Sure, he took a terrific all-around roster with maybe 5 or 6 players who'd rank among the 20 best in the world, and got them to the quarterfinals, playing a style that filled all viewers with boredom and despair. Whoop-de-frickin-do. It was like watching football coached by Jean-Paul Sartre. (Is he available, by the way?)

Very quickly: In no way did I mean to denigrate the importance of Americans developing ball skills, which only Reyna and Donovan (when his chakras are right) have really displayed among our current players. That is unquestionably the single biggest difference between the US team and better teams.

I think I was trying to find a shorthand way of approaching that very problem. Outside of places in NYC, LA and South Texas, there's not a lot of improv-style street soccer in the US. Yes, I know, that IS changing, but pretty slowly. I continue to maintain that if a better, deeper, wider pool of American athletes were playing a lot of soccer, and they began early enough, they'd ... well, they'd develop better ball skills!

My last shot: fnarf, I'm not the biggest defender of MLS -- it's pointless for Donovan to keep playing in that league -- but if you think it's only on a level with the English Conference, you're just wrong, that's all. I think the league is a very mixed affair, right for some players and not for others, but it has unquestionably raised the standard of American play. Clint Dempsey, the one American who ought to get a shot at a Euro-career based on this tournament, is entirely an MLS product.

And the thing about size being a disadvantage? That's very 1980, I'm sorry. Go read the stats on the Italian roster; by my count, they have 12 players over 6 feet tall, and only 2 or 3 shorter than 5-10. Maradona wasn't a great player because he was a little guy. He was a great player who overcame his lack of absolute physical gifts, and he played in the middle of the field, where height doesn't matter. For the last time: A) Nobody is suggesting we need a whole team of huge guys; B) Most guys who excel at the skill positions in major American sports aren't exceptionally big; and C) soccer players are getting bigger all over the world anyway. Case closed.

John Lennon repeatedly refers to himself as "working-class," in this film and elsewhere in his public comments and writings. One could argue, I suppose, about the specific circumstances of his upbringing. The aunt and uncle who raised him were not poor, and could be construed as clinging to the underside of the middle class, if only just. He did not come from anything like the kind of stable, middle-class English family life that, say, Mick Jagger did.

Lennon's father was a merchant seaman and his mother was a housewife who had four children by three different men. Both of them abandoned him. I suspect those roots were what Lennon meant by the term "working-class," and it sounds adequate enough for me.

Next time, come here with some better argument than "you ignorant Yank," please.

I've fixed two factual errors in the Lennon piece: The Emerson-Lennon meeting did not occur at the New York Times office, as I originally said. And Strom Thurmond was indeed from South Carolina, not Mississippi. (I suppose I was channeling his good buddy Trent Lott.)

I've fixed that Haggis reference in the first paragraph. Thanks to the various readers who pointed out that while "Million Dollar Baby" won several Oscars, the adapted-screenplay award was not among them.

about the hair-raising recrimination scene between Spacek and Wilkinson. That was hellacious. Looking back at my original review of that film, I said the same thing! I liked that film much better than this one, but really my reaction to both was very mixed. Whoever made the observation that Field creates great paragraphs but not great novels is right on the money.

Even at the time, I remember comparing "Bedroom" to another work of small-town cheerios realism, "You Can Count on Me," and feeling that while the former was more momentous, more "serious," it was also lead-footed, manipulative and kind of pretentious. "You Can Count," had a much lighter touch. It breathed, and it felt to me like it didn't have a false note anywhere. I wonder when Lonergan's making another movie?