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.