Thursday evening: Clear and cold . . .

1. And the storm ends.

This morning was one of those crystal-clear, cold and beautiful mornings. The snow was still heavy on the trees, the sun was highlighting the winter colors and the sky was clear. Absolute gorgeous.

2. Someone wrote something very cool for me!

Seanan Maguire (cadhla) does Iron Poer, and asks for three words and a style.

I gave her cat, bed, dark and asked for free verse.

This is what I got:

In the Dark.

All cats are gray, in the dark;
That's what the sages say, isn't it?
In the dark, all cats are gray.

I wonder, was I just a cat to you,
Swept so gray with dissolving shadows
That you couldn't tell my face
From any other woman's face;
When she called you to her bed,
Did you follow freely, thinking,
In your hidden heart of hearts,
That it didn't change a thing --
In the dark, all cats are gray.


3. John McCain has a sense of humor and irony.

Briefly interrupted during a question from a fellow Vietnam War veteran, he demurred,

“I would remind you it doesn’t take a lot of talent to get shot down . . . .   I was able to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane.”

4. Great writing of a very different sort.

Yes, I have posted this before, but baseball has started again.

It has been almost 33 years since Carlton Fisk's 12th-inning homer won Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. I just cannot imagine how -- in the early morning hours and knowing he'd be back at the park in maybe 12 hours -- Peter Gammons put these words together.

By Peter Gammons
Boston Globe

And all of a sudden the ball was there, like the Mystic River Bridge, suspended out in the black of the morning.

When it finally crashed off the mesh attached to the left-field foul pole, one step after another the reaction unfurled: from Carlton Fisk's convulsive leap to John Kiley's booming of the "Hallelujah Chorus'' to the wearing off of numbness to the outcry that echoed across the cold New England morning.

	Carlton Fisk motions for the ball he hit in the 12th to stay fair -- and it did.

At 12:34 a.m., in the 12th inning, Fisk's histrionic home run brought a 7-6 end to a game that will be the pride of historians in the year 2525, a game won and lost what seemed like a dozen times, and a game that brings back summertime one more day. For the seventh game of the World Series.

For this game to end so swiftly, so definitely, was the way it had to end. An inning before, a Dwight Evans catch that Sparky Anderson claimed was as great as he's ever seen had been one turn, but in the ninth a George Foster throw ruined a bases-loaded, none-out certain victory for the Red Sox. Which followed a dramatic three-run homer in the eighth by Bernie Carbo as the obituaries had been prepared, which followed the downfall of Luis Tiant after El Tiante had begun, with the help of Fred Lynn's three-run, first-inning homer, as a hero of unmatched majesty.

So Fisk had put the exclamation mark at the end of what he called "the most emotional game I've ever played in.'' The home run came off Pat Darcy and made a winner of Rick Wise, who had become the record 12th pitcher in this 241-minute war that seemed like four score and seven years.