Lance Mannion

That Carl Sagan

Posted Thursday evening, March 4, 2021.

First Mr Spock, then Professor Sagan. Following up on the previous post, Bob Pappalardo’s education as a planetary scientist continued:

...During high school, Bob worked at Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport, Long Island, not far from his house. A few years later at Cornell University in Ithaca, he found the field of planetary science the way everyone else in the wider discipline did: through a Carl Sagan Moment. Upon enrolling, Bob had intended to take up the ancient art of astronomy, but problem the first: there was no astronomy major proper at Cornell; the field was taught under physics. Problem the second: physics. Bob therefore switched studies, his base camp now the university’s new geology building. Myriad mineralogy labs lined the hallways, and to study the stuff of the Earth was to spend long days and late nights in them, over big, binocular-type microscopes adorning tall black lab tables. Pappalardo was seated in one such lab on one such night behind one such microscope when another student, first name John, last name Berner, and so of course they called him Bunsen, walked in.

Hey, Bob, asked Bunsen, you know about this course Sagan is offering? This course on icy moons?

Bob did not know about this course Carl Sagan was offering, this course on icy moons, but he went home that night, pulled out the course catalog, and looked it up. ICES AND OCEANS IN THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM. Instructor: SAGAN, CARL.

That Carl Sagan, yes. He of Cornell, yes, of course. The prominent professor was for Bob part of the university’s initial allure. But Sagan didn’t always teach, had a lot going on. Carl Sagan, recently of Cosmos (book and television series) and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (television series). Carl Sagan, of the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, the robotic explorers that in 1979 transformed the four telescopic dots of Jupiter’s moons into jaw-dropping globes of fire and ice,and later, around Saturn, revealed worlds diverse, living, geologically active, almost fully-fledged and practically planets (further study needed). Carl Sagan of the spacecraft Viking 1 and 2, which in 1976 revealed the Martian surface to be barren, though certainly in possession of everything necessary for life to exist (further study needed). Carl Sagan, a superstar in a profession bereft even of minor celebrities, who brought astrophysics into blue-collar living rooms, who in turtlenecks and with windswept hair spoke like a philosopher, practically in verse and presented the the pursuit of knowledge as something intrinsic and vital to the soul of every human being, who used his platform and lilting baritone to advance social causes, who planned protests against nuclear weapons test sites, arms linked with fellow activists, who crossed police lines and was placed gladly under arrest---Armageddon’s Thoreau---in order to advance his cause. Page one the next day: a rebel astronomer in handcuffs! Carl Sagan with a Ph.D. behind his name and a childlike imagination in his head, who had, for example, lobbied for light to be added to the Viking lander so that at night martian animals might be attracted to it and scurry up to investigate. Well, why not? Nobody knew what waited on the surface of the Red Planet.

That Carl Sagan.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

The Vulcan really drove the point home

Posted Thursday morning, March 4, 2021.

The Pappalardo below is Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist who is the central figure in “The Mission”, David W. Brown’s account of the twenty-year quest to send a space probe to explore Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa:

When Pappalardo was a child, astronauts worked and played on the moon. It was just normal, a thing people did, like work in a factory, bank, or bakery. They set up seismometers. They collected rocks. They explored this strange new world and encountered mystifying phenomena: spots of orange dirt on its plaster landscape, jarring flashes of light when they closed their eyes. Scientists on Earth solved these puzzles: the former formed by fire mountains in Luna’s primordial past; the latter, cosmic rays colliding with rentinas. Astronauts drove cars up there. They played golf. They brought mice with them. Pets! In space!

Bob was never going to be an astronaut---that just wasn’t in the cards---but he was a child of Star Trek, and across five-year missions, Spock pointed the way in first run, and then in syndication, and then in animation (the Vulcan really drove the point home): science…

---from “The Mission: or, how a disciple of Carl Sagan, an ex-motocross racer, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the world's worst typewriter saleswoman, California mountain people, and an anonymous NASA functionary went to war with Mars, survived an insurgency at Saturn, traded blows with Washington, and stole a ride on an Alabama moon rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of the second Garden of Eden at the bottom of an alien ocean inside of an ice world called Europa (a true story)” by David W. Brown.

Abraham Lincoln and the George Bushes I and II

Posted Wednesday morning, March 3, 2021.

President-elect Abraham Lincoln saying farewell to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois from the rear platform of the train that would take him on the perilous journey to Washington, D.C. for his inauguration. February 11, 1861.

Doesn’t matter how insightful, vividly descriptive, narratively compelling, thematically appealing, dramatically realistic in its portrayals of the characters who move in and out of the story, and in all other ways well-written it is, sometimes my favorite passages in a work of nonfiction turn out to be the more mundane, workaday, just-the-facts, ma’am, paragraphs that simply tell me something I hadn’t known until I came across them in the course of reading the book in hand. Tim Widmer’s “Lincoln on the Verge”, his chronicle of President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s fraught, dangerous, sometimes comic, often harrowing, but ultimately triumphant two-week journey by train in February 1861 from his hometown in Springfield, Illinois to Washington, D.C. for his first inauguration, is insightful, vivid, compelling, thematically appealing, dramatic, and very well-written, and there are many passages I could quote from the 209 pages I’ve read so far illustrating these facts, and no doubt I’ll get around to doing that over the next couple of weeks as I chug along. But this morning this paragraph, which almost reads like an index card Widmer made notes on as he did his research, is making my day, because I didn’t know this about the Bush family history:

Euclid defined a circle as a shape with a center, from which all lines can be drawn equally. [Columbus, Ohio, through which Lincoln’s train passed on February 13] did its best to live up to that idea, open to all the young strivers who found their way into the gear mechanisms of a busy state capital. A generation later, an ambitious young mechanic named Samuel Bush [born in 1863] would rise quickly through the ranks to become a superintendent of motive power for a local railroad, then general manager of the Buckeye Steel Castings Company, which specialized in railroad couplers. Following new lines of energy, his children and grandchildren would move toward Connecticut, then Texas. In the fullness of time, the Bush family would supply the United States with two presidents, the forty-first and the forty-third.

