by John Walters
Above The Clouds Forever
Rest in peace, Charles Yeager, who passed away yesterday at the age of 97. Yeager never stepped foot on the moon, never even took part in an Apollo mission, but if you read Tom Wolfe’s excellent book, The Right Stuff, then you know that all of the fly boys in the early Sixties looked up to Yeager as the king of all test pilots.
And if you read all of Wolfe’s tome, then you know that he devotes the final chapter to a test flight of Yeager’s that went wrong but illustrates all of the traits that made Yeager, and America at the time, a cut above the rest. Yeager should have perished that day. Instead he went on to live 55 or so more years.
Imagine
John Lennon, who was 40 years old at the time, was shot and killed outside his NYC apartment 40 years ago today. Most of us learned via Howard Cosell and Monday Night Football (Lennon had actually been a guest on the show once).
It is one of New York City’s great underground traditions that each year on this date guitarists gather around the “Imagine” imprint in Central Park and play Beatles tunes all day and all night. And draw quite a crowd on what is always a chilly night.
Love is all you need (love is all you need).
Keeping Up With the Joneses
In New York City Rashida Jones was just named the new president of MSNBC, while in Florida the cops just busted down the door of COVID-19 whistleblower Rebekah Jones. This is all very confusing because this is not the Rashida Jones who was on The Office (and is the daughter of Quincy Jones) and neither is Bridget Jones nor is either the the love interest in the song Me And Mrs. Jones (you may recall, they have a thing going on).
The Rebekah Jones story is straight-out Gestapo sh*t, as this Florida scientist was fired for not fudging the COVID numbers, then continued on her own to release factual data and distribute it to the public, so the cops enter her home guns a blazin’ and take her hard drive. How does this happen in America? Oh, that’s right, it’s Florida.
From Russia With KABOOM
This should have been the Katie Perry video.
Spicy Tuna Roll
As Bomani Jones tweeted, the UNLV of my youth would retire his number. Yep.
Breaking Down Your Heisman Field
No matter what you or I (or, more importantly, what I) think, the Heisman Trophy race will come down to three quarterbacks: Ohio State’s Justin Fields, Alabama’s Mac Jones and Florida’s Kyle Trask.
Fields leads the nation in completion percentage, an insane 78.1% (Jones is second at 75.7%). Trask leads the nation in TD passes with 38 (and only three interceptions). Jones is third with 27. Jones is second in the nation in Passer Rating (behind Western Michigan’s Kaleb Eleby) and third in passing yards per game (Trask is second…UCF’s Dillon Gabriel is first).
They’re all worthy and you can cherry-pick whomever’s stats you want to make your argument. You can argue that Jones is the most consistent across the board relative to the other two and that he is the quarterback of the nation’s top team. I’d argue that only Fields is the most outstanding player on his own offense (at Florida it is TE Kyle Pitts and at Alabama it is wideout DaVonta Smith).
So who will win? I’d vote Fields but my guess is that Jones will win unless Trask leads Florida to an upset of Bama in the SEC championship game.