It is reasonable to assume that I’m going to spend a fair amount of time, at least over the next week or so if not for the entirety of the next month, talking about soccer.  And I’m going to be calling it “soccer,” not “football,” because I’m ‘merkin and screw the metric system, dammit, or something like that.

SON OF A BITCH CHILE YOU JERKFACES

(Sorry.  My “cheer for the team with more hits on the blog” plan has been 3-0 so far, but there’s about two minutes left in the Chile-Australia match and Chile just scored again, so so much for that.)

Anyway.  I’ve watched all of two of the matches and a good chunk of the other two.  Here was my day:  Job interview, watch soccer, write 500 words or so of fiction, watch soccer, actively curate my Twitter account (I have spent way too much time today on Twitter, and oh by the way you can follow me off to the right, there) and watch more soccer.  I can’t explain my attraction to the World Cup; I have paid no attention to soccer whatsoever since the last World Cup and in fact have watched virtually no sports at all this year.  I don’t like sports.  Watching sports nearly always feels like a massive waste of my time that could be spent more productively doing something else.  Hell, I’ve even ignored the Olympics the last couple of times.  But there’s something about the World Cup.  I dunno.

I won’t get to watch most of the games tomorrow, so here are my picks:

• Greece (43 hits) beats Colombia (38 hits)
• Costa Rica (7 hits) beats Uruguay (3 hits)
• England (4,474 hits) demolishes Italy (114 hits)
• Japan (115 hits) beats Côte d’Ivoire (2 hits)

I am apparently pulling for a US-Canada finale, which I know doesn’t make any sense– does Canada even have a team?– but what the hell; I don’t know a single thing about any of these teams so I may as well choose a method that I think is fun.

(Also, I reserve the right to cheer for the Netherlands under any and all circumstances, and no, I don’t know why.  Oranje!)