history of the world.

2. You can't say you didn't see this coming.

BCS

1. Ohio State
2. Michigan
3. USC
4. Florida
5. Notre Dame
6. Rutgers

Meaning?

Meaning thatIf USC beats Cal and West Virginia beats Rutgers (hardly the least likely of circumstances) the season becomes (or should become) clear-cut. tOhio State-Michigan and USC-Notre Dame are our BSC semi-finals.

I, for one, couldn’t be happier. This would be as close to a playoff as we’re likely to see in the next 20 years.

I don’t want to hear about “close loss” or whatever. Whoever loses tOSU-Michigan goes to the Rose Bowl.

Anticipating objections:

1. How does a one-loss ND go ahead of a one-loss Michigan? The Florida State precedent (1993) deals with that.

2. A Notre Dame team having defeated Cal and Notre Dame (I’m also assuming they beat UCLA, yeah, there’s that) should leapfrog over a Michigan team losing to Ohio State.

3. Same-season rematches in college football suck. This is an inarguable truth of the universe, whether they be a conference championship game or a bowl (Oklahoma-Nebraska ‘79, Florida-Florida St. ‘96). Voters are often dictated by what they want to see as much as whom they deem worthy, and nobody outside of Columbus or Ann Arbor wants to see a November loser get another chance. This fact will hurt whoever loses between Michigan-tOSU.

Well, there's Florida, right?

Call it intuition or whatever, but I truly think that a Notre Dame team that beats USC would jump ahead of Florida. One cannot dismiss the impact of that prime-time Thanksgiving Saturday ABC game for launching teams’ and individual players’ fortunes. The 2002 game launched a two-loss USC team into the BCS as an at-large entry (over a two-loss Kansas State team that had defeated USC) and basically won the Heisman Trophy for Carson Palmer. Should Notre Dame prevail this way, I see them jumping Florida.

Senator Nelson's son arrested after victory party

Apparently there was the matter of an unconscious woman he was dragging across a hotel parking lot. Details here.

The Democrats are back, baby!

Webb wins--barely--in Virginia

Webb surged–he picked up something like 80% of the last 2% of the vote counted. Talent is about to take a dive as soon as the St. Louis vote comes in. Tester is ahead in Montana.

We are looking, ladies and gents, at 51-49, Dems.

Off to bed.

Thoughts at ten past ten

Fox is reporting that Talent’s weakness is his bad bullpen–only 7 points ahead with St. Louis and Kansas City still to be heard from. That margin is too small.

In Virginia, it’s going to come down to the last surviving Confederate widow. 12,000 votes.

Meanwhile, rumblings in Maryland. The GOP has refused to give up on Steele. The Washpost has taken down calling the state for Cardin.

And, wow.

Wow.

1) Fox news 2) announces that Nick Lampson (D) wins 3) Tom DeLay’s old seat, thus, in Fox’s count 4) handing the House to the Dems.

In other news, Shelly Sekula-Gibbs wins the special election to fill out all eight weeks remaining in Tom DeLay’s term, to be succeeded by Lampson. And, in what may be the story of the night, 42% of those voting manipulated the spinning typist to write in “SHELLY SEKULA-GIBBS” vs. Lampson in the separate regular election.

What may be the only close-to-intriguing story in the most boring Texas election cycle in my 17 years of living here (and no, Kinky Friedman didn’t help) is how the Sekula-Gibbs/Lampson battle (District DeLay) starts tomorrow and shapes up for 2008. And really, that’s all there is in these parts.

Oh, and not for nothing, but . . .

On Fox, Michael Barone with a stack of election returns is Mariano Rivera with a baseball in his hand.

"Ohio six, well, that's part of the Kentucky border, a series of suburban communities earning a median sixty thousand a year joined with some hilly country, a group of farms that went for Kerry by sixty percent, all but the Johnson spread, dating back to Aunt Bessie's dailiance with McGeorge Bundy . . ."

Sodrel (R) loses house race in Indiana

You've never met him. But he was important tonight.