---from “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington” by Ted Widmer.

Madcap, not hell bent

Posted Sunday morning, February 28, 2021.

Well, that mood didn’t last.

Since the rest of the gang was sleeping in, which I took as their birthday present to me, giving me some extra time to myself and peace and quiet, I threw myself a private party, downing two mugs of Irish Breakfast tea instead of my usual solitary and purely medicinal mug of green tea. I was tempted to have a third, but, to steal a line from Niles Fraiser, I was feeling madcap, not hell-bent.

The mug is lying, by the way. But you have to forgive it. It was a long-ago Father’s Day present from the Mannion guys, and they were too young back then to know better.

"It is too late to travel..."

Posted Sunday morning, February 28, 2021.

Detail from a photo by John Vachon, “Front Porch, Sunday afternoon, Vincennes, Indiana”, 1941. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s my birthday, and I’m in a mood...

Able at last to stop
And recall the days it took
To get them here, they sit
On the porch in rockers
Letting the faded light
Of afternoon carry them off.

I see them moving back
And forth over the dullness
Of the past, covering ground
They did not know was there,
And ending up with nothing
Save what might have been.

And so they sit, gazing
Out between the trees
Until in all that vacant
Wash of sky, the wasted
Vision of each one
Comes down to earth again.

It is too late travel
Or even find a reason
To make it seem worthwhile.
Already now, the evening
Reaches out to Take
The aging world away.

And soon the dark will come,
And these tired elders feel
The need to go indoors
Where each will lie alone
In the deep and sheepless
Pastures of a long sleep.

--- “Old People on the Nursing Home Porch” from "Selected Poems" by Mark Strand.

Baby, I was baked this way

Lifted from the album, Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021.

Temptation in Aisle 5. Temptation in Aisle 5. Lady Gaga inspired "Chromatica" Oreos on display at Hannaford’s Supermarket, Plattekill, New York, Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021.

Believe it or not, I resisted. I had to. As much as I wanted to turn my voice into a musical message of kindness, it’s Ash Wednesday, and I gave up cookies for Lent, more for reasons of health than for religious ones---my blood sugar has been way high for weeks. Not that hard a sacrifice though. I’m not that much of a fan of any type of Oreos, except Lemon, and these “Chromatica” Oreos are just plain old Golden Oreos with pink and green food coloring. Might have been a different story if Lady G had inspired Chromatica Mint Milanos.

Notes from a patriot and a tea drinker

Posted Sunday morning, February 14, 2021.

Detail from “Tea Time” by Jan Joseph Horemans II, painted sometime in the second half of the 18th Century. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Via Wikipedia.

I don’t know whether I’d have been a Patriot or a Tory if I’d been alive and living in Boston when the Tea Act was passed, but if I’d been a tea drinker on either side, I'd have found common cause with the smugglers. From “The British Are Coming: The War in America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777” by Rick Atkinson:

...The Tea Act restructured the East India Company and gave it a monopoly on tea sold in America. The company could appoint its own American agents, eliminating the expense of British wholesalers; the tax of three pence per pound would be retained to again affirm Parliament’s authority, but other export duties were eliminated. The price of tea in America would drop by more than a third, selling for less than the smuggled Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese tea popular in the American market. Pleased by the windfall, the East India Company prepared two thousand lead-lined tea chests for shipment to New World ports.

Too clever by half, the plan infuriated both smugglers and American merchants now superseded by favored East India agents. It implied Parliament’s authority to create monopolies for other commodities and reawakened the fraught issue of taxation without representation. The cynical manipulation of colonial markets on behalf ot British mercantile interests nudged American moderates toward common cause with radicals who deplored all British meddling in American affairs. In an attempt to stigmatize the beverage, one writer asserted that tea turned those who drank it into “weak, effeminate, and creeping valetudinarians.”

I admit to being a creeping valetudinarian these days, but would someone weak and effeminate, even if a creeping valetudinarian, drink his tea out of a mug like this?

Beam me up some Earl Grey, Scotty...

The Empirical Misha

Posted Wednesday night, February 10, 2021.

Detail from “In a lesson of credence with the sexton” by Ivan Vladimirov. 1913. Via Wikiart.

Today would have been the 121st birthday of Boris Pasternak, the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature winning Russian poet and author of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”. Yura is the boy who will grow up to be the title hero of the book.

Yura realized how much he owed to his uncle for the general qualities of his character.

Nikolai Nikolaevih was living in Lausanne. In the books he published there in Russian and in translation, he developed his long-standing notion of history as a second universe, erected by mankind in response to the phenomenon of death with the aid of the phenomena of time and memory. The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.

Even more than on Yura, the circle of these notions had an effect on his friend. Under their influence, Misha Gordon chose philosophy as his specialty. In his department, he attended lectures on theology and he even had thoughts of transferring later to the theological academy.

The uncle’s influence furthered Yura and liberated him, but it fettered Misha. Yura understood what role in Misha’s extreme enthusiasms was played by his origins. From cautious tactfulness, he did not try to talk Misha out of his strange projects. But he often wished to see an empirical Misha, much closer to life.

---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak.

This old house, this old householder

Adapted from the Facebook news feed, Thursday night, February 4, 2021. Posted Tuesday morning, February 9.

We're without a bathroom sink tonight. The drain trap crumbled this afternoon. I bought a replacement. Normally a trip to the hardware store cheers me up, but the top quarter of the old pipe is still on there good and tight. I sprayed it with penetrating oil but now I'm too tired to tackle the job, so it'll have to wait until morning. This old house has been falling apart piece by piece for the last few years but over the last couple of months the deterioration seems to have accelerated. Like house, like owner. I don't know if the house is a metaphor for me, or I'm a metaphor for it. I also don't know if the right word is synecdoche or metonymy so I'm going to worry about that instead of the sink.

On using your own words when writing online instead of being used by the words you read online

Monday night, February 8, 2021.

"A gorgeous metaphor for a communal life online": A school of surgeonfish in reef waters off the Maldives. Detail from a photo by Uxbona, via Wikipedia.

