Done with sports again, I think, because really all I have left is hoping for Argentina and England to lose, and they both keep winning matches in the exact same horrible way, so let’s just put soccer in the closet again until 2030.
Tag: sports
It’s bloody hot
That’s the thermometer in my back yard, at 7:37 PM, and you’ll note that thermometers don’t know what a “heat index” is, so I can only assume it’s the literal apocalypse outside right now. It’s supposed to be like this all week. I’m not excited about it.
I watched both World Cup matches this afternoon; Brazil-Japan was exciting despite ending the wrong way; Germany-Paraguay was a textbook example of Everything Americans Think is Wrong with Soccer, not only featuring a truly ludicrous amount of flopping (if I took a drink every time I said “you’re fine, get up,” I’d be dead) but ending in a shootout where the pivotal miss on the German team’s part, the kick that more or less decided the game, soared ten feet above the goal.
I don’t think I’m being unreasonable when I suggest that, given a stationary ball and no one defending, any professional soccer player should be able to hit the fucking goal. Someone out there– possibly not someone reading this, but someone— will surely disagree with me on that. I could put a ball in the goal from that distance when I was playing soccer at ten. The goalkeeper is basically relying on vibes and luck to choose which way he jumps; he’s only barely relevant. All you have to do is hit the goal. The damned thing is twenty-four feet wide and eight feet tall. 192 square feet. Come the fuck on. And he wasn’t the only player who missed the goal! He was just the worst example.
The dude who missed that shot should walk into the ocean, is what I’m saying. Imagine NBA games that ended with each team shooting free throws and one of them airballs. That’s the rough equivalent here. Maybe one player from the opposing team gets to throw a ball at the ball to account for the goalie.(*)
The third game of the day features my Netherlands; I will have to cheer for a European team against an African one, which rankles a bit, but they’re my team and that’s that. I just wish I remembered why.
(*) No, an even better example: a football (our football) game where the game was decided on five extra point attempts. Any kicker who missed that badly wouldn’t make it off the field alive, and if he did he wouldn’t be taking his kicking foot with him.
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In before the power goes out
We are expecting cataclysmic rain for the next couple of days, and I’m genuinely wondering if I’m about to get another power-outage day off from summer school. Tonight should be manageable, but Wednesday genuinely looks horrifying, and I’m not even in the part of the state that’s going to get hit the hardest, although I will be if the storm track shifts northward even just a little bit.
I spent— brace yourself— the entire afternoon watching the World Cup, and liveblogging the entire thing, so if such a thing might entertain you feel free to head over to my Bluesky account. In accordance with my entire life history, both of the teams I supported lost. I started off neutral on the Norway-Iraq match, but for some reason my allegiances shifted quickly once the match actually started.
Anyway, not a ton else going on right now. I finished Monika Kim’s Molka, and if you liked her first book you will like this one. Maybe not quite as much as The Eyes Are The Best Part— the book is essentially telling two stories at once and they don’t knit together as well as I’d like— but still pretty solid.
On the World Cup: How to Choose Who to Cheer For
I haven’t watched a World Cup game– sorry, match— yet, and it is entirely possible that I’ll make it through the whole thing without watching any of them, but I still have Strong Opinions about who should win. To wit:
- Oranje! My team is the Netherlands. Why? I have no clue. However, I have been consistent about this for at least three World Cups now, including at least one that they did not actually participate in. I think I just like saying Oranje.
- Sorry, not you: If the United States is one of the two teams, I am for the other team. Because to hell with patriotism right now.
- Iran, because Iran winning the World Cup would be fucking hilarious;
- Africa unite: If the Netherlands or the US are not involved in the game, but a team from Africa is, cheer for the team from Africa. If two African teams are competing against each other, choose the team with cooler uniforms. EXCEPTION: South Africa. See below.
- All other
gamesmatches: No Netherlands, no US, and no Africa? The preference list is as follows:- Curaçao, because I don’t even know where that is;(*)
- Haiti;
- Mexico;
- Any team from Central or South America (follow the “uniforms and vibes” rule if both teams are Central/South American)
- Türkiye;
- Any other team from Asia Minor/the Middle East; blah blah uniforms & vibes
- Canada;
- Anywhere else that isn’t Europe, including South Africa;
- Europe, excepting the Netherlands; BBU&V.
So today we are supporting Qatar, Morocco and Haiti; tomorrow, Türkiye, Curaçao, ORANJE!, the Ivory Coast and Tunisia, and Monday, Cape Verde, Egypt, Uruguay and Iran. You get the idea, I think.
(*) I just found out that Curaçao is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, apparently, and moved them up on the list. We’re going to consider Cape Verde as Africa-adjacent as well.
