January 21, 2007

WE'RE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL!!

If you've been checking the times of my previous posts, you know I've been writing during the Bears game. Thankfully, my new wireless router is working, so I've also been watching the game. More distracting, Master Haims arrived in the middle of the game. sigh. The Peanut is such a beautiful, lil miracle.

So, while part of me wishes I was watching the game in a bar in Chi-town, I wouldn't have missed the chance to hold my nephew for all the tea in China. (He was sleepin while I held him, now he's awake and nursing.)

Now it's time to see if the Pats will make it a rematch, 21 years in the making. Let's all do the Super Bowl shuffle....

Posted by cj at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2006

Electricity Lost, Futbol Tie

I watched the absolutely thrilling Ghana - Czech World Cup Match yesterday while cooking / eating breakfast. There is absolutely nothing better than the underdog romping a heavily favored team. Ghana scored its first goal within the first two minutes of the game - a World Cup record. They went on to win 2-0, and the announcers said if they'd played smarter it could've been a 4-0 win.

The only weird part was that a Ghanan player - Paintsil - kept waving an Israeli flag. The US commentators said Absolutely Nothing. Turns out Paintsil plays for an Israeli club. As a UK observer pointed out, this would be like Beckham raising the Spanish flag during a UK win in the World Cup. According to Reuters, Paintsil wanted to honor his Israeli fans. I suppose it makes sense: his professional life seems to be based in Israel, and there are many Ghanan workers in Israel, but still...it could be used as an example of the lowering levels of nationalism in the world; which to me is an excellent thing. Alternatively, since it was a form of nationalism, just for his chosen country instead of his home country, it could be seen as an example of the importance of nationalism both as a civic philosophy and useful for personal economic security. (Apparently, the Tel Avic club Paintsil plays for was looking to axe him before yesterday's game.)

The announcers also kept promoting the US game at 3pm. Turns out that was the EDT start of the damn game. In reality it started at 2pm CDT, a fact I only caught onto much later in the day.

See, at about 2:20, the power was cut to my building. I had been doing other things on my puter and hadn't realized the game had already started. Sitting in my top floor flat in 90 degree heat without fans wasn't appealing, so I took a shower, got dressed, and started walkin to a pub. By the time I got there, the pub was dealing w its own circuit-breaker problems and I ended up only seeing the last ten minutes of the US game. Doh! Oh well, it didn't stop me from getting drunk with some random futbol fans...

Now I'm wondering if I should attempt to make breakfast with my food that sat unrefrigerated for 5 to 7 hours...

Posted by cj at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2006

Hilarious Explanations of Futbol

You simply must read Dave Egger's excerpt from his book The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, on Slate. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four coordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple of times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.

Also check out Luis Arroyave's Red Card blog on the Trib's site. While not quite laugh out loud funny like Eggers, Arroyave does provide good color commentary on what it's like to be in the host country during a World Cup.

Posted by cj at 06:42 AM | Comments (0)

9 by 9, FIFA, and other tidbits from Saturday

9 by 9 is the challenge to drink 9 drinks by 9am in honor of the beginning of the World Cup. Or maybe it's just an excuse to start drinking at 6am. The women who invited me out this weekend for the most part had even less understanding of football than me. For example, they didn't know that the World Cup occurs once every four years. Or that a player plays on both a professional club team and their national team. But that's understandable. I was almost as clueless before I dated a football fanatic. Almost, but not quite - I had already seen "Bend it Like Beckham," and my Big Sis was in Brazil during the last World Cup, so she caught the fever then and passed some knowledge onto me.

So to recap from the World of Sports That Everyone Who Doesn't Live in the US Is Paying Attention To: England won its opening game against Paraguay. The lone goal was kicked into the net by a Paraguayan player. I really don't want to be that man when he goes home from the games. Next up on Saturday was Sweden v. Trinidad / Tobago. Trinidad is in the US division for qualifying for the World Cup. The way it works is that the top three teams from each geographic area automatically qualify. Other teams can qualify through a wild card style access. The top three teams from the North America division were Mexico, the US, and Costa Rica. So Trinidad made it in by the skin of their teeth on a wild card and is the smallest country (geographically) at the World Cup. They managed to hold Sweden to a nil-nil tie. This really helps the UK b/c Sweden only gets one point for a tie, whereas the UK got three points for a win. The third game of Saturday, the Ivory Coast v. Argentina was probably also a great game to watch. Alas, for that I was at a Pig Roast and missed Argentina kicking ass to a 2-1 victory.

By the way, Costa Rica lost to Germany on Friday in a surprising (relatively) high scoring 2-4 game; and valiant Ecuador pounded Poland to a 2-0 victory.

On Sunday, while I was getting ready to go to the Jew Fest, the obnoxious American announcers kept trying to conflate politics and sport during the Mexico-Iran game. Not only did they spew the irrational war-mongering party line about Iranian politics, but they talked more about their misguided understanding of Iran then they did play by play of the damn game. Mexico won 3-1. In the earlier game, not televised on ABC (damn them; getting broadcast channels only sucks), the Netherlands beat Serbia / Montenegro 1-0. And in the final game of the day, Portugal beat Angola 1-0.

According to a guy I met yesterday, "only immigrants in the US care about the World Cup." I'm glad most people I know are not so xenophobic. Granted, I still understand if you haven't caught World Cup fever, but I encourage you to use it as an excuse to go to a pub in the next few weeks: you're bound to meet many more cute males than any other random public gathering.

Posted by cj at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)