Season opener

I can never get over the fact that one of the ridiculous perks of my job status - maybe the only one left ... - is an annual invitation to the President's Suite at a football game.  Was USC saving money here in any obvious way, I wondered?  For a start, no ability to choose which game I might want to attend: one knows one's lowly status (probably in terms of any hard cash one might give the university, I suspect) when one gets invited to the Missouri State game, rather than being able to voice one's preference for, let's say, Michigan.  But who am I to complain when I'm handed a very tasty cocktail on a sunny afternoon, and see USC win 73-13?  That is not a typing error.  It's the most points scored by USC in a game since 1930.  Missouri State aren't very good, of course ...And some money must have been saved by the fact that the practice of serving cocktails in a remarkable tacky take-home commemorative glass, introduced under Carole Folt's tenure, mercifully seems to have been dropped.

The rockets were badly timed and their ascent didn't manage to coincide with the Rockets' Red Glare of the National Anthem ... but they were still there -

and the flag (at half mast because of the Minnesota shooting last week) was fluttering in front of a tower at the California Science Center holding the Space Shuttle Endeavour.

Here come the players!  (these are SC, of course - the Missouri State ones were so overwhelmed to be in the Coliseum that quite a few of them ran out with their cell phones out, filming the moment.  It's their first game playing at the top end of college football, and - apart from the fact that they were the first to score, with a field goal - coming out onto the pitch might well have been their happiest moment).

I swapped my (empty) glass for a stylish aluminum chilled bottle of water; we each ate large helpings of ice cream, left the most lopsided game I should think I'll ever see halfway through the third quarter, and were home before MS had finished being pulverized.