Over at Fox, Major Garrett is bringing up GOP legal challenges in the race. Doesn't sound like much.

Over at TX-22, Shelly Sekula-Gibbs is hanging in there at 42%--as a write-in. Only the slightest indication of how well the GOP would have done had Tom DeLay either 1) resigned a long time ago, or 2) stayed and fought. What he did was the worst of all words.

Nancy Johnson (R) loses in Connecticut House race

Only a matter of how many.

GOP holds Katherine Harris's seat; may gain in Georgia. Virginia continues to annoy

First smidgin of good news for the GOP all night: FLA-16 stays GOP; GOP competitive in two of the only three Dem Congressional districts up for grabs.

Virginia--gawd, when has so much been expended over what mattered so little--still a nail-biter.

Same with Missouri.

Tennessee--barely a lead for Corker.

And the GOP is claiming that CNN (and Fox) called Maryland too quickly.

Rhode Island goes to the Dems

Astrogirl with her first commentary of the night: "How ironic. Whitehouse beats the candidate supported by the White House."

Ugh.

Chocola, Northup lose

Three GOPers in red seats have lost--still the low-hanging fruit. But not good.

Fox calls Maryland for Cardin

Wow.

The GOP margin for error narrows.

Lieberman wins in Connecticut

Well, somewhere, Kos plots revenge.

I love it.

Don't kid yourself: the nutroots went all-in on Lamont. And they are one GOP victory in either Maryland or the four GOP battleground states from retaining the Senate.

Implications to follow.

Santorum out, Menendez in

No surprises. And Schumer has just declared Ohio for the Dems.

The House: I don't like those Indiana House races: if the Dems go four for four, look out. And Shaw is behind in Florida.

The GOP needs some good news fast: Maryland or Virginia, either one.

Those Damn Exit Polls: here we go

On Huffpost.

Acting with the assumption that exit polls always skew left (sometimes dramatically so) we can assume, early, that Kyl and Corker are home free.

The Dems, then, must hold Maryland, win (as they appear ready to) Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then run the table in Virginia, Montana, Rhode Island, and Missouri.

Tall order. As for exit polls? "Allow me to be the first to say, 'Mr. President.'"

Harris to Nifong: "It's about honesty. You're not honest."

An election-day takedown of Mike* Nifong, the Durham district attorney running the most public disgrace of a trial since the McMartin Preschool child-molestation fiasco and other related preying-teacher frauds perpetuated from New Jersey to San Diego in the mid-80s.

(It is always worth noting that the great Child Molestation Epidemic Hoax was smashed due in large part to the efforts of three eclectically mixed periodicals: The Village Voice, The National Review, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. To which news Desert Rose remarked, "There's no subsitute for intelligence applied correctly."

Forty years from now, books will be written about Ray Nifong's prosecutorial misconduct, which has verged on the Kafka-esque since the DNA samples of the accuseds' turned out negative. For now, those of us who have followed the case will have to gain satisfaction from this exchange, between Bob Harris, the voice of Duke sports, and Nifong, when Harris refused to shake hands with Nifong outside a polling place:

You've got to be nicer than that," Nifong said.

"Get out of here," Harris said. "Don't pull this crap."

"This isn't about Duke," Nifong said. "This isn't about Duke at all."

"No," Harris said. "It's about honesty. You're not honest."

More on this in future weeks. For now, back to the mid-terms.

*Correction: Anonymous wrote me to point out that DA's first name was Mike, not Ray, as I originally wrote. I've corrected the text.

Election Day . . .

And, turnout blah blah blah. To paraphrase Dean Barnett: Election Day is like watching the Super Bowl played in the dark. Nothing going on until night-time.

What to watch for: If the three GOP Connecticut Reps go down, trouble for the Republicans. If the Steele wins early in Maryland, bad news for the Dems.

A Chafee win in Rhode Island is bad news for the Dems, negligible news for the GOP in so, so, so many ways.

Watch the GOP Indiana Reps.