Variations of the phrase “no one is talking about this”, which, with conventional capitalization, is the title of a new novel about lives lived out online by Patricia Lockwood, appear all the time in my Twitter feed, as one Twitterer after another vents their anger, frustration, horror, or anguish that an issue they believe is of vital importance and needs immediate attention from the media so that politicians will notice and set to work right away solving the problem. Thing is, it’s usually the case that the reason no one is talking about it is that they’ve already talked about it, as a quick Google will show. The top ten items that the algorithm turns up will be links to articles and stories in which people have talked about this at length. The angry, frustrated, horrified, anguished Twitterers have made the mistake of thinking that what’s happening in their Twitter feeds is representative of more than what’s happening in their Twitter feeds and of thinking the world as it appears to them online is the world as it is.

One of my objects since I started writing for an online readership, sixteen and a years and four portals ago, has been to drive my readers offline and out of the virtual world back into the analog one. Read this book, watch this movie, was my constant theme, take a walk in the woods or at least a hike around the block; look at that bird, watch out for bears; grab your tool kit; enjoy the weather or, at any rate, get out into it long enough to know what you’re complaining about when you sit back down at your keyboard or take out your phone to complain about it: better yet, take out your phone and call a friend to complain about it. Study a real school of fish, instead of being a member of the school of fish you swim with online. And then use your own words when you blog, Facebook, tweet, instagram, TikTok, or substack about it.

Another object has been to use my own words myself and come up with my own jokes. I’m old enough to remember when that was a point of pride, and I’m proud to say I’ve succeeded in that. (Narrator: Not always.) So you can see why I’m looking forward to reading “No One Is Talking About This” and why I’ll be talking about it as soon as I do. What’s coming up aren’t more of my words. They’re the words of Claire Wills talking about “No One Is Talking About This” in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

“Stream-of-consciousness!” yells the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This. She is, like Lockwood herself, a writer in her thirties with a huge Internet following. She has, like Lockwood herself, a husband, parents, brothers and sisters, friends—all of whom appear in the novel—but she is just as tightly bound to the commune of “people who lived in the portal.” She is onstage in Jamaica, talking about the world online, about life as it is lived through the window of the phone you hold in your hand, and on which you may be reading this review....

“But what about the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” One audience member yawned, then another. Long before the current vectors came into being, they had been a contagious species.

Lockwood expects her reader to work hard. The novel is all about the importance of being in the know, and it won’t work unless we are prepared to join in, parsing the anecdotes. There is something very winning about Lockwood’s abundant faith not only that we can but that we will follow her. She jollies us along, leading us through the language and styles of ever more evolved platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), without explicitly naming any of them. She trusts us to keep up to speed, to catch meaning off the current vectors and to keep it circulating.

That passage is one of several in which Lockwood tries out labels (with exclamation marks!) for the kind of book she is writing: “The plot! That was a laugh.” What hope for storyline, when the novel simply follows the Lockwood character, an Internet obsessive, obsessing about the Internet? She scrolls, she showers, and she scrolls some more. She spends her time in bed engaged in “spellbound reading” of her phone—exactly the same reading that everybody else is doing. She posts, she messages, and she texts; her phone buzzes repeatedly in her pocket when she starts trending; she climbs onto stages in Australia and Japan and all over Europe and talks about the portal:

All around the world, she was invited to speak from what felt like a cloud-bank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information. She sat onstage next to men who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on so hard that they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing. This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?

She laughs, “Ahahaha!,” “the new and funnier way” to laugh. She knows to say “it me,” or “unbelievably me,” rather than “that’s just how I feel!” in response to a post about a warty frog, unutterably alone. She is absolutely in command of the language of the portal, and she writes about this command in discontinuous sections of prose that appear like lengthy tweets, separated by asterisks and gaps. Naturally she wonders about this style:

Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote…

“Someone could write it. But it would have to be like Jane Austen—what someone said at breakfast over cold mutton, a fatal quadrille error, the rising of fine hackles in the drawing room.” Pale violent shadings of tone, a hair being split down to the DNA. A social novel.
…

It’s an odd ambition, when you think about it—to write a novel about the Internet. However much you jazz up the form you are folding new modes of communication back into old ones, and by mentioning Austen Lockwood wants us to notice this. The novel she has written is a hybrid beast: it is an arch descendant of Austen’s socio-literary style—a novel of observation, crossed with a memoir of a family crisis, and written as a prose poem, steeped in metaphor.

No One Is Talking About This does feature a plot, if not exactly a “plot!,” and the plot even belongs to a genre—the disenchanted bildungsroman. As Lockwood moves deeper inside the portal she becomes increasingly alienated from “real life,” increasingly “locked in” to the collective consciousness. Lab rats in a cage get a pellet of food when they hit a button, but all you get for living in the portal and playing the game is to be more of a rat. She looks back wistfully to a time when the portal appeared to serve people rather than the other way around. The idea of spending time in a chat room seems positively Edenic compared to the new world in which “every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.”

A school of fish, seen from above—it’s a gorgeous metaphor for communal life online, and it points to a contradiction in this novel, in which Lockwood repeatedly discovers new ways of saying that we have lost new ways of saying things: “What began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma.” You start by pinging an elastic band at the back of the class, and before you know it you are part of a gang, talking only to the people who talk exactly as you do, listening only to your own echo:

It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals…

The alternative to spouting the shared doctrine of your online community is to try to keep ahead of the portal itself. But it is such hard work, not just being an ordinary fish, but being the first fish to catch the light in a dart of new direction: “It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus, produce the perfect sneaze of it, and then mutate it into something new.” You can’t afford time off. She tries locking her phone in a safe, but that isn’t exactly self-control, and she very quickly folds. Eventually her husband diagnoses a “dead look” behind her eyes, just when she claims she is feeling most alive…

---from “Bildungsonline” by Clair Wills, from her review of “No One Is Talking About This” in the February 25, 2021 issue of the New York Review of books.

Tinker Tailor Telephone Tea Cosy Grumpy Spy

Posted Thursday night, February 4, 2021.

