Week Three, part one

Manhattan vs. Carolina:

I have missed a couple of chances to look smart by picking Carolina. But I really would not like to be thought smarter than I am. Manhattan.


New England vs. Baltimore:

They say you're only as good as your last match, which would mean New England isn't very. But I say you're only as good as your next match. Wow, that's almost good enough to go into the fortune cookie business for. New England.


Seattle vs. Miami:



Seattle by a Mumphrey.


Arizona vs. Chicago:

In Winston Churchill's WW II memoir, he recounted a little chat he had with Stalin at one of the Big Three meetings in which he mentioned a one-day trip to NYC that Molotov had taken after a conference in Washington had broken up. He felt suddenly remorseful when he realized that he may have got Molotov in trouble with his boss. Churchill reports, though, that Stalin made a joke out of it, saying, "no no, you're wrong, he did not go to New York. He went to Chicago to be with his fellow gangsters." Everybody laughed, and Churchill felt relieved at apparently not having done any real damage. But in the book "Nikita Khrushchev Remembers", written during the author's forced-but-not-too-uncomfortable retirement, Khrushchev reports that ever afterward, Stalin suspected Molotov of being an American agent. And on the Dick Cavett show in the early 1970's, the French actor Alain Delon told of how at the age of about fifteen he had stowed (stown?) away on a ship to America, with plans to go to Chicago, which he associated with Dillinger and Capone. Unfortunately, Cavett, who had already corrected Delon on a couple of minor matters of pronunciation, corrected him yet again, as Delon had given the "g" in "Dillinger" the swallowing treatment, as in "swallowing". After this, Delon didn't feel like talking much and the interview suffered.

Anyway, the point is that I was thinking of making some comparison of Chicago and Arizona in which the former is the home of working gangsters in their prime while the latter is where they retire, thanks in part to the government's witness protection program HALLELUJAH, MY COMPUTER CRASHED BUT EVERYTHING HERE WAS SAVED because that seemed more interesting than simply pointing to Chicago's hundred-point average rating edge, but it wasn't coming together too easily and there are the twin considerations of certainly overdone and possibly offensive, but I thought I would illustrate just how wide-spread is Chicago's gangster image for the sake of anyone in the future who needs to fill space writing about Chicago. Chicago.