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Had a few people over. Had the televisions on. Had a fine time. In the evening Auburn played a vanilla game against a struggling Arkansas team. They threw eight passes. (The lowest total since 1984.) They just ran the ball right at Arkansas. They won 35-17.
It is easy to marvel at how long ago last year’s season feels. Auburn, now 8-1, will be in the BCS top 10 after this game. No one expected it. Not sure anyone really believes it.
They are fun to watch.
It wasn’t fall today. It was 75 and clear, which means it wasn’t summer, so it may as well be autumn. The maple in the front yard, already giving up the fight, right in the heart of the tree.
The maples are always the first to quit, but they sometimes hang on a bit longer than some of the others in the yard. In the front yard we have this maple that goes yellow and a towering elm that flares yellow before burning out as a dry orange. In the backyard there is a southern red oak, a white oak and a few pin oaks — the oaks the rest of the oaks would disown if they had hardwood lawyers — another maple that turns yellow and a dogwood that will flame out as a defiant red any day now.
If you could get all of those in one spot they’d surely be a beautiful collection.
Had this in the office today:
I’m not a big pumpkin spice fan, but if you like pumpkin at all, you should try the Hersey’s Kisses. Two was plenty for me, so no need to share. But you’ll probably want to keep them all for yourself.
Things to read …
Or watch. The BBC now has a hexacopter. They have one more copter than I do. Maybe one day I’ll catch up. But check out those shots. (I’d embed it, but the Beeb’s code is ridiculous.)
I was reading last night, in Rick Atkinson’s book, about Lt. Ralph Kerley at Mortain. He only appeared briefly, but it was enough to make me look him up. Whatever happened to that guy? The Internet suggests he mustered out a lieutenant colonel and died in his native Texas in 1967.
He also shows up in this column by The Oregonian’s Steve Duin, which should really change your opinion of the deceased author/historian Stephen Ambrose:
Weiss also was furious that Ambrose had described his commanding officer, Lt. Ralph Kerley, as — after four days and nights of fighting off the Germans — “exhausted, discombobulated, on the edge of breaking.”
Not true, Weiss said: “To the dishonor of the man. Kerley was one of the coolest, most fearless men I’ve ever seen. The way (Ambrose) footnoted that looks as if he got the material from me. If in that little bit of material he took from my book he created that kind of fiction, how many other times has that been done?”
Bob Weiss was a Portland, Ore. lawyer who served under Kerley. Weiss took exception to the Ambrose depiction and then had a nasty bit of correspondence with Ambrose over some other questions of attribution. But, mostly, Weiss was worried about the way Kerley showed up in Citizen Soldiers — which also sits on my shelf, though today I’m a bit reluctant about that.
Kerley earned the Croix de Guerre, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. I was at Mortain for the exact same amount of time Ambrose was, which is to say not at all, which is also to say six days less than Weiss, Kerley and the 120th Infantry Regiment of the 30th Infantry Division. I just read the Ambrose passage again … given his history let’s just call it poorly-written narrative.
Anyway, local veterans are recalling their experiences in the military:
“I flew a B-25. That’s why I’m here,” Buford Robinson said, smiling. “I flew 43 missions.”
From 1944 to 1946, Robinson served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps. He fought in the Pacific Theater of the war and participated in the rescue of 500 American POWs at Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines.
Thom Gossom, the first African-American walk on at Auburn and the first African-American athlete to graduate from the university, got a bit of publicity today. He’s an actor today (and author), charming and engaging and wholly approachable. Here’s a story he told at homecoming a few years ago:
Quick hits:
ObamaCare screw up sends callers to cupcake shop
From Buzzfeed: Things That Took Less Time Than HealthCare.gov
How the NSA is infiltrating private networks
Insurance Insiders ‘Fear Retribution’ from WH Amid Pressure to ‘Keep Quiet’ About Obamacare
And there are two new things at the Tumblr site I forgot to mention yesterday, here and here.