Gary Oldman as George Smiley at work in the 2011 film adaptation of John le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. Focus films

Le Carre could be funny: mordant, witty, sardonic, satirical, even parodistical, all in his own manner and voice. He had influences, naturally, some you’d expect, like Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh. But in certain sentences and phrases and Smiley’s relationship with telephones I hear whispers of P.G. Wodehouse, particularly in Smiley’s tea cosy and those nearly anthropomorphized “anonymous” grey boxes humming “without warning”:

Smiley had always loathed the telephone, and he would take no calls whatever, unless in Guillam’s view they concerned matters of great urgency, and none did. The only instrument Smiley could not switch off controlled the direct line from Guillam’s desk, but when he was in one of his moods he went so far as to put a tea-cosy over it in an effort to quell the ring…

...It was during this...period that a new and wonderful gadget appeared on the fifth floor. It was brought in suitcases by two crew-cut technicians and installed over three days: a green telephone, destined, despite his prejudices, for Smiley’s desk and connecting him directly with the Annexe. It was routed by way of Guillam’s room, and linked to all manner of anonymous grey boxes, which hummed without warning….

---from “The Honorable Schoolboy” by John le Carre.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Declassified related post: "John le Carre, Comic novelist?"

Baby Jesus Deep

Mined from the notebooks, Friday, December 18, 2020. Dug out Wednesday morning, February 3, 2021.

View from the front door of the Mannionville Ranch House, Tuesday morning, February 2, 2021.

Our nor’easter has blown through. Snow stopped falling late yesterday afternoon, and this morning it’s even beginning to melt off the roof. Making quite a crash as it slides onto the back deck. Reminds me, I’ve left this one  buried in the notebooks since our last big snow back in December. Digging it out now because history’s repeating itself and I’ve been answering the same questions I answered six weeks ago, with the same hesitation and qualifiers. And, no, I don’t know how many inches we got. Wiseguy, A lot more than “A Lot.” Somewhere just below “Holy Hell”, I’d guess.

Report from the Weather Bureau of the Department of In Search of Lost Time: Friday, December 18, 2020:

Been fielding phone calls and texts from friends and relations far and not too near, all of them wanting to know how we’re faring after the storm. Really, I suspect, they want to tell me how they’re faring. Human nature. At any rate, by way of getting around to their news, they’ve all asked versions of the same ancestral question: “How much snow did you get?” Dealt with that one a lot when we lived in Syracuse. Folks out of town checking on us believed that every snowstorm that dumped on us was an antarctic blizzard that buried us up to the second floor windows, and with reason. I’ve always hesitated before answering the question. The person asking it usually means “How deep is it?” and expects the answer to be in inches. But I don’t judge snowfalls by depth. I judge them by weight, that is, by how much shoveling needs to be done and how hard it’s going to be to do it. By that reckoning, three inches of wet snow is more than a foot of dry, powdery snow, simply because it’s heavier. But I have my own table of measure, not as precise as the National Weather Service, but useful in deciding when to reach for the shovels. Here it is:

A dusting.

Not too bad.

It can wait.

Oh oh.

Starting to really pile up.

Better get out there.

Darn.

This is bad.

Why don’t I own a snowblower?

This is a  lot.

A ton.

Pretty deep.

Getting deeper.

Really deep.

HOLY HELL!

Today I added a new line of measure: “Baby Jesus Deep.” The roads are clear, the sky’s blue, and no more snow’s predicted, so this morning I headed to Barnes & Noble to do some Christmas shopping, and saw this on the way:

I think this is going on the chart between “This is bad” and “Why don’t I own a snowblower?”, which is where I had ranked yesterday’s snowfall. Let’s hope it melts before I have to add “Mary’s Halo Deep” to the chart.

"It was artistic to be these girls..."

Posted early Wednesday morning, February 3, 2021.

Detail from “Il suonatore di liuto (The Lute Player)”, 1612/1620, by Orazio Gentileschi. The National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

“...and to be us, in love with them.”

I didn’t need to have read “Lolita” in high school to see and think along these lines, and I hadn’t read it, and wouldn’t get around to it until just before I went off to graduate school, and I’m glad. It meant I saw these girls as themselves and gazed at them through my own eyes and not through Humbert Humbert’s. At least, I’d have thought, to the degree I thought instead of felt, I was seeing them as they were and not as I wanted them to be and I looked at them through my own unfiltered eyes and what I saw was what there really was to see. But these girls, many of whom were my friends, two of whom were my girlfriends, were artistic and were not only worthy of having love poems written to them and of being painted by Italian masters, they wrote poetry and painted and drew and played musical instruments, and, not simply by the way, got better grades than I did...

Across the street, past the Gellatlys’ house, and past their back yard, was the house of my friend Don. He and I read “Lolita” at about the same time. Just as Humbert pleaded his love for Lolita before the “winged gentlemen of the jury,” we expounded to each other on our love for various beautiful girls at Hudson High School. These girls were like Lolita, with their field-hockey sticks, and book bags, and scuffed knees on the school bus. Lolita starred in a famous, best-selling book by a high-class foreign author. Therefore, the girls who rode Bus 8 with us were themselves worthy of the loftiest regard—worthy of having love poems written to them, or of being painted by the old-time Italian painters whose names we didn’t remember from trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Suddenly it was artistic to be these girls, and to be us, in love with them. The world seemed all in a sweat over this fictional girl, Lolita, who looked and talked and acted like girls we got to be next to, and hopelessly far from, every day.

---Ian Frazer, “Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me”, in the December 20, 2020 issue of the New Yorker.

With Doctor Blackwell in Geneva

Posted Monday morning, February 1, 2021.

Portrait of Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman doctor in the United States, uncredited and undated but likely depicting Blackwell as she'd have appeared in the late 19th Century. Courtesy of Hobart and William Smith Colleges via the Finger Lakes Times.