Natty dread
I’m not watching. I’ve not watched an IU football game this year– in fact, I doubt I’ve watched an IU football game since I graduated(*)– and if I decide to start now, they’ll lose. In fact, I’m going to do my best to ignore the internet during the game so that I don’t even get any accidental score updates. Hell, it’s been years since I watched an IU basketball game, and it’s more than a little shocking to me that I can name IU football’s quarterback and coach and am no longer able to name the coach or even a single player on the basketball team.
Sadly, my lifelong dedication to being superstitious about sports is not the only reason to pay no attention to this game. I am deeply pissed at IU right now, and while it’s genuinely upsetting to be cutting ties with the university I graduated from and that I’ve loved for literally my entire life, the way IU has been conducting itself recently has been beyond the pale and I can’t accept it any longer. I’m going to start telling people I graduated from Purdue. It’s that bad.
On top of that, the more I’ve learned how college sports works now, and particularly how college football works now, the less I want to do with any of it. We basically have a good football team now because Mark Cuban bought us one. Seeing video of Fernando Mendoza showing off his new diamond Rolex earlier today was literally disgusting. I’d rather suck, frankly.
I dunno. This sort of feels like Old Man Yells at Cloud to some extent, but I’ve not been a sports guy for decades if I ever really was, and ignoring a national championship run has got to be the last of a really large number of nails in that coffin. This hasn’t been fun for a long time, and now it’s actively repulsive, and I’m out.
(*) Not true, apparently, as WordPress dug up a post from last year where I talk about watching IU play Notre Dame in the football playoffs, a game I have no recollection of at all and which we, of course, lost.
Set it all on fire and salt the earth
Pictured: Not my TV.
I think I am entirely giving up on the idea of television. It’s been a minimal part of my life for years, but I don’t even want the concept around any longer. I don’t give a shit about the Super Bowl but I’d kind of like to watch Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, and it appears to be completely impossible to watch the Super Bowl on the television in my office without either purchase of additional equipment (the TV is not currently hooked up to any sort of antenna, since it’s almost exclusively for gaming) or signing up for something. I tried to download something called Fubo, where apparently the game is being streamed for free, and my TV told me that I had to sign into it– as in sign into the television— in order to download the software.
No. I’m not signing into my television. No thank you.
So, yeah, fuck it. I’m going to hit “publish,” make a very cursory attempt to stream the game on my computer instead of my TV, and if I don’t have it up and running in under a minute, it’s YouTube tomorrow for me. Things were better when you could just turn the Goddamned TV on and watch one of the five things that were on. I don’t give a fuck if that makes me a Boomer or a Luddite or whatever; television is so thoroughly enshittified at this point that I’m simply opting out of it altogether. I’m tired of idly thinking that maybe I’d like to watch a certain specific thing and then inevitably discovering that despite the ten fucking million options out there and the fifteen things we’re already signed up for, I can’t watch that thing because Reasons. It literally happens every time I decide I want to watch something specific.
I absolutely refuse to create a login for my television. That’s the line, apparently.
Fuck it.
I made it!
Good news— I have survived the first semester of my 21st year of teaching and still haven’t gone to jail, although I almost got sent to the hospital again earlier this week. (Mental note: never admit your wrist hurts after breaking up a fight.) My students did acceptably on their final— more data to come on that later this week— and I am about to curl up in front of the television to watch, of all things, my Indiana Hoosiers play Notre Dame in the college football playoffs.
What a fuckin’ world.
Well, THAT was bullshit
Well, it’s official; I can’t have nice things, even when the nice things aren’t very nice.
Pictured above: the only punch Mike Tyson actually threw in that entire Goddamned fight. I’m a writer, y’all, even if I’ve more or less given up on books, and I could have written ten thousand different versions of that fight and not one of them would involve both corners begging their fighters to get more aggressive with the other person, and not one of them would have involved a fight where Mike Tyson barely threw a fucking punch the entire time. I swear he went entire rounds without throwing any punches.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I’m not going to genuinely suggest that that fight was fixed, but I will say that it sure looked like neither guy was super interested in actually winning it. I thought Paul looked genuinely scared in the first round, when Tyson actually did come out aggressively and hit him a couple of times, but after the second … nothing. Tyson turtled up and chewed on his gloves, and what the hell was the deal with that, and Paul danced around and occasionally threw a few punches. As shaky as Tyson’s legs looked, I can’t believe there wasn’t at least one knockdown at some point. Neither of them looked like they were fighting to win, and the crowd was noticeably pissed at the end of the fight.
I’m back to my “never ever care about sports for any reason” viewpoint, in case anyone was wondering. It’s just never worth it. Thank God I only spent time and not money on this.
(Not true. I could have made that money back. I’ll never get the time back. I will always have to remember staying up way too late for this terrible, boring, anticlimactic fight.)