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May 9, 2007 - May 2, 2007

Thursday, June 15, 2006

PSAYINGS.5A.30. So it's the World Cup... Where were we? Uh, yeah. The big international championship of soccer. Also called futbol. By people who don't know what football is.

As usual, the Americans have a team. A bad one, of course. This is a big part of why we're so not liked around the world. We have the best athletes, and somehow we can't field a soccer team that can measure up to the best of the Czech Republic. Maybe we should learn something from the fact that the children of all those Clinton-loving soccer moms aren't automatically good at soccer just because their doting mothers drive them to practice in Range Rovers and cheer their pathetic attempts to KICK THE BALL.

Which brings us to the biggest reason why Amerians suck at soccer. American moms don't understand any game, period, and since they're the only ones in this country who pay attention to soccer, the sad fact is, nobody in this country knows anything about the rules of soccer. Today we're going to correct that.

Soccer. It's a European imitation of hockey, played without violence (on the field) and on a much bigger scale, in order to insure that nothing ever actually happens in the course of play. The soccer field, for example, is the largest arena in sport, 340 yards long and 135 yards wide. Teams use 25 players on the field per side, and they play three halves of forty minutes each. The action consists of players in short pants KICKING THE BALL back and forth, up and down, hither and yon, to and fro, etc, for hours at a time, in front of hundreds of thousands of drunken spectators who assault one another with bottles and brickbats as a kind of homage to their team's ability to KICK THE BALL.

Despite the violence among the spectators, soccer is essentially an aesthetic experience, akin to a bullfight, in that there's an ideal, more important than mere winning or losing, to which all teams aspire: the nil-nil tie. Nothing inflames the soccer fan like hours of frenzied KICKING OF THE BALL that ends with no result of any kind. For true afficianados, this particular outcome is more satisfying than a sexual orgasm.

Nevertheless, on rare occasions, scores do occur. This happens when the ball inadvertently leaves the field of play and falls into a zone called the Goal. All soccer teams work very hard to make sure this happenstance is avoided, but even the best athletes make occasional mistakes. One in four soccer contests are marred by the instance of at least one goal. When the calamity transpires, soccer announcers express their disappointment by bellowing the word "Goal" for some five minutes at a time. Generally, players are so chastened by this verbal denunciation that they prevent any subsequent reoccurrence: 90 percent of the games that do not end in the preferred nil-nil tie conclude with a 1-0 score. Teams that consistently fail to achieve the nil-nil outcome are eliminated from competition.

It's a shame that Americans can't quite get on board with this, the most popular sport in the world. If we could, we might have more appreciation for not only soccer, but the incredibly important role played by the U.N. in keeping the peace (a.k.a. KICKING THE BALL), which we really should learn to think of as a nil-nil tie, regardless of how many hooligans perish during the fighting in the stands.

Got it? Good. That's our G-O-O-O-A-A-A-A-L!

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

PROFESSIONALS. Now that Karl Rove isn't going to be indicted, some of the conservative bloggers are kicking ass and taking names. Michelle Malkin has a nice review of the more over-optimistic stories and images promulgated in the liberal media when they were trying to convince everybody, including themselves, that Rove was going down. Yeah, they were pretty over the top, but there's no point in getting mad about it. Even lefties have imaginative fantasies, and the tools of make-believe are available to everyone. So what if Reuters likes to play tricks with PhotoShop. It's not as if anyone takes what they do seriously anymore.

We'd like to take this opportunity not to be nasty but to recall some of our favorite media image jokes of recent months.

Remember the picture of Cheney featuring the word 'retire'? We liked it.

And what about the famous CNN "X'ing" of Cheney? We liked that too.

We also have a confession to make. We've done some subliminal PhotoShop work ourselves. Does the name Huey Long ring a bell? We even made up a story or two about Karl Rove, complete with phony images. Just like the liberals.

Everybody should relax... and get their own copy of PhotoShop. The news is what we make it. Isn't that the slogan of the New York Times? Well, it will be, any day now.

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