Wednesday is the 200th birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the United States. Blackwell studied medicine at Geneva Medical College, a department of Geneva College in Geneva, New York, starting in 1847 and graduating in 1849. Geneva College renamed itself Hobart College in 1852. In 1908, William Smith College for Women opened on the Hobart campus. For administrative and business reasons, William Smith was treated as a department of Hobart, but in 1943 it was formally recognized as an independent school, although it still shared facilities and faculty with Hobart. Technically, that’s still the case, but they call themselves by the collective name of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the plural deliberate but quietly elided, which is how they were known when I arrived there to teach in the mid-1990s. Blackwell was then and I think still is Hobart’s most famous and distinguished alum. William Smith claims her too. When I was there her memory was well-honored by both colleges, separately and together. Her name was invoked with reverence and pride. Her story featured prominently in the lore of both schools. In 1994, a statue of her as a student was installed on campus. But I don’t recall hearing this part of the story, although it probably circulated. I wish it had circulated around to me. I’d have enjoyed sharing it with my students. They’d have gotten a kick out of it. Especially the William Smith students, and especially the science majors and pre-meds among them:

Elizabeth Blackwell was admitted to Geneva Medical College as a joke. She was twenty-six years old and had already apprenticed herself to two physicians, but she was rejected by more than a dozen schools. The only acceptance letter came from the students of Geneva Medical College, an Episcopal school in upstate New York. Dated October 20, 1847, it contained the following resolutions: “That one of the radical principles of a Republican Government is the universal education of both sexes; that to every branch of scientific education the door should be open equally to all; that the application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our class, meets our entire approbation; and in extending our unanimous invitation, we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.”

Although this promising letter purported to reflect the deliberations “of the entire Medical Class of Geneva Medical College,” it failed to explain why Blackwell’s admission had been relegated to the student body. The answer was that the faculty had opposed it but did not wish to offend one of her recommenders, and so punted the issue to the students. Nor did the letter explain how those students had come to unanimously support her application: aware of the faculty’s opposition, delighted by the prospect of pranking them, and knowing that their decision had to be unanimous, they menaced the only dissenter until he relented. In the end, the motives of Blackwell’s fellow-students did not matter; she set off right away, starting the fall term a few weeks behind the men in her class.

---Casey Cep, “The Blackwell Sisters and the Harrowing History of Modern Medicine”, in the February 1, 2021 issue of the New Yorker.

Like I said, I think all my students, Hobart and William Smith alike, would have enjoyed the idea of their predecessors of a hundred and fifty years back putting one over on the faculty. But I think the William Smith students’ laughter would have been slyer, more knowing, and more tinged with irony. At the time, William Smith was the tougher school. It had higher admission standards and more rigorous degree requirements. William Smith students as a whole had a higher GPA. You went to Hobart because you didn’t get into Colgate. You went to William Smith because who needs Colgate? But you wouldn’t find many Hobart students who’d admit this out loud.

______________________________________________________________________________

One day after class, I was walking out the door with a William Smith student. She was a science major, biology, I think. Very good student, one of the smartest in the class, and one of the best writers. She had something weighing on her mind and had stuck around to ask me a question: Who did I think were smarter, science majors or humanity majors. Being the son of a physicist and the smartest human being I knew, I was quick with my answer, but I was also talking from experience as a teacher: “Science majors, no question.”

I assumed she was bothered by the attitudes of some Hobart students, who as a group had a problem facing the fact that any woman with any major could be smarter than they were. It turned out that her argument was with other William Smith students whom she felt looked down on science majors as mere technicians, laboratory drudges who might know how to light a bunsen burner or prepare a microscope slide weren’t intellectually up to a real liberal arts education. I'd like to imagine things have changed a lot by now. Among women, at any rate.

Wanda and Vision Love Lucy

Posted Saturday evening, January 30, 2021.

Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff---the Avengers’ Scarlet Witch---looks perplexed at finding herself inhabiting a character who’s a mashup of situation comedy leading ladies: She’s in Laura Petrie’s kitchen, wearing one of Donna Reed’s dresses, and making dinner using the magic of Samantha Stephens in Marvel Studio's television series "WandaVision".

Mannion Family Movie Night is routinely The Mannions Catch Up on TV Shows Night. Last night we watched the second two episodes of “WandaVision”, and I think I have a better idea of what’s going on. I had no idea what to think after the first two episodes, which I’m pretty sure was the point.

“WandaVision” takes two characters from Marvel Studio’s Avengers series, Wanda Maximoff---a mutant with magical powers, played by Elizabeth Olsen, and the Vision, an android with Superman’s super powers and Mr Spock's affect, played by Paul Bettany--- and drops them without explanation or lead-up into a world that’s mimics television situation comedies and has them progress decade by decade from one era’s style of show to the next, moving from black and white to color, changing fashions, attitudes, and kitchen appliances without comment or notice. They start off in the 1950s, with Wanda dressed like Donna Reed and Vision like Ward Cleaver, to the early 60s, where they’re suddenly living in Rob and Laura’s house in New Rochelle, to the later 60s and Sam and Darren Stephens neighborhood, to the 1970s and the Brady Bunch’s place, which is where they’re left at the end of Episode Four.

Elizabeth Olsen is going to turn thirty-two in a couple of weeks. I mention this because of what I’m about to get into next.

It happened that the week we watched the first two episodes, I was catching up with the news that Aaron Sorkin is going ahead with a movie about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, reportedly starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, and fans---fans of “I Love Lucy” not of Sorkin, emphatically not fans of Sorkin---were in a collective social media platformed rage at the casting of Kidman as Lucy. Kidman is Sorkin’s second choice to play the part. Cate Blanchett had to drop out.

The fans had suggestions for “better” casting. Chief among the actresses they championed was Debra Messing. More for her smile, her liveliness, her quick wit, and obvious high humor, than her red hair, I think, although the red hair helps.

But another favorite was Kathryn Hahn, whom most people know from “Transparent” and “Bad Moms”, but I recognized as the voice of Doc Ock in ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’.

I never watched “Transparent” or saw “Bad Moms”. But I have seen Hahn work. Last night, in fact, and two weeks ago when we watched the first two episodes of “WandaVision”. She plays Wanda and Vision’s style-changing but not joke-changing wacky neighbor. She’s funny in the part, but looking at her and thinking about her playing Lucy, I wanted to say to the fans rooting for her, “Have any of you seen “I Love Lucy’?”

