I’m back, and, hey, in soccer news: we won another Women’s World Cup.

The USA — as is only proper — has won the Women’s World Cup for the second time in a row… how often do they do this soccer thing again? Every four years? Well, that seems dumb. They should have it every year. They might get more people in the USA watching it if they did.

Continue reading I’m back, and, hey, in soccer news: we won another Women’s World Cup.

I would watch elephant soccer.

In fact, I would watch elephants generally. Because elephants are neat.  But baby elephants batting around a soccer ball?  That sounds very joyously restful.  You could have yourself a fine old time enjoying their enthusiasm.

[Insert obligatory soccer joke here.  I’d make one, except that I’ve just finished watching a bunch of baby elephants playing soccer.  I’m just not in the mood to be snarky.]

Should America be doing more to fake an interest in soccer?

This is not me mocking the game, per se – it’s just that we’re apparently doing fairly well in the World Cup, so far, and eventually we might actually win one. If and when we do, we should give serious consideration to figuring out how to pretend that America actually cares as much about this accomplishment as the rest of the planet apparently does. Because it’s going to severely annoy every other country in the world if we shrug it off; including the countries we actually like. A little judicious hypocrisy wouldn’t hurt, here.

Just a thought.

Moe Lane

PS: At the very least: if we ever do win a World Cup we should probably agree among ourselves to not needle the rest of the planet (like we do, cheerfully) by calling it ‘soccer.’  At least for a few days. A week, at the most.

Before I start rolling my eyes at the World Cup…

…do any of you actually care about it?  Generally speaking, my attitude about soccer is that we should continue to suck at it, because it’s a harmless way for countries to triumph over us in something; but if people actually like the game and care about the results I don’t want to be intentionally rude.  …Well, in this at least.

…Words [BZZZT!] fail me.

I hope to God that this got started because somebody bet somebody else that they could get this concept all the way through to production.

It’s the bloated soccer ball that really puts the cap on this particular exercise in the death of individual dignity.  If they used a football or something then you could make the case that playing in this sport was not a tacit condemnation of your poor life choices to date; but the size of the ball tells you The point of the exercise is to film you writhing on the ground in agony from being tazed several times, sir.  The resulting ‘temporary’ neural damage thus means that we need to provide you a ball that your palsied, shaking arms can hope to hold on to – although, honestly? If we thought that we could just get away with simply having people run at and taze each other we wouldn’t even have bothered with the ball.  Apparently, however, even entertainment lawyers have things that they balk at…

Well.  Perhaps words didn’t fail me, after all.

Via AoSHQ.

‘Psychic Octopus’ getting death threats?

I shudder at how these people would overreact if there was a real sport involved:

The eight-legged oracle picked Germany’s rival Spain to beat Germany in the quarterfinal, which he was right about, and has now chosen Spain to win the whole World Cup tournament. Germans have reacted by posting death threats and calamari recipes on Twitter and the internet, People reported.The “Psychic Octopus” has correctly predicted the winner in all 7 of Germany’s World Cup matches, including the team’s quarterfinal loss to Spain and their third-place victory of Uruguay. Paul’s powers were first noticed in the 2008 European Championship, when he picked the winner 5 out of 6 times.

Via AoSHQ.  As to the winner of today’s soccer game: who will be less obnoxious about winning? – that’s who should win it.

Moe Lane

PS: No, I recognize that it’s all in good fun.  For that matter, it’s not really a World Cup if there aren’t Americans out there blustering about the essential worthlessness of a sport that they can’t seem to put together a winning team for.  I’m providing a service, here.

Psychic soccer octopus.

We can’t really mock them for this: we do equally goofy things for sports that we consider relevant.

A “psychic” octopus is said by its aquarium owners to have predicted the country’s football team will knock England out of the World Cup.

When consulted, Paul the octopus chose a mussel from a jar with the German flag on it ahead of one in a similar jar bearing the cross of St George.

Still, there’s a video.  The Germans are wearing leis.

Moe Lane

PS: I heard that we lost to Ghana.

Well, that’s the idea.