As the evening goes along, watch Foley's seat, followed by DeLay's.

And if the GOP wins any two Senate races between Tennessee, Montana, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Missouri, the GOP Senate is safe for now.

I'm going over to Huffpost for a second, having not seen it today. If "Voting Irregularities" are in their top left "scream headline" slot, the Dems are in trouble.


Update: Well, not quite. But close.

Some weekend

Random sightings:

1. USC defeats Stanford, 42-0, in about just the game it needed. It now returns to Los Angeles for the balance of the season--and quite possibly its four most dangerous opponents--and, as I sit here, I cannot think of what will happen, anywhere from the BCS Championship Game to losing the Sun Bowl tiebreaker to Oregon. 11-1 or 8-4: at this point I simply have no idea, and neither does anyone else. The great untold story of this season is the depth of the Pac-10, and--as Robbie-Boy pointed out--the crappiness of its bowl arrangement, whereby, potentially, a 9-3 USC team with victories over Arkansas, Nebraska, both Washington schools, Arizona State and (for instance) UCLA and Notre Dame might end up in freaking El Paso in late December.

2. Arizona State loses to Oregon State, 44-10. Ouch. Has something been happening in Beaver country? Was its 33-10 lead over SC not a fluke? I'll make this point again: One through eight (and even Arizona is showing signs of life) the Pac-10 is very good and very, very tightly packed.

3. Election Day tomorrow. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on polls tightening. I still give--in the Senate--Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Maryland and (barely now) Montana to the Dems, and Virginia, Tennessee and (barely) Missouri to the GOP. But even in doing so I can see how a few thousand votes can turn things one way or another. Perhaps the only even marginally safe GOP seat is Tennessee, so a six-seat pick-up for the Dems is (however unlikely) perfectly legitimate. As for the GOP . . . Ohio, Pennsylvania seem lost and New Jersey will stay Dem, so, best-case scenario, the GOP picks up Maryland, loses one more and keeps 53 seats. Again, probably won't happen. 51-49.

4. Saw Departed. Not as great as I hoped--when the Stones music came in over Nicholson's opening narrative, I was ready for something transcendant, something of the order of Goodfellas. Didn't happen. And I was disappointed, in that the opening montage (busing, protests, etc.) seemed to promise something to the politics of Boston, something that Howie Carr covers in his book The Brothers Bulger. But, as Donald Rumsfeld might have said, you go war with the movie you have, and what eventually shows on the screen is very, very good. DiCaprio showed me something, and Wahlberg, and Damon as a rotten bastard. Jack was Jack. And what you get from a Scorsese crime movie is a Scorsese crime movie, in a style as distinctive as John Updike's prose.

5. Looked forward to last night's Patriots-Colts game more, I think, than any regular season game I had ever seen. Really. What a bummer. Not the final score, but the quality of play. Really, four interceptions (okay, two were not Brady's fault) against that defense? Bill Simmons has been hammering this home all season: the Pats have 13 million in unspent cap money. The money cannot be rolled over. And now that the trading deadline has passed, there is no way of finding a quality receiver. With the playoff slotting coming into play, New England will now very likely have to win a Wild Card game at home, then two games on the road: Denver and the Colts, two of the (for differing reasons) hardest places to play in the NFL. I don't even want to think about it.

6. My novel stands at 5,100 words and counting. This is my cue to get back to work.

One-Month Novel: 50,000 words

Up to 3,028 as of midnight this morning.

Louisville def. West Virginia, 44-34

Chapter one of USC's First Long Road Back Since 2003 (only this time without Leinart, Bush, Williams, Colbert, White, Udeze, Cody, Tatupu, Patterson, Bing, Lutui--did I leave anyone out?).

Dear Rutgers:

Go Rutgers! Beat the Cards!

Signed, Chauncey (get me off the hook, damn it!) Washington

(Joe here: does anyone remember a Thursday Night "Gambler's Special" game so compelling?)

Five Days Out

Partially due to polls, partially due to perceived momentum, partially hunches, here's where we stand.