“Have you taken a good look at Lucille Ball?”

In the 1930s and 40s, Ball had achieved a second-tier movie stardom as a romantic leading lady, usually in comedies or light-hearted dramas, routinely playing the sensible girlfriend of the movie’s clownish, hapless, feckless, or misguided male lead. My two favorite movie starring her in a version of this role is “Sorrowful Jones” starring Bob Hope.

But in 1951, when “I Love Lucy” premiered, Ball was making a shift in her career. Not just from film to television. From leading lady to...clown.

I mean that as high praise. Chaplin was a clown. Keaton was a clown. Laurel and Hardy were clowns. Fanny Brice was a clown. Red Skelton called himself a clown with pride. Harpo Marx was the clown’s clown.

It turned out she had a gift for physical comedy. She could mug, mime, fall down, stammer, blubber, double take, spit take, and take hits (from things like inopportunely opened doors and objects falling off shelves)with the best of them. Some of the best of them guest-starred on the show. Harpo Marx, for one. Lucy did a more than passable Harpo impression, and together they did a take on the famous mirror scene from “Duck Soup”.

She could do all this while maintaining her movie star-beautiful looks. Which was a part of the show’s central joke.

Lucy could have been content to be Desi’s adoring wife, supportive, differential, domestic, ornamental. But she had ambitions.

She wanted to be a star. Of stage, screen, and television.

She wanted to be Lucille Ball.

In her own mind, she already was. She just needed a break, and was always scheming to get one.

Her trouble was she had no talent.

Which gave Lucille Ball plenty of opportunities to showcase her talent for clowning. She was at her funniest when she was acting out Lucy’s incompetence.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to see Lucy as admirable in her determination to establish a life and career for herself apart from being Desi’s wife. The other is to see her as deserving to fail and being punished for getting ideas. Every week she was put back in her place. It was the 1950s, after all. Either way obscures the main point: Lucille Ball was brilliant at being Lucy Ricardo.

Lucille Ball was forty when she first played Lucy Ricardo. Nicole Kidman is fifty-three and a half. Cate Blanchett is fifty-one. Both are too old to play Lucille Ball at that time. Too old to play Lucy Ricardo who was supposed to be a young housewife. Debra Messing, the fan favorite for the part, going by the gossip on social media, is fifty-two. She’d have been a dream as Lucy during the first “Will & Grace” years. I don’t know about now. Depends on how well she still moves. Whoever plays Lucy has to be able to move.

By the way, Hahn is forty-seven.

For that matter, Javier Bardem, at fifty-one, is too old to play Desi Arnaz, who was only thirty-four when “I Love Lucy” premiered. I think I’d rather see Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who is about to turn forty, or Gael Garcia Bernal, forty-two, as Desi. I’m assuming the casting rules are that Arnaz/Ricardo has to be played by an actor from a Spanish-speaking country, although not Cuba specifically. Garcia-Rulfo and Bernal are Mexican. Bardem was born in Spain. To me, as important is if he can play the conga drum and sing “Babalu”. Which reminds me: in the 1992 movie, “The Mambo Kings”, Desi Arnaz was played by Desi Arnaz, Jr. Not a bad movie. The novel it was based on, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is not a bad novel. Would have been a better novel if it had come with a soundtrack. Come to think of it, it would be easy enough now with the internet’s help to provide a soundtrack yourself. Hmmm...maybe...But never mind for now. Arnaz is a secondary character in the movie. The male lead was played by Armand Assante. The second male lead was played by Antonio Banderas, who would make a great Desi---Arnaz or Ricardo. He’s already proven he can sing and dance. He can do comedy and drama. He’s fifty-one, but he can still move.

All this depends on “Becoming the Ricardos” focusing on “I Love Lucy” as much as on the backstage drama of Lucy and Desi’s romantic and business lives. Sorkin’s 2006 TV series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” almost never showed us any of the supposedly brilliant comedy whose weekly creation the series dramatized. And it was about characters who were never shown to be funny as a matter of course or even to have senses of humor. So we may get to see only glimpses and snippets of the Ricardos being their TV selves. If what we’re mainly going to see is a middle-aged couple who happen to be in business together growing apart while their marriage fails under the stresses and strains of work, with the comedy that is their work and their business kept offscreen, then Kidman’s and Bardem’s ages won’t matter. Let’s hope Sorkin has learned his lesson.

If he has, then Sorkin should have cast someone who could play Lucille Ball playing Lucy Ricardo. Someone able to be a clown at the same time she was beautiful, who could make her pretty face and hourglass figure part of her clown suit, and then switch to drama when the script called for it, without losing all traces of the Lucy we love. She would have to be able to move. That’s what Elizabeth Olsen is showing she can do on “WandaVision”. She’s expanding the range of Wanda Maximoff as a character by giving her a sense of humor and putting it to work. I’m looking forward to seeing how that plays out in the next Doctor Strange.

Meanwhile, back here at the Mannionville Ranch.

Last night, “WandaVision” made its first direct connection to the Avengers movies. Oliver got a kick out of how the show is treating as serious a situation “Spider-Man: Homecoming” made the basis of comedy. But then, the Spider-Man series is a comedy. So, in its weird, sinister way, is Doctor Strange. And Guardians of the Galaxy. And Ant-Man and the Wasp and, now, Thor. The tragic phase---or I should say epic phase---of the MCU films ended with, well, “Endgame”. The next phase is the picaresque. I wonder how Captain Marvel will fit in with that. Shouldn’t be hard to manage. After all, now that Captain America is out of the picture, Captain Marvel is the Marvel’s equivalent of Superman, and Superman is DC’s comic (Sorry. Can’t write around it.) hero.

Last note: fans on the web, and here in Mannionville, were thrilled when a character they love from the comics turned up in episode four and looks to become an important character. But I was more happy to see the return of a character from Thor, with a newly minted Ph.D. but without her intern.

_______________________________________________________________________

Yeah, I know. Ageist. So is my belief that forty-three-year-olds shouldn’t be starting at quarterback in the Super Bowl, but Tom Brady begs to differ.

