Confessions of a soccer hater

I don’t like soccer.

It’s a boring game. After watching twenty-two men chasing a ball for ninety minutes, you’d be lucky if they scored thrice. In 306 games in the Dutch Eredivisie this year, the average was 3.12 goals per game. That’s roughly one goal every half hour, or less if you include the half-time break. Major League Baseball teams managed 9.60 runs per game in the 2007 regular season. Granted, baseball games take longer, but not more than three times as long.

Normally, it’s quite possible to avoid soccer, but every other summer there’s a European Championship or a World Championship. During those three or four weeks, it’s as if there’s nothing but soccer. It’s on every tv channel, in every newspaper, on every website. Homes and bars and stores turn orange. Even people turn orange, and Planet Earth might as well be a giant soccer ball.

Most annoyingly, nobody seems to be allowed not to like soccer for the duration of the tournament. The soccer craze is forced upon you, whether you like it or not. You have to watch the games and talk about them the next day. That’s society’s fault, though, not the game’s.

Indeed, it’s no different this time. The European Championship started last week and it’s everywhere. Just two more weeks, and I’ll be free again until June 11th, 2010.

Still…

I watched the Netherlands’ first game on Monday, against reigning World Champs Italy, and I have to confess I enjoyed it. The score was certainly pleasing enough: 3-0 in our favour. Beforehand, a draw was considered an optimistic prediction. Our squad played their best game in years, Italy their worst. And yes, I watched it in its entirety, and I wasn’t bored. (Well, perhaps a little bit at some point during the second half. I continued to watch with one eye, while reading a magazine with the other.)

Of course, I didn’t have much else to do that night. I was visiting my thesis advisor in Garching this week. That’s a nice little German town. Nice, and very quiet. I thought I might as well watch the game for a while.

Yesterday, during supper, Croatia were beating Germany. That was fun as well, if for a different reason. The German commentator was so terribly desperate that I almost felt sorry for him. It’s only a game!

The Netherlands’ second game is on right now, against France. It’s two thirds through the first half and, much to my surprise, we’ve got a 1-0 lead. Perhaps I should turn on my television. I might enjoy it
again…

[Update: We beat France 4-1 to secure first place in Group C, the "Group of Death" with World Champions Italy and WC runners-up France, and we haven't even played the third and final game yet. Group of Death indeed! It'll be the death of Italy or France, or both if we let Romania win on Tuesday.]

Red cabbage explosion

In today’s physics experiment, we have learned that a glass bowl filled with red cabbage does not survive a fall from 1.5 metres (5 feet). The bowl shatters on impact and shard of glass are launched into every corner of the room. Most of the cabbage remains near the site of impact, but some pieces may end up a couple of metres away.

Next time, I’ll have to hold on better to whatever I’m trying to put into my microwave. Having the bowl of cabbage explode on the floor was definitely fun, but it creates an awful mess.

Random observations

• One prejudice about the US seems be true, at least in Granville: everyone has a car. During my 90-minute walk yesterday morning, I encountered a grand total of two other pedestrians. Both were elderly people.
• Cars here are less noisy than in Europe. Could it be the automatic transmission?
• I underpaid at the supermarket Thursday night! Not on purpose, obviously, and I only noticed it when I was back at the B&B. I had to pay $15.50, so I gave the lady a $10 bill, a $5 bill and what I believed to be a 50-cent coin. However, I later realized the coin was a quarter.
• Winter weather comes everywhere I go. In November, early snow showers hit Heidelberg during my visit. The temperature never got above freezing while I was in Garching in December. It’s the same in Granville so far: sub-zero (or sub-32 on that other scale) since I got here. It’s -7 °C (20 °F) at the moment and the temperature for tonight is expected to drop down to as low as -18 ° C (0 °F).

MMVIII

Happy New Year!

That is, if you follow one of the many calendars that turned the page yesterday. According to Wikipedia, Buddhists are now in 2552, the Thai in 2551, and the Koreans in 4341. Meanwhile, Jews are about a third of the way through 5768, Muslims are in the final month of 1429, and the Chinese in the penultimate month of 4704.

2008 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of the Potato. It is also the International Year of Planet Earth, the International Year of Sanitation, and the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. For all of you out there, my readers, I hope it will be a year of good health and lots of happiness.

Which came first?

An age-old question finally answered:

From Wulffmorgenthaler.com

The amazing colour changing card trick

Did you get fooled?

Shades of grey

Here’s one of my favourite optical illusions (copied from BrainBashers.com):

Are the squares A and B the same colour? The answer is here.

Lego giant washed ashore

A giant Lego man was fished out of the sea at the Dutch town of Zandvoort yesterday. Workers at a drinks stall spotted something in the water and were surprised to find a life-sized Lego toy.

The Lego man seems to belong to an artist or a group of artists from the city of Utrecht going by the name of Du Fois. The website Ego Leonard, owned by Du Fois, has a bunch of pictures from the Lego man at last month’s Dance Valley festival. However, when contacted by Dutch tv network RTL4, Du Fois denied knowing anything about the giant toy. Thus, it remains somewhat of a mystery where it came from and how it ended up in the North Sea.

[Update (August 8th, 2007): The drinks stall keepers yesterday intended to keep Mr. Lego and they left him standing outside their stall when they closed for the night. When they got back, the Lego man had vanished without a trace.]

[Update 2 (August 8th, 2007): Yay! There's two videos available on YouTube:

]

Corn field destroyed

A man driving under the influence of cocaine destroyed a corn field near the town of Dussen with his SUV Friday night. The police had the field’s exits blocked, so he couldn’t get out onto the normal road. The odd ride eventually ended when the man drove into a ditch trying to escape the police SUVs that were chasing him through the corn.

Firstborns smarter than younger siblings

Firstborn children are smarter than their younger brothers and sisters, according to a Norwegian study published in Science. In families with two or more children, the IQ of the oldest child is, on average, two points higher than that of the second child (103.2 versus 101.2). Children with two older siblings score an average of 100 points on an IQ test. The scientists who performed the study think that the elder children get an intelligence boost from helping and caring for their younger kin.

In other news, an American couple seems to have fallen off a roof while having sex. A taxi driver found them dead and naked, and a quick search revealed their clothes on the roof of a nearby building. They must both have had a lot of older brothers and sisters.