Winning By Losing

[FreeThinker]

I am not a person who normally gets emotional about sport (as Mitt Romney calls it). I started following the NBA only because Oklahoma City stole the Supersonics from Seattle and Okieland finally had a major league team of some kind. I used to attend NASL games in the late seventies when the Tulsa Roughnecks beat the New York Cosmos. But I couldn't care less about the OU Sooners or the OSU Cowboys. Yawn. I am not one of those Americans who becomes rabid and jingoistic about soccer only once every four years and for whom David Beckham (did I spell that correctly?) is the only soccer player who comes to mind. Although I do remember that some lesbians got in trouble when they took their shirts off a few years ago after winning something involving a soccer ball. If I watch a sporting event, its usually to lust over hot male bodies. I use it as a substitute for something I don't want listed on my credit card statement for the world and the NSA to see.

However...I admit that I have begun to watch the World Cup, despite my disgust with the Brazilian government for spending billions on something that will result in nothing for the millions of poor people in their country. I was thrilled to see America's wins over Ghana and Portugal, though I still don't quite understand the arcane rules that let us advance after losing to Germany--and don't waste the bandwidth trying to explain it to me. I'm a ditsy queen. I will... however... be glued to my computer watching our match with those waffle-makers from Belgium and chanting "USA! USA! USA!"

Belgium? Really? I mean, didn't Lichtenstein invade Belgium once?

[Cole Parker]

If you're talking about Christy Chastain pulling off her shirt after scoring a goal for the US Women's team, she didn't bare anything resembling a breast. She had on a sport bra under the shirt, and so was entirely chaste. Of course, it was a woman, and she took off her jersey in public, so the Victorian press went absolutely berserk about it. Said more about them than it did Chastain or women's soccer.

[The Pecman]

What is this "football" you speak of?