Allie? She’s right here:
Auburn hosted overmatched Florida Atlantic today. So instead of worrying about football, here’s an opportunity to concentrate on the important people surrounding it. The Yankee approves:
I’m using a Holga lens, a gift from a friend who was cleaning off his shelf and sent the thing to me. The premise behind the Holga lens is to emulate the poor quality of the Holga, a cheap, plastic camera marketed in China. Even the lenses on some of those cameras were plastic, which allowed for a lots of soft focus, fuzzy edges and showed off whatever was happening in the emulsion of your film. (Remember film?) So Holga shots became hip, or hipster depending on how you see it, and now we have a niche lens. These are my first shots with it.
This first set are some of the people with whom we tailgate.
These are the hosts of our tent, Kim and Murphy. You’d have to look hard to find sweeter people:
In the stadium they’re running this feature before the game begins. The winner tonight was a guy who was unaware he was on the screen for 44 seconds. We saw him eat a fair amount of his hot dog. These guys were all on their phones, so the name of the feature was apropos. The young woman on the left was singing along, but she had no idea …
A few people inside the stadium:
Auburn won 45-10, in a game that was truthfully under control after the first two scores within the first five minutes.
I said, on Thursday night while watching Central Florida upset Louisville, that football is in some ways even more fun when you are watching the emotions of a game in which you aren’t invested.
Sometimes. Because when you are wrapped up in it, this stuff can be anxious.
Four years ago, when Arkansas visited Auburn, was the last time I watched an emotionally wrought football game. I didn’t feel like that in the BCS championship game or in the 2010 Iron Bowl comeback or the SEC Championship game that year. But the back and forth, punch-counterpunch of the Arkansas game that season felt a lot like tonight’s game. Anything was possible, nothing was too absurd, no one was stoppable. The heart races even in a seated position.
Tonight was like that. We got to watch a bunch of young men we don’t know stick with something and stick together. We saw them play against perhaps the best player in the game, just months removed from some of the worst athletic experiences they’ve every encountered.
We watched them claw and fight. We witnessed them realize their goals were before them. We saw them pull off something pretty spectacular. We watched young men with tears of happiness in their eyes and joy in their heart.
Fans gathered just before midnight to welcome the team home:
This is a special place with some special people and they all felt like it tonight.
How can you not be emotional about football?
It was an evening kickoff, which meant an afternoon spent sitting in the tailgating tent, sorta-watching other games.
People coming and going in the tent make for good conversation, but seldom do they let you dissect the intricacies of a cover-two defense. Not that I’d prefer to do that over the former.
The thing you’d prefer to do is watch the game on CBS, but apparently they and Dish are having another spat, and that means we couldn’t get the Georgia at Tennessee game today. It only went to overtime, so thanks CBS and Dish.
Not that we would have seen the end. We would have been inside the stadium watching the Tigers play, which is precisely what we did.
Nova flew this evening:
So did these planes:
I do not know why people wave their shakers at planes, but they do.
Anyway, it was military appreciation night, so all of those themes were added to your usual Saturday night pageantry. And Nick Marshall might have earned his own appreciation night.
The quarterback ran for 140 yards and two scores and threw for 93 yards in a gameplan designed to show off his feet.
Tre Mason showed his off, too:
He gained 77 yards on the ground, 62 receiving yards and the game’s first touchdown.
The game almost got out of hand when Robenson Therezie managed an impressive interception and returned it 78 yards for the score. The best part are the crestfallen looks on the faces of the visiting Rebels fans in the background. I love the background atmosphere shots, the accidental documentary snapshot:
Auburn couldn’t put Ole Miss away, though, and the Rebels would fight back. All the while, Marshall just kept running.
Ole Miss churned up yards, and they eventually turned a three score deficit into a five-point affair. And despite allowing 464 yards, it felt like a game for the Auburn defense. At the end, when it counted, the defensive line came up huge. The Tigers beat Ole Miss 30-22, the first ranked opponent they’ve defeated since 2011, to go 4-1 on the season.
Here are the video highlights, edited to make the game look terribly lopsided. I assure you it was not:
