EGOLOGY UPDATE

I apologize to my adoring fans for not checking in for so long. I have been working on a larger writing project and taking care of some personal issues which, if I were a 28-year old girl writing a blog, you would already know about. My current interregnum has been stymied by my ego (I love a thesaurus!)... and the following YAHOO! "news" article: Mighty oil-eating microbes help clean up the Gulf.

I don't know how long that article will remain readable in the webworld, so I will provide appropriate clips, acknowledging that I did not write it and giving all such credit to YAHOO! for its money and environmental writer John Carey (not to be confused with Bill Carey of Ogden Edsl fame, or John Kerry of The Addams Family fame) for his typing. I'm not taking a shot at Carey; please don't think that. I believe he has made a brilliant analysis of the situation. After all, he came to the same conclusions as I did 9 weeks ago. For this study of my considerable talents and ego, I must also direct your attention to my piece from May 28th of this year, I'll Have Seconds on the Buffet, specifically, the section entitled The Oily Worm Gets The Bird.

Now that the emotional fervor is starting to subside, let's take another look at what I had to say about the Deepwater Horizon spill and compare it to what is hitting the media today:

Me Then: Gee, do you think maybe the earth can handle what effectively is a small bruise?

Them Now: Where is all the oil?

Me Then: ...the oil leak will be plugged - we humans are pretty good at fixing things...

Them Now: Nearly two weeks after BP finally capped the biggest oil spill in U.S. history...

Me Then: ...the gulf will become clean again, through the money of BP and the American taxpayer, the efforts of conservationists, a few photo ops of hippies wiping a seagull with Dawn...

Them Now: And the small cleanup army in the Gulf has only managed to skim up a tiny fraction of the millions of gallons of oil spilled in the 100 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig went up in flames... the oil slicks that once spread across thousands of miles of the Gulf of Mexico have largely disappeared. Nor has much oil washed up on the sandy beaches and marshes along the Louisiana coast... So where did the oil go?

Me Then: ...but mostly the natural cycles of the planet (ain't crude oil a naturally occurring substance?...)

Them Now: "Some of the oil evaporates..." High winds from two recent storms may have speeded the evaporation process. (I thought hurricanes were the global warming equivalent of The Death Star?) ...the oil has been devoured by microbes... Although there were more than 4,000 boats involved in the skimming operations, those cleanup crews may have only picked up a small percentage of the oil so far. That’s not unusual; in previous oil spills, crews could only scoop up a small amount of oil. "It’s very unusual to get more than 1 or 2 percent..."

Wow! Do you mean to tell me that we have spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to clean up 1 or 2 percent of the spill??!! Let's see:

Only 49 of 253 beach portions in Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida have been affected by the spill, which gave Texas a miss altogether

11 men were killed when the Deepwater Horizon rig blew (but let's still not talk about them)

We've decimated the Gulf Coast region by putting a moratorium on drilling, the very move most economists and residents of the region say is the wrong thing to do

We demand that BP fire their CEO AFTER getting the well capped because he didn't say sensitive enough things about the devastation of our Gulf - Hello! Pansy Corner; meanwhile, our president goes on The View (remember what I said about that? "Barack Obama will take credit for cleaning up his 'Katrina' and blame BP for all that was done wrong")

And in the end it turns out that nature has done almost all of the clean up work... for free.

It all kinda tugs at your purse heart strings, don't it?

200,000 miles and going...

I Was Wrong...

Hope I didn't make you choke on your coffee... spit takes are so passé. My wife gets downright giddy when she hears me use that phrase: I was wrong. Granted, it's very rare and, quite frankly, I think I've dwelt upon it long enough.

What I really wanted to write about today is the World Cup. You may have heard something about this going on in the news lately. I heard about it for a while before I realized they were talking about a soccer game. I'm from the South and I know that down here we have a tendency to over explain just for the sake of throwing extra syllables into everything, but didn't you think: "World Cup? World Cup what? World Cup of Hockey? World Cup of Dancing? World Cup of Hot Wings?" As uppity as the rest of the world claims Americans to be, I think it's downright conceited not to finish the name of your little tournament.

Turns out, though, that it's kind of popular. In fact, it's the most watched sporting event in the world, over NASCAR and Baywatch. According to Wikipedia 715.1 million people will watch it this year. I'm guessing that ".1" is the portion in the United States. Now, I don't consider myself an expert on the game of soccer (though my little brother did play one season of little league, so...), but I thought I might take a few minutes to explain the game to you, good reader, just a bit.

WHAT SOCCER IS

Soccer is a game played on a field the size of a Walmart parking lot, with 22 waif-like men sporting Don Johnson beards, two grumpy coaches who can't be understood... even in their own language, one ball - which apparently can be a little too round, and two jibberish-shrieking announcers who could fain excitement at a Stutterers Anonymous funeral. The object of the game is to kick the ball around the field until one of the teams runs out of penalties or the stands erupt in flames of violence. The players are not allowed to use their hands for anything other than slapping and adjusting crotches.