“WandaVision” is available to stream on Disney+.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you for visiting the blog and reading the post. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did and like what goes on here and would like to help it continue---and you can swing it---please consider making a small donation. It would be a real help and much appreciated.

Click on the link to use PayPal or, if you bank supports it, you can contribute via zelle using my email address lmannion109 at yahoo dot com.

I feel no guilt

Posted Thursday night, January 28, 2021.

Workers outside the London offices of Lehman Brothers on the day the company filed for bankruptcy as the housing bubble collapsed. September 15, 2008. Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP. Via Deseret News.

Rahman wrote this in 2014. The scene is set in 2008 during the collapse of the housing bubble when his narrator worked as an investment broker on Wall Street. For some reason it feels immediately relevant this week.

I feel no guilt for what I did in finance. There’s little doubt that the financial crisis will translate into an economic one and that recession will likely follow. People will lose their homes, their jobs, but tell me how I can feel guilt for something that was not only legal but actively encouraged gyt governments everywhere. I never sold mortgages to home buyers; I bought large bundles of them from commercial banks and apportioned the packages into parcels that were sold on to investment firms, all of it done aboveboard and without so much as a quizzical look from regulators. If I am to feel guilt, then surely it is for something I should not have done, when I knew I shouldn’t do it, and when that something harmed others. But even then, how I can I be responsible for all the consequences?

---from “In The Light Of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.

The other person's snow is always cleaner...

Posted Thursday morning, January 28, 2021.

The view out our window, around eight this morning.

I wonder if our house looks as pretty after a snow from our neighbor’s window as hers looks from here.

Doors I regret not having knocked on

Adapted from the Twitter and Facebook feeds, Sunday night, January 26, 2020. Posted Tuesday night, January 26, 2021.

Bourbon Street in New Orleans. February 12, 2010. Chris Litherland, via Wikimedia Commons.

From the Department of In Search of Lost Time:

A year ago tonight we were up at the Old Mannion Homestead, just for a long weekend visit. We had no idea that our next visit would last four and a half months. Pop Mannion was a fan of Walker Percy, and I was looking through his collection of Percy’s novels and nonfiction and landed on this from the essay collection “Signposts in a Strange Land”...

By no means a lesser virtue of Toole’s novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech…

But Toole’s greatest achievement is Ignatius Reilly himself, intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his Gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one an war against everybody---Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, protestants, and other assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas got to pot, transported to New Orleans…

I hesitate to use the word comedy---though comedy it is---because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it…

---Walker Percy in his introduction of “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole.

I'll always regret that I didn't read "A Confederacy of Dunces" when we were down in New Orleans in the spring of 1990. Ditto Walker Percy’s "The Moviegoer".

I did read "The Earl of Louisiana" that trip, but on the train ride home.

Percy died two months after we were there.

Before I learned how sick he was at the time, I used to regret not having gone over to Covington to knock on his door. We did take a ferry over to Covington, but only to have lunch at a restaurant on the wharf friends recommended. I’m not sure it even occurred to me knocking on his door was a possibility. When it did occur to me, we were already back in Fort Wayne. It may have occurred to me when I read that he’d died.

Like I said, I used to regret it, but not the way I regret not having gone up to Ipswich when we were in Boston to knock on Updike's door.

Or not having knocked on Vonnegut's door in NYC when we moved here and his door was less than hour and a half away,

Warning to writers I admire: I'm talking myself into showing up to knock on your doors.

Lincoln's Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Lincoln: Act I, Scene 2

Posted Tuesday morning, January 26, 2021.

2010 photo of a section of the woods where the Battle of the Wilderness was fought in May 1864. Rob Shenk, American Battlefield Trust.

Lincoln heard it wrong. Twenty thousand is closer to the total number of Union casualties at the Battle of the Wilderness. The total “sent to their final account” in the battle has been put at around 2500 for the Union Army, about 1500 for the Confederates. The battle was fought over three days, not one. I doubt he found much comfort in the news when he learned the actual figures. The total dead from the Civil War, counting both sides, was 620,000. The total American dead from COVID-19 was 420,090 as of yesterday, January 25, 2021, according to the New York Times; 1,792 of them died yesterday. Donald Trump has yet to cry out. It’s a question if he’s ever even really noticed. He likes to compare himself to Lincoln, but the comparison is meaningless to him. It's just another way for him to express his self-love and self-pity. If he did take it in and understood the implications, he’d climb to the top of Mount Rushmore and throw himself off Lincoln’s beard.

Take for instance [Lincoln’s] reading from Macbeth after the Battle of the Wilderness, the grinding standoff in May 1864 between Grant and Lee in the woods of Northern Virginia. When told of the battle’s high casualty count, he cried, “My God! my God! Twenty thousand poor souls sent to their final account in one day. I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!” Hi pallid face, his dishevelled hair, and dark ring under his eyes gave him a ghastly look. He found solace in one of the gloomiest passages in literature. He picked up a Shakespeare volume and leafed to Macbeth’s most famous soliloquy...The haunting words came forth slowly in Lincoln’s high-pitched voice:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

---from “Abe: Abraham Lincoln In His Times” by David S. Reynolds.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Correction: I originally posted that the number of U.S. Covid deaths was 42,090 as of yesterday. An inexcusable typo and careless copy editing on my part. I left out a 0. Reader Ron Force caught it. The death toll was 420,090.  The New York Times has updated its tracking chart and now puts the toll at 421,000. The CDC lists 419,827 dead.

A shout out to Houston Gamblers great Jim Kelly

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday night, January 16, 2021. Posted Sunday night, January 24.

Buffalo Bills Wide Receiver celebrates catching a pass for a touchdown during last week's the AFC Divisional Championship game against the Baltimore Ravens. Bills won 17-3 to go on to the Conference Championship playoff against the Kansas City Chiefs tonight. Photo by Rich Barnes/USA Today Sports, via the Grand Forks Herald.

It’s been a long time since I was a football fan, and I haven’t watched it regularly in ages, since Joe Montana left San Francisco, in fact. But I watched Buffalo play Baltimore last week and I’m watching them play Kansas City tonight, because a good friend from my college days is an ardent Bills fan and I feel I have to root for them for her sake, but geez! Football is boring.