Nine competitive Senate races: Seven GOP, two Dem.

Dems must win six seats in the aggregate and hope (as seems likely) they hang on to Lieberman in the caucus.

The most likely scenario for a Dem takeover is for the Dems to hold their two seats and go six-of-seven in the GOP seats.

So, consider:

GOP Seats:

Likely GOP: None

Lean GOP: Virginia, Tennessee

Toss-up: Missouri

Lean Dem: Montana

Likely Dem: Pennsylvania, Ohio

Dem Seats:

Lean Dem: New Jersey

Toss-up: Maryland

Right now, if pinned to the wall, I would give both toss-ups . . . to the GOP. Well, I'd give each one independently to the GOP, but probably bet on a split. So say Missouri goes GOP and Maryland for the Dems. Or the other way around.

Which leaves?

Dems, plus four. 51-49, GOP.

Yeah, I'd take that and walk away, too.

Kerry, Day 3: So it's over, of course

Senator Kerry: “I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.”

Translation: "To any stupid serviceman dumb enough not to understand what I was saying, and furthermore to any of said serviceman stupid enough to actually be offended by what, to anyone listening, was clearly a smart-aleck remark aimed at your retarded commander-in-chief (who got better grades than me at the same university, but let's not go there) . . . to all you idiots, and to your idiot families, I apologize. Kind of."

November is National Novel Writing Month

So I entered.

The goal: 50,000 words in one month.

Day 1: 1,307. 300 words behind already!

Jeff Bagwell, ex-Astro (and Hall-of-Famer!)

The inevitable happens.

Awhile ago, a writer on espn.com's Page 2 (it could have been Jim Caple) made the case that, when one considers all five tools, Jeff Bagwell was the greatest third baseman of the last fifty years.

Sound odd? Consider every Hall-of-Fame third baseman since 1960. Bagwell had slightly less power numbers that McCovey, Stargell, Killebrew and Murray (all hit at least 475 home runs to Bagwell's 449), but with a higher batting average (.297) than all four. His batting average (.297) is the same as Orlando Cepeda's, but with more home runs (Cepeda hit 379).

So, his offensive numbers are in the mix with the five who are in, and this was while a considerable number of them in the Astrodome, which was only the worst hitters' park of all time.

Add to this that could field and throw better than any of the above (some were outright defensive liabilities). And as for baserunning, it isn't close; he set a baseball record in 1997 by going from first to third on singles 150 times, and he is the only player--at any position--to hit 400 homers and steal 200 bases.

One could make the argument that Stargell or McCovey was more dangerous, or more clutch, or more something--but to find a first baseman significantly better than Bagwell, one would have to go back more than half a century, to gentlemen named Foxx, Mize, Greenberg, Sisler, Gehrig.

Jeff Bagwell is a Hall-of-Famer.

Kerry, Day 2: Signs of Life

The gang at Fox News were almost bouncing in the anchor chairs this morning.

Kerry has been put into Han Solo-esque carbon freezing until next Wednesday.

Now: what are the consequences? Probably not an outright flip of a specific election or elections, nothing like the 2002 Paul Wellstone "memorial service" essentially handed Minnesota, and probably Missouri, to the GOP. Harold Ford--who by all accounts was losing anyway--quickly distanced himself in Tennessee. James Webb in Virginia, who has embraced Kerry in the past, may have a more difficult time, especially with Virginia's substantial military and military-family population.

The real effect may be psychological, something to get the GOP moving in the last week and get people generally in the polls. The GOP base has been looking for something to get them moving. This may be it.

Senator Kerry, Senator Kerry

I turned to the mid-terms with my own brand of sixth-year weariness. I had promised myself to immerse myself in the minutiae of the mid-terms once the Yankee season ended, but, yee Gods. Things looked bleak for the GOP--not reason enough to turn away, but enough reason when combined with polls that seemed to point nowhere in about a half-dozen Senate races (never mind the unfathomable House races), and, most important, a profound unseriousness in too many races. This mess was, in the aggregate, enough to make me turn the dial for succor.

