Tag: world cup

In before the power goes out

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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 games matches: 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.

Just talking

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

The Marjan Kamali book I finished last night and the Julia Alvarez book my kids are reading for summer school are overlapping in some really interesting ways, but I want to finish the Alvarez book before I talk about either of them too much. Meanwhile I am sitting at my desk absolutely enthralled by this, which I just found out about on Bluesky and sought out immediately. I am hungry; all I’ve eaten all day is a couple of doughnuts and a turkey wrap, so maybe dinner would be a good idea, but I’m currently putting off food in favor of music. It’s that good.

The World Cup started today; the first match was apparently at 3:30. I initially planned on watching it but then didn’t in favor of mowing my front lawn in blazing heat, which tells you just how committed I am to following the World Cup. I don’t think I’ve ever not done anything in favor of mowing instead. But my front lawn is now mowed, and I’m no longer paranoid that my neighbors secretly hate me.

My back yard, meanwhile, is going to suddenly catch fire in the next couple of days and burn to a crisp and then I won’t have to worry about it or its ten-foot, carnivorous, mobile weeds any longer. Nobody can really see the back yard. I’m pretending it’s a nature preserve. There’s probably some insects in there somewhere, assuming the weeds haven’t eaten them.

In case you can’t tell, I don’t have anything staggeringly important going on at the moment. I had nine kids today, the most of them I’ve had, and they seem to be enjoying themselves well enough so I don’t think we’re going to drop down to four again anytime soon. The one I know from last year still hasn’t shown up, though, which is kind of disappointing. I’m doing a decent job acquitting myself as an LA teacher; some parts of my brain that I haven’t had to use in a long time are coming back online, which is fun. I was hoping for a decent change of pace with this job, and I’ve got it in a couple of different ways, and I’ll be even happier with the whole situation next week, when that first paycheck shows up.

What do y’all have going on tonight?

What is this I don’t even

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN BRAZIL RIGHT NOW.

Just for the record

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I’ve talked a lot of shit about goalies over the last couple of weeks, but Jesus, if it wasn’t for Tim Howard having the game of his goddamn career we’d have just lost 16-0 instead of going into jesus why is the game still going please someone fucking score time.

#BecauseWhyNot

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

maxresdefault… You’re supposed to think the Lego dude is giving you the finger here, right?  That’s not just my screwed-up mentality taking over?

It has been a singularly useless morning.  Not only have I not gotten any writing done, which isn’t exactly the end of the world– I got through basically two full drafts of an entire story yesterday, and am not yet so far behind that I’ve got any reason to be nervous– but I haven’t really done anything else with the time.  I’m pretty sure I spent an hour just lying in bed staring at the wall.  Like literally staring, not trying to sleep or reading or anything.  Just staring.

And now I’m watching soccer, which has been the other thing I do when I’m at home alone four days a week, and once the World Cup is over I’m seriously not going to have anything to do with my time other than yucky things like keeping my house clean.

I thought– at least partially due to a lack of anything else compelling to write about at the moment– that I’d take a couple of minutes to point out some of the things that I actually like about soccer since several of my other posts have either been critical or gently mocking in some way or another.  So have some positives, although keep in mind that even right now as I’m listing several of them in my head that a bunch of them are going to be stupid:

  • I love the opening ceremony for World Cup matches.  I assume regular soccer matches don’t work like this, with the anthems and the little kids and the picture with the refs and the ball and all that, but there really is a lot of symbolism there that I’m quite fond of– starting with both of the teams walking out onto the pitch together.
  • I like that the game never actually stops.  You’ve got 45 minutes before you get a break, go run your damn ass off, and when that 45 minutes are over we’re going to add extra minutes for the places where you screwed up and had to halt the game.  I know this makes American TV networks insane because there’s not as many places to stick in ads.  That’s a feature, not a bug, and I love it.  Fuck the networks; I like it when they’re inconvenienced.  I’ve entirely lost the ability to watch football over the past several years and a good part of the reason is the way a damn game will take three and a half hours because of all the pauses and time-outs.  (The other half is the evil; that’s another story, though.)
  • I like that even though every soccer player is born with a genetic condition that gives them terribly weak ankles and calves  that are incredibly easy to injure, they’re tough enough to shrug off those horrible injuries and get back up and get in the game like nothing happened.
  • Okay, that was unfair.  That said: the game has a weird sportsmanship to it, where once the players realize that someone is actually injured– it seems like someone gets hauled off in a bucket once per game– someone will generally kick the ball out of bounds to stop the game, and I saw at least one example where Team A kicked the ball out of bounds because a Team B player was hurt, and then when Team B took their corner kick they basically handed the ball straight over to Team A because that was the fair thing to do.  Then again, biting and headbutts.
  • While I still think the lack of scoring is a problem, it is really exciting when it does actually happen.  There could still be a little more, though.
  • I like intelligent announcers.  Soccer seems to have a preponderance of those, or perhaps I’m simply mistaking British accents for intelligence, but I don’t think I am.

I still think they should get rid of goalies, though.

This is obviously official and real

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized6 Comments

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Print and distribute as necessary.  I have to have three thousand words by noon so I need to get to work.

In which let’s talk about soccer again

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

missed-opportunities1So I’ve figured out exactly why soccer isn’t going to ever really catch on in the States.  It’s not the low scoring, although that’s part of it.  It’s the inaccuracy.  I just watched Cristiano Ronaldo, a soccer player so amazingly well-known and famous that I have heard of him, take a free kick on goal that missed the goal completely.  It is at least the fourth shot on goal in this game that was not touched by any defensive player and literally did not even come close to actually touching the goal.  I’m not talking about shots that were deflected by defensive players or the goalie.  I’m talking about a guy with an open shot ten or fifteen yards from the goal who proceeds to miss the goal completely, and about the fact that this phenomenon happens all the time in supposedly “professional” soccer.

And it’s not limited to shots on goal either.  Passes, corner kicks– why the hell is a corner kick even a thing?– regularly appear to go absolutely nowhere near where they are supposed to go.  It lends the entire sport this weird atmosphere of amateurism and randomness that I don’t think us ‘Merkins really like to see in our pro sports.

I can hear the soccer fans.  “Well, it’s difficult to <x>!”  Well, I’m sure it is.  That’s the problem.  There appears to be no difference between athletic brilliance and pure geometric accident.  Our goalie just pulled off what, on first glance, looked like an awesome save– but was it, really?  There were two shots in rapid succession.  One caromed off the goalpost– because, again, the offensive player missed— and bounced right back toward a bunch of other Portuguese players.  One of them kicked it again, and our goalie, who let a goal in earlier by just falling down instead of doing some sort of, y’know, cool goalie thing, and who was already flailing around and stumbling because of the previous shot, just threw his hands up and just managed to deflect the ball over the top of the goal.

Was that an awesome save?  Incredible athletic skill from one of the premiere soccer players on Earth?  Or just dumb luck?  Dunno; near as I can tell they look exactly the same.

(It’s halftime.  Some doof sportscaster dude just said if you “take out the goals,” it would have looked like the US lost the last game and was winning this one.  Can you imagine someone saying that about basketball or football?  It means that scoring is basically random in soccer.  That’s bad!)

I have a suggestion.

Eliminate the position of goalie entirely.

Think about it.  Most of the missed shots in this game have been just that– missed shots.  Each goalie has maybe a couple of saves, and I’m willing to bet that at least a couple of those misses wouldn’t have hit the goal anyway.  It’s apparently really goddamn difficult to hit the goal.  Why have somebody in the game whose job it is to make scoring even more rare?  Get rid of ’em.  Add another midfielder instead or something.  It’ll make the game more exciting and at least make it look more skillful.

Get on that, FIFA.