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Morning Linkage

Mullen's Auburn-week press conference - Hit the link for Mullen's weekly 14 minutes of gab with the press. He hits on challenges posed by Auburn, the now-irrelevant play of Jeremy Johnson, the play of younger guys against Northwestern State, and the rotation at a few different positions.

Prescott's Auburn-week press conference - Watch or read the highlights of Dak's press conference. The video and article are from AL.com, so be sure to read the erudite and thoughtful comments at the bottom of the page.

Gus Malzahn's Auburn-week press conference - As I'm sure you've heard, Malzahn named a new starting QB yesterday. He's never played in a college game before. I haven't done research on how first-time-starting, freshmen QBs have fared against Manny Diaz—whose current defense, notwithstanding its other foibles, is in the top four in the SEC in both sacks and TFLs—but I'm interested to find out.

New Auburn QB's Auburn-week profile - A fairly in-depth article on Auburn's new starting QB. Lots of "sources" seem to be pretty high on this kid's arm. Pay heed of the sources, Manny!

MSU's NFL players' Auburn-week update - If you're interested in how State's former players are faring in the NFL, HailState.com has you covered. Quick takeaway: In his first two NFL games, rookie Preston Smith has a tackle, a sack, a PBU, two forced fumbles, and a fumble recovery. Solid.

Auburn-week recap of an elite basketball recruit's pre-Auburn-week visit - Schnider Herard, a 6'10" four-star center from Texas rated as the fourth-best center in the 2016 class by 247Sports, had an official visit at State over the weekend. We're in his top five. Apparently the most significant factors in his decision will be his ability to play significant minutes right away and the presence of a coaching staff that can adequately develop his game. Check and check. The fact that Coach Howland is getting these kinds of kids on campus in his first six months on the job is astounding.

Taking a moment to appreciate the long take

Touch of Evil isn't my favorite Orson Welles movie, whether we're talking films he directed or films he acted in. (Citizen Kane for Column A, The Third Man for Column B.) But its famous opening scene, all shot in one continuous take, is pretty damn impressive.

Good Old Fashioned Ribaldry

A couple of nights ago, I made the bizarre decision to read the opening pages of Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead aloud to my wife. While it's a solid (and enormous) WWII story that I recommend without reservation, I'm not sure it was meant to serve as bedtime story material for your spouse who's having a tough time going to sleep. And sure enough, a few minutes in I got to a gloriously off-color section about a soldier's sexual conquests. Even though Mailer wrote it in the 1940s, it hadn't lost its, erm, panache.

So in these lines of raunchy dialog, a character uses the term "barrel of honey" in a manner I won't elaborate upon here. I laughed at this quite a bit and got my wife in on it too by reminding her of the chorus of this 1930s Blind Boy Fuller song, which I used to jokingly serenade her with back in the day:

Man, those pre-war cats weren't messing around with their double entendres, were they?