Put it this way: I hadn't counted so desperately on "Monday Night Football" for escape so much since George Clooney asked "Are you ready for some football?" by way of promoting Three Kings. But, this fall? Heavens, if it became a choice between watching the Maryland Senate debate rebroadcasted on C-SPAN or the Patriots-Vikings game, well, come on, man, it was time to grab that beer and cheer on Brady and the guys.

There is such a profound unseriousness in this year's elections one wants to scream I don't care! Gay marriage? Fine, let 'em. Stem cell research? Let the science go where it goes; by all accounts, adult stem cell research holds the most promise, but I was a C science student in college and am hardly an authority. Fund all of it. Global warming? When I read that a Maine TV producer had ordered a cease-and-desist on all global warming pieces "until Bar Harbor is under water," I wanted to cheer out loud. Presumably for the last four billion years the world has, at all times, been either warming or cooling; there were once icebergs in what is now Texas and, later on, farmlands in Greenland, and the notion that human behavior can either accelerate or retard either warming or cooling is romanticism on a scale that Emerson would have laughed at.

But these issues were monumental when compared to the utter triviality of the George Allen-James Webb Senate race, a race I've come to think of as emblematic of the entire year.

Tell me. Exactly when was George Allen thought of as a GOP presidential contender, a worthy opponent to McCain and Rudy? And does anyone remember when James Webb's resignation as Secretary of the Navy in 1987 was seen as a principled move over a 600-ship Navy? After months of "Macaca," and who said the n-word to whom, and deer heads in mailboxes, and "the Cambodian twist" in somebody's novel, one could not agree more with NRODT, whose words could speak for the entire election. To paraphrase: Grow up, both of you. We have more important things to deal with, chief among them a world war.

I went through all my favorite blogs the past week, and thought of some opinion to have, and simply gave up, because hardly anyone (aside from Hewitt, Malkin, littlgreenfootballs, and the sainted Mark Steyn) seemed anywhere in tune with the world as is everywhere plain.

And the elections? The GOP would lose big. And for the most trivial reasons.

And then John Kerry spoke.

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

John Kerry: the gift that keeps on giving hope to the GOP. And the man who, as much as anyone, embodies the difference between the two parties.

Now, consider:

Did Kerry mean to imply that servicemen and -women are undereducated people?

No.

Did Kerry reveal the utter condescension so present in his party?

Yes.

Either way, those are the words that came out of his mouth. And now he’s stuck with them. And the folks that have been stuck defending a certain President’s sentences are lined up around the block to take their shot. As they should. After a day of gleefully running foam-at-the-mouth e-mails from veterans with PhDs, veterans with MDs, veterans who were valedictorians in their college graduating class, veterans who left their law practice to enlist, current soldiers and sailors who fit the above categories, and parents of soldiers and sailors who fit the above categories–after a day of this, NRO’s The Corner has at least energized the base. Kerry has no one to blame but himself.

What was revealed here was another instance of something far worse than malevolent convictions. What came out was of Kerry’s mouth was the robotic repeating of the loony left’s meme regarding military service. It is not enough for the Dem underground/Moveon/Rangel crowd to criticize the war in Iraq; it must (by way of raising the spectre of the draft) spout the “only poor/minority/undereducated kids are serving” line. And Kerry–who of all people knows this is not true, but further knows his only chance his pathetic (read: nonexistent) chances for the nomination reside in running to Hillary’s left and getting in bed with this bunch–repeats the meme in the most cynical manner. But being Kerry, the words come out in the clumsiest, most anti-Bill Clinton, most “My favorite player is Manny Ortiz” fashion. And when he’s held to his own words, his first instinct is to say, “It’s everyone’s fault but mine.”

So human. So Kerry.

John Podhoretz put it best: Who needs the Swiftboats when Kerry swiftboats himself?

The GOP may still lose.

But suddenly it's not so sullen.