- It’s almost as if soccer fan just can’t help himself. Soccer fan must stay true to his nature and go soccer fan at some point, no matter what the circumstances. Never was this more evident that last night during a European Cup match between the Netherlands and Albania, when a flare thrown from the stands hit an Albanian player in the head and forced the premature end of a match that had a few minutes left on the clock. To be fair, the Albanian team did have the audacity to be losing 2-1 to the Dutch, so I guess the Albanian players deserved a lit flare to the head, right? Way to go soccer fan, thanks for reminding the rest of us why you’re such a bunch of degenerate a-holes. Things don’t go your way, riot. Your players don’t play as well as you think they should or make a single mistake, throw a lit flare or urine bomb at them. Opposing fans getting on your nerves? Start a full-on gang war in the stands, setting things on fire and using any blunt object you can find as a weapon. It’s great that you all love your soccer team and follow them so passionately, but did you know that you can still be fanatical about your team without rioting and throwing flares at the players? Stadiums should not have to erect barricades and barbed wire fences around the field to protect the players, but many Euro venues do for soccer games. Seriously, you Euro soccer fans make Philadelphia fans booing Santa Claus and cheering opposing players suffering concussions seem classy by comparison.
- Sam Bowie and Bill Walton, meet Greg Oden. Oden, the top pick by the Portland Trailblazers in June’s NBA Draft, today had arthroscopic and microfracture surgery to repair articular cartilage damage in his right knee and will miss the entire upcoming season. Oden joins Walton and Bowie as Trailblazer centers who have had their promising careers wrecked by injuries, although Oden’s career hasn’t even started in earnest. He only played two summer league games before having a tonsillectomy and missing the rest of the summer schedule. Now, he will be MIA for a team that wasn’t counting on him to be the cornerstone of its resurgence. This is a catastrophic setback for the franchise, which has been donut-like in its continual inability to fill the hole in its inside game for years. Ironically, this injury by the top lottery pick in the 2007 draft could propel Portland to the bottom of the standings and a very good shot at the top pick in the 2008 draft. You do feel bad for Oden because although he did sign his rookie contract guaranteeing him several million dollars, he now has to sit by and watch the team he was supposed to help to prosperity struggle through another losing season. Also, coming back from microfracture surgery is a huge challenge, and until Amare Stoudemire did so last year, there really hadn’t been a single athlete who had undergone the procedure and made it back to anything close to the level of play he or she had been at before surgery. Best wishes to Oden for a full recovery, but this is just about the worst start to an NBA career that you could cook up in your worst nightmare.
- So the U.S. Senate isn't really buying what W. administration honks like Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus are selling. Why that is, I really don’t know, because I felt that both Crocker and Petraeus were verrrrrry convincing as they sat before the various Senate committees looking like they were facing a firing squad armed with AK-47s. In no way did it sound like they were just administration lackeys, spouting rehashed and recycled political speak supplemented by some colorful charts they had done at Kinko’s the night before the hearings like two slacker college students trying to score a passing grade on their big project. And I for one found it extremely convincing when Crocker and Petraeus tried to explain how, despite the situation in Iraq becoming less stable and more violent by the day, we can still win if we just do a whole bunch of things that we can’t possibly do in reality. It was also nice to see how the senators did such a nice job of remaining neutral and balanced, because in no way could I tell what the opinions of congressmen like Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., were as he opened the hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with a ten-minute monologue openly criticizing every aspect of W.’s plan in Iraq. The senators just didn’t seem enthused by the fact that the number of civilian deaths in Iraq has recently gone down from a whole bunch to only quite a few and that some of the many warring tribal factions within Iraq have expressed “some interest” in cooperating with American plans for the country. Oh, and I guess Crocker and Petraeus just didn’t get around to explaining why we’re in Iraq to begin with, because I’m sure they both had very good explanations for that, what with the mythical weapons of mass destruction ultimately proving to be a figment of W.’s imagination. None of the senators in the hearings, not even the Republicans, seemed to accept what Crocker and Petraeus were saying. This was supposed to be a major milestone in the war in Iraq, the September trip to Capitol Hill by administration representatives to update Congress on the Mess O’Potamia. It turned out to be nothing more than a depressing confirmation of what we already knew, that things are going poorly in Iraq and they’re not going to get better any time soon. Even Crocker basically admitted as much, saying that any progress we make won't have any highly visible, tangible benchmarks that we can point to. In other words, you want us to believe that things will get better, we just won't be able to see it. Yeah, pardon me if I don’t believe you when you say that. After watching those hearings, my feelings are even stronger that we need to leave Iraq - NOW.
- Well a big, hearty F’you right back at ya, Bolivia. Apparently the Bolivian government is like an annoying seven-year-old who just got made fun of on the playground, because on Tuesday the South American nation announced that it will begin requiring visas for U.S. tourists beginning Dec. 1, following through on a promise to treat Americans in the same fashion that Bolivians entering the United States are treated in, a fashion the Bolivians find unfair and objectionable. A 30-day tourist visa for an American visiting Bolivia will cost $134, an amount shockingly similar to the one paid by Bolivians visiting the U.S. According to Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, U.S. citizens will now fall under Bolivia’s most highly regulated migratory category. Yeah, that’s really necessary. Like a lot of Americans are going to want to stay in your crap hole of a country for a prolonged period of time. Nice of you to basically copycat everything we’re doing, Bolivia, it shows a total lack of both creativity and maturity. You can’t even come up with own original visa policies, you have to mimic ours out of spite. Let’s face it, you always have been and always will be an afterthought for anyone looking to take a vacation to South America. I’ll stick to Brazil with maybe a side of Argentina and Chile…….
- Haven't we all heard this lie before……the metric system is coming and pretty soon, we’re all going to be using it so you’d better learn it and learn to love it. Every generation since World War I has heard the same spiel, I think, yet none of us has ever seen the metric system come to be the rule in America and it’s a good bet that we never will. The people of Ireland and Britain are right there with us, as they have successfully fought off the European Commission’s attempts to impose the metric system on their countries. Back in 1999, the European Union drafted rules designed to phase out imperial measures like the mile and the pint by 2009, but public outcry over the impending change forced the EU to reconsider and now the Brits and Irish will get to keep their systems of measurement. Personally, I’m glad to see it, because it just wouldn’t feel right to see Irishmen ordering a liter of Guinness at the local pub. It’s a pint now and it should stay a pint. Besides, now we can stop having absurd stories like the one that came out a few years ago when a British grocer was convicted of a crime for selling bananas by the pound rather than by the kilo. We’ve got the metric system on the run now, keep up the fight………
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