As IF Times

link This is Why Americans Don’t Like Soccer – Soccer – Boston.com.

We know it’s the world’s “most popular sport”.  We know that the world is consumed as if in an epileptic frenzy when the World Cup is staged every 4 years.  But it’s boring.  Soccer, or football as the game is known everywhere in the world outside of North America, is as interesting as watching Pong.

From its origins as a savage pastime when combatants kicked the heads around of their vanquished opponents, the game has really stayed fairly true to its roots.   At a certain level, we understand the game’s primitive charm.  Especially at the global level when the pride of nations are at stake during a match at the World Cup.  There are few sports which stir up nations’ national spirit like soccer does.  Entire countries will shut down while they watch their squad do battle with that of another.  Soccer is essentially a surrogate for armed battles and which purports to demonstrate the superiority of an entire nation over another; especially if they have nothing else to brag about.   It’s the one time that Cameroon can kick Britain’s ass and shame the Limey bastards on the world stage.

We can see the simple charm of the game, one which doesn’t have all the arcane rules of many professional sports.  Soccer is big business worldwide, like any major sport.  It is a game which small boys dream of playing in all corners of the globe and their heroes are godlike.  It is still a sport for the common folk.  It’s also a sport in which there is as much action in the audience as there is on the pitch.

Basketball is a sport that has evolved into a game populated by thyroid cases and freaks of nature that must be over 6 feet 6 inches in height or they’re considered too small to play.  The shoes on most players can double as kayaks for midgets.   The players’ hands are so large that the ball may as well be an onion.   Basketball is clearly not a game for regular people.

Baseball is hardly interesting anymore either, since much of the game is spent with players standing around and spitting.  The real hard core fans are statistics geeks who can rattle off ERA’s, saves, runs allowed, etcetera.  Clearly a game for accountants.   Cheering for a team is like rooting for Price Waterhouse to beat Ernst and Young.  If baseball is too much action, there’s always cricket.

Hockey is not really a world sport because a big ice surface is not readily found south of the 49th parallel.   That’s a sport for a very specialized audience.  Golf; well that’s the same as hockey; use a stick to put an object into a hole.  Only golf has is played in warm weather, has more rules than an IRS handbook and participants lack any fashion sense.  American football comes close to the rabid fanaticism shown by soccer fans, but like basketball, as specimens, the players are generally many standard deviations removed from an average guy.  They are essentially bred for the sport like racing hounds or thoroughbreds.

Soccer at least gives the pretense that the players are average people who happen to have finely honed ball skills. If only they could do away with the Oscar winning head holding and ground rolling, it would be a real man’s sport instead of a primary school recess game.

link Restaurant with No Weapons, No Concealed Firearms Sign Robbed at Gunpoint.

It sure is crummy when a good plan goes awry.  Sure, it makes sense to some; simply post a prohibition against something and voila, problem solved.  As long as two things are present: firstly, that people can actually read and secondly that people give a flying flick about what’s on the sign.  It may have just occured to the owners of this restaurant that posting a no guns sign at their premise is as useful as a no poop sign for dogs at a fire hydrant.  To the crooks who robbed the place at gunpoint, the proprietors may just as well have placed a neon arrow at the register saying “take me, I’m yours”.

But this logic is lost on much of that segment of society who believe that waving their “I’m a Vegetarian” t-shirt will prevent them from being eaten by a lion in the wild.  A similar gesture of stupidity is occurring now in another context, that involving the fate of 300 odd girls in Nigeria being held captive by a terrorist Muslim group whose name sounds amusingly similar to the band that sung “Whiter Shade Of Pale” from the 60’s.   The brilliant campaign that has been thought up is to use Twitter and mount a social media campaign: specifically, hashtag, bringbackourgirls:

pleading celebs

Undoubtedly, the pressure brought to bear by celebrities and social media will convince the armed militants to give up their control of the poor girls.  The consequences of not complying are too fearsome to consider.  What if they get unfriended?  If only someone had the foresight to place a no kidnapping sign at the girls’ school at the time.  They wouldn’t be in the pickle they’re in now. Also, this same social media campaign aims to shame the men who would be potential buyers of these girls as slaves:  “Real men don’t buy girls”.  Boy, I bet the market for buyers of the girls has dried up completely.  Given that the terrorists have threatened to sell the girls off at $12 apiece, why doesn’t someone just offer to take the entire bunch for $3000 on a bulk discount?

Increasingly, the delusional are living in a bizarro world of theoretical benigness and faux moral piety wherein the intrusion of harsh reality is an affront to be dismissed contemptuously. Those that choose to live in reality are shamed at best or at worst, demonized, even criminialized for actions that offend the delusional.  And of course, woe be to any who would willfully or unwittingly say something that is deemed to be offensive by the PC gestapo.   Even the normally brash Mark Cuban had to backpeddle a bit when he candidly stated that if he saw a black kid with hoodie walking his way, he’d cross the street.  Apparently, “black kid in a hoodie” was dog whistle speak for Trayvon Martin.  Cuban used to have more cojones, but now is bowing  to the PC police too.  Mark, Mark, Mark.

Putting up signs and imagining that bad things won’t happen to good people is an admirable life philosophy…if you’re an 8 year old girl.  Usually, people grow out of that stage of naivete and become adults.  It’s not clear to me why the views of the delusional have become mainstream, but I suspect it has something to do with the state of protracted adolescence that’s epidemic in the West.  The bemusement turns to despair when you realize that it’s the delusional people who are in positions of influence and that adolescence for them is a permanent state.