Shanghai Yummy

Thanks to satori for putting a design on this thing. Yes, I'll take full responsibility for the name. Just don't get the wrong idea. A shout-out to shiggy whose blog is much cooler than mine.

The topic of the day is Football. Soccer, to my fellow Americans. One of the nice things about being outside of the USA during the World Cup is that the entire rest of the world shows every single match of the tournament on free television. In the US, I'm told, you get the US games on ESPN2 and that's about it. Maybe Univision has all the games. I have a theory as to why this is, and it involves myopic money grubbing media corporations, but I won't go into that.

Regardless, those wily Americans are making a serious run for the second round. Yes, Portugal played like crap during the first game, but there have been plenty of times the Americans weren't able to capitalize on other teams' crapitude (TM - a registered trademark of michael lee). To me, that game showed us that for the first tiime in years, the US squad was playing to win rather than just not to lose. And yes, the US had some serious luck in the game against Korea, but again, they were able to hang in there despite a withering assault throughout the game and pull off the draw. And DUDE, a PK save by Brad Friedel! Being a goalkeeper myself, I can say without hesitation that those are impossible to save, and it's SO satisfying to see one. Even sweeter that it was by the team I happen to be rooting for.

China, on the other hand, is coming home after being eliminated in the first round. It would be nice to see them take Turkey down as a warning shot for the next World Cup. I was able to watch the China vs. Costa Rica game (the opener for China) at a movie theater with about 300 Chinese fans. Certainly one of the things that "brings people together" is sport, and it was kinda cool to just hang out with a bunch of people enjoying football, even if their team did lose. Sorry, no riots or hooliganism to report from here. It was an orderly retreat.

I was going to write about the discos in this entry, but I think I'll save that for the next one...