Beth Jackson gets a bit mixed up with the names. “You know,” she notes in her long introduction, “we call it the Eiffel Tower, or the Colosseum, or the Needle—it depends a bit on where you come from in the world.” Not a Texan, but someone who came to Houston 15 years ago to dedicate herself to the place she speaks of, she could have gone on listing the nicknames: it was “the Taj Mahal of sports” in the view of *The Daily News*, or it looked like “a flying saucer” as described by Mickey Mantle, the baseball player who hit the first home run there. None quite captures the boldness—let alone the pretension—of the name that stuck most firmly to the Astrodome.