Except the two goalies. Their job is possibly the most important on the field. When the ball has spent too much time being knocked about at one end of the field, the goalie is supposed to pick up the ball, place it carefully on the ground, then kick it clear to the other end so the fans sitting down there can watch some of the "action" for a while. Sometimes the ball will accidentally roll into the net when the goalie is trying to pick it up. In those instances they just put the ball back in the middle to give the centerline folks a show for a bit.

I don't think there are any cheerleaders in soccer, but quite frankly, I don't think I want there to be. Let's face it: most of these countries aren't known for their beautiful people, with the exception of the Netherlands, whose women were ironically arrested and kicked out of the World Cup stadium. I'm not sure about any mascots either, outside of Posh Spice. And I can only guess that there are a multitude of sponsors associated with soccer, because we only catch the occasional commercial that Kevin Nealon shares with us on one of his stupid banned commercials shows.

WHY SOCCER SUCKS

Besides the absence of hot cheerleaders, I think there are several other specific reasons that soccer is not particularly popular in the U.S., though, like socialism, it seems to be catching on of late. To start, it's the name. Now, everywhere else in the world this game is called football. Of course, we already have a game called football, so we can't call it that. Plus, although that descriptive term probably fits the foreign game a little more accurately, the confusion would be an insult to Dick Butkus, and that wouldn't be good for anyone.

The Brits are especially bad about looking down their noses at we Yanks for our misnomenclature. That's a turn-off right there from the start. But let's take a look at where "soccer" came from. Back in Jolly Old England times the folks playing this brand of football wanted to differentiate it from Rugby Football, so they started calling it Association Football (due to official organizations and ministers and elves and wizards and all those other sort of titles they have in England). As any fan of The Young Ones (one of the greatest shows of all time - hint, hint for Christmas) knows, the Brits love to create shortened nicknames for everything:

television = tele
French fries = chips
John, Paul, Ringo, & George = John & Paul
Association Football = Soccer

So, the next time the Queen of England calls you a barbarian for referring to it as soccer, tell her, "Takes one to know one, Betty!"

Another reason we don't like soccer is the lack of action. Part of the problem is the size of the field: it's enormous! These guys are spread so far apart that the ball has to travel 14.6 miles (or 6,312 kilometers for you soccer fans) between kicks. That's where those ridiculous announcers come in. Here's a typical spastic reaction by an announcer old enough to be hanging around outside a Miley Cyrus concert looking for dates:

Good God, what a reaction from a man that old. Jeez, get a life. It's not like Dale, Jr. took the checkered flag or something.

If they'd make the field a little smaller, and the action a little faster, we Americans might get into it. But I just don't see this happening. One of the primary tactics of the soccer man is called flopping. The idea here is to get the other team penalized. You know how punters and place kickers will act like they've been plowed into when a rusher gets close? Multiply that by ten Liston-Ali factors and you've got any typical soccer player coming within ten yards of another. They flail about and writhe on the ground until the referee points at a random billionaire in shorts and orders him out of the game. It's so silly even the American team's coach in the World Cup doesn't like it. But it's such an integral part of the game many say the U.S. will never be taken seriously in the world of soccer until it learns to embrace this tomfoolery. Should we recruit Vince McMahon to coach the team?

This garbage gives the game a very un-manly reputation in a country where girls' softball results in broken bones and stitches. Soccer is so wimpy that a headbutt to the chest four years ago is still infamous. I was 20 yards up the stands when Quentin Coryatt delivered this shot on Kyle McPherson:

Had that occurred in a soccer game, Coryatt would be rotting away in jail today... with 36 Dutch models.

As much as the wimpiness and lack of action gives me the yawnies, it's the fact that ties are celebrated in soccer that turns Americans off the most. (I know hockey has 'em, but fights, man, fights!) I'm not saying a tie should never be allowed to happen: sometimes offenses suck so badly that there really is no point in going into quintuple overtime. But ties should never be celebrated. They may not exactly be a losses, but they sure as hell ain't wins!

Of course, I reckon soccer is great for countries like Italy who - not counting four World Cup titles - haven't had any kind of real victory since Emperor Claudius conquered Britannia. And France and England certainly have had their share of ties, coming from the same families and all. (Funny, they each have one World Cup title, as well.) Americans just don't like ties. We didn't tie the eight year American Revolution... we won it! When Europe was mired down in WWI and WWII, we went in and broke through. We're used to being the tie breaker. Hey, that's a great idea!

When any World Cup game looks like it's going to end in a tie, why not send the Super Bowl Champs from that year in and break up the tie? Now I'd watch that!

I WAS WRONG

You probably thought I'd forgotten about my opening... I didn't. When this World Cup 2010 started I said there was no way I could care less about it. Turns out I was wrong: the Americans lost and now I actually care a little less about what occurs from here on out. Spain vs. the Netherlands - hopefully it won't last 80 years this time. Yawn.