What are we watching? Two committees of old men playing eleven-level chess using young men as the pieces?

When I tweeted that point last week, a friend quoted George Will: “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” But Will was talking about the play on the field; the committee meetings he meant were the huddles. I mean the way football games are covered on television and the way we’re made to see them. The committees are the coaches, and the cameras and commentary focus on them as if what they’re doing is why fans at home are watching and who we’re rooting for.

I also hate the challenges, which are based on the premise that there's no such thing as a legitimate play unless a camera sees it and another committee of old men agree the camera saw what the replays show they saw.

And I’ll spare you my standard rant against the half-time reports, particularly Fox’s, another committee old men who seem to think what we want to watch is yet another committee of old men, this one acting like a gang of frat house fanboys using football as an excuse to flirt with each other and indulge their man crushes.

As it happens, the two most ardent football fans I know are women. The other is also a friend from college. (Different school.) She lives in New Orleans, so I felt obligated to watch the Saints play the Buccaneers.

Brady vs Brees, two old men who have defied aging. If nothing else, I thought, maybe I'll learn how to recapture some of my lost youth. Cheaper than Nugenix, at any rate.

Bucs won. Oh well. Saved me from having to choose between rooting for the Saints and rooting for the Packers, one of my old favorite teams and my brother Larry’s all-time favorite.

Back to the Bills and the Ravens. Buffalo won in the cold and the wind, 17-3. Should say with the help of the wind and the cold. This is the first time the Bills are in the conference playoffs since their glory days in the 1990s when they were led to four consecutive Super Bowls and six AFC Championship appearances by Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly.

The then twenty-four-year-old quarterback for the USFL's Houston Gamblers, future Buffalo Bills great and Football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly (right) scrambles before passing for a touchdown in a game against the Memphis Showboats, June 24, 1984. Photo by John Henley/AP, via AZ Central.

Kelly is going to be sixty-one on Valentine’s Day. He’s been sick on and off with cancer since 2013. He recently announced he’s cancer free, but he’s been there before. So it was doubly good to hear NBC announcer Al Michaels give a shout out to Kelly at the end of the game.

Reminded me, though. Everybody should read "Football for a Buck" by Jeff Pearlman. I've been recommending it as the book that explains Donald Trump. Just about very bad quality he showed himself to possess as president, he'd shown himself to possess during his involvement with the USFL in its short life in the early and mid-1980s when he almost singlehandedly destroyed the league through his greed, selfishness, egomania, and stupiidity. But it's foremost a book about football, as a game and a business. And it includes a good mini-biography of the young Jim Kelly during his USFL days with the Houston Gamblers when he was not the good man he grew to be.

Donald Trump isn't the worst person in the book, until he is. Neither is Kelly. Far from it. But a lot of people in the book are shown to have behaved badly at the time, and Kelly is one of them.

He was prodigiously talented but selfish, self-indulgent (to put it mildly), immature, even for a kid just out of college, arrogant, careless, and in a way lazy. The Gamblers wanted him to learn a different type of offense than he was used to and he shrugged them off. He thought he was already a great quarterback and didn’t need to work at being any better. He relied on his talent to carry him through any situation, on and off the field. Without hitting readers over the head with it, Pearlman presents Kelly as the anti-hero of a morality tale, with future San Francisco 49er great and Football Hall of Famer Steve Young as his mirror image. Young is one of the few people in the book who did not behave badly.

When the Gamblers threatened to give his starting job to another QB, Kelly set out to show he could run the new offense better than his potential replacement. And he succeeded.

This led to a showdown with the L.A. Express and their quarterback Steve Young in a game that has become known as “The Greatest Game No-one Saw,” because a relatively small number of fans turned out in the stands---the USFL’s chronic league-wide problem---and ABC decided to broadcast another game:

What those select few in attendance viewed, however, was something out of a futuristic football-video bonanza...Young and...Kelly threw for a combined 829 yards (a pro football record 574 for Kelly alone)...The Express held a 23-13 advantage entering the fourth quarter, and when the score reached 33-13...the Gamblers’ media director [led] reporters from the press box toward the field to prepare for the postgame interviews On the Houston sideline, chaos reigned. [Houston’s co-owner] Jerry Argovitz was grousing about his team’s flaccid offense, yelling insults toward [Gamblers’ head coach] Jack Pardee. Hosea Taylor, a six-foot-four, 249-pound defensive tackle, overheard his obnoxious boss and stomped toward him, fists up. “Hosea had to be held back,” said Ray Alborn, the defensive line coach. “He had murder in his eyes.” Then---Bam! Within a span of nine minutes, Kelly led the Gamblers on drives of 74, 43, and 84 yards. [Pearlman’s footnote: “The word ‘drive’ presumes a long stretch of plays. Such was not the case. Kelly hit Richard Johnson for a 52-yard touchdown pass on the first ‘drive,’ Vince Coville on a 40-yard touchdown pass on the second ‘drive,’ and Ricky Sanders on a 39-yard touchdown pass on the third ‘drive.’”] It was one deep laser after another, and the fleet of Houston wide receivers made mincemeat of the [Los Angeles] secondary. “We started running the no-huddle offense with 10 minutes left in the game,” said John Jenkins, the offensive coordinator. “Nobody had ever done that before. It was like watching an Olympic track meet.”

When, with seconds left, Young’s pass to Mel Gray was intercepted, Houston sealed a 34-33 win for the ages. “That was the most amazing single battle I ever engaged in,” Kelly said years later. “Empty stadium, exciting teams, nonstop scoring. Steve and I still talk about that one.”

An ironic post script: The reason Kelly started his professional career in the USFL was that he was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in the 1983 NFL draft and he did not want to play in Buffalo. Too Cold.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Game’s over. Chiefs won, 38-24. I was going to be rooting for Buffalo, no matter what, but I was also rooting against the Kansas City fans. I’d forgotten. They do the tomahawk chop, which is every bit as offensive as the Washington Football Team’s old name.