A Study in Contrasts

Good Americans.


















Bad Americans.














Players good, money bad.

Or is that players tolerated, money detested?

U to the N to the I-T-Y, people!

Battle of the The Bs

Well, not all the players were B teamers, but don't expect to see many of these faces next month for the Ruckus at Reliant February 6th. Anyway, Team U! S! A! defeats Sweden 2-0.

It was a good game. Landon Donovan put them ugly boots to good use and broke (another) record - 35 career goals. And still just 25. This kid could go places.

Eddie Robinson scores his first goal in his first ever game. I think there was another kid named Eddie who did something like that and now he's playing for Fulham! Mr. Inconsistency, meet Team Mediocre. Let's hope Eddie R stays with MLS.

Curious thing about the photo: the apparent lack of love for Taylor Twellman. Is he the Odd Man Out? Is he on his way out? Stay tuned.

p.s. apologies for the lack of timeliness. Work sucks.

Yin and Yang and the News Today

Rancid are back in the studio.

Most excellent and welcome news because the whole B and C Side thing did not do much for me. Tour to follow?

That's the yang.


Here's the yin: Fulham, determined to conquer the hip hop demographic, is chasing Eddie Johnson.


Yes.

Eddie Johnson. The Pride of Bunnell, Florida. In 2004, he scored his very first international goal in his very first appearance - a World Cup qualifer game, to boot. Scored a hat trick in his next international appearance. Only MLS player to score back to back (or is that game to game?) hat tricks. Ever. But we've been fooled before by Eddie's Potential. In 2005. 2006. Part of 2007. Some players' form takes a few games off. Eddie's evaporates for whole seasons.


Well, I hate to say it, but it could be worse.

It could have been Twellman.

Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes

Well, actually, Baby just needs to get out of the freakin' house.

It's January, peeps. And while it's currently 73 degrees with the sweet sweet sunshine, it's 40 below in my bored old soul. And February. The wise and philosophizin' GWSF say this: fuck February! February can suck my dick! Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Henry Rollins is coming to Knoxville. Tix are reasonable until one starts adding in the ticketbastard charges, the dinner out and, worst of all, the intangible cost of Taking The Husband. I'm quite sure he would hate it, him being a little more Red State (and redneck) than I. But could I go with someone - say, my daughter? - who might actually enjoy it? Nooooooooooo. It would either (in his imagination) be a) some kind of Girls Gone Wild hooternanny or b) be oodles of fun that he missed out on. Maybe that's the same thing. But anyway, he'd insist on coming and I'd have to listen to him bitch.

But look! Metro Pulse is having a contest!

And I'm feeling lucky.

The Rain In Sevierville Falls Gently on the ...

My dog woke me up early this morning. Well, early for a Sunday anyway. We went out for our constitutional and it was pissing down rain, cold, and dreary. My feet got wet, my newspaper got wet, and the dog got wet. If you know your Jimmy Buffett, you could say my fin was sinking low big time. When we got back in, I asked myself 'what can I do now to increase the depths of my misery?'

And the answer: watch pissy Englishter Premier League soccer. Specifically, Derby versus Blackburn. The first half was scoreless and boring. I had hopes of seeing Benny Feilhaber (a/k/a Little Mostest, who bears a pronounced likeness to Brad Pitt circa Thelma and Louise). He didn't play. In fact, of the eleven men Derby had out there, Eddie Lewis appeared to be the only one actually playing the game. The rest of the team was out there making Fulham look good.

The second half started and in comes Benito. Derby score! A lead! Derby has a lead for the first time since like ... ever. Then they get the benefit of a pk call! They could double their lead!

Brad Friedel once was a goalkeeping god. Today he was not. He got lucky. Twice. Saved the pk, but didn't hang on to it. Derby stood there disbelieving, and instead of attacking the freaking ball that was bouncing away from Brad, they allowed him to crab crawl over to get it. Not long after, Blackburn scored. And then they scored again.

Benny had some good touches. And a lot of bad ones, like everybody else in a Derby shirt. More playing time, I think he'll be aight.

At Least I Didn't Have to Watch It

Fulham 1, Spurs ... 5.

Sigh.

Mr. Clinton Dempsey provides the Whites (who are, in a testament to pissy Englishterness , in red) the lone goal.

Here's hoping the new boss can keep them off Relegation Row.

Or that The Mostest From Nacogdoches finds a new team.

Informed, Organized and Catalogued.

That's how I like my Year Ends.

Second best part of this holiday season? The lists. The Best-ofs, the Top Tens, the Year-ins. I like to see what I missed, I like to see what I was cool enough to be in on. Cool, of course, being a relative term. As is "in on" - I think in most cases, with me, it's more like "happened by the most impossible set of circumstances to find quite blindly." But the lists, they are succinct and tidy; thus, by association, am I.

So, I found one or two here at Time's 2007 Pop Culture compendium. They also have lists in News, Arts & Entertainment, Science and Business. Like Lay's potato chips, I bet you can't read just one. The 10 Buzzwords gave me a name and a mission: freegan. I will never be a vegan, and I'll never dumpster dive for food, but I will do my best to shun mainstream consumerism. I like stuff, but it's taking over my life, the acquiring, the tending and the throwing away. The water cycle of material goods, if you will. It's food for thought. And that - the year ahead - is where my thoughts are at when they're not seized with sweaty-palmed panic over Christmas and all the doings. I want next year to be a great one, so maybe, just maybe if I plan a little, plot an outline - even if it's just in pencil, not stone - I can help that happen.

Food for thought.

And with that, I am outta here until after Christmas.

Happy Holidays, peeps!

It Wouldn't Be Christmas

Without kitsch. Patrick Star, you ARE my hero.

Filling The Void

with more bs.

I have nothing to write about. Not one iota of inspiration. Not one scrap of an idea. Not one morsel of information with which to litter the cyber-verse. MLS is dormant. Fulham, even with Mostest, is just not that fun to watch. There's not a whole lot of music happenings during the Christmas season other than caroling, and that's not going to feed my entertainment jones. My kids aren't doing anything cute. Well, "cute" in the adorable sense, not in the smart-assed teenage antics sense. Antic-ing may very well be taking place. I don't want to know.

But just when things seem dreariest, just when I think it can't get any darker and there is no light at the end of the long tunnel of same-ness and quasi-winter I have fallen into, along comes a little Christmas miracle.

Bless you, Giorgio Armani.

Just in Case You Wondered

Color me impressed!

Thanksgiving 2007

I made it! For real! And it was tasty!

Could have used a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but very very tasty.

Anyway, I want to give thanks for the fact that I only had to say the words "fat dripper" once this year.

See, it's high school come back to haint me. I took home ec the unfortunate year I was a freshman and my sister was a senior. We had a quiz on the names of various kitchen implements. I did not know the term "baster", but I knew it's purpose. Hence, "fat dripper."

I am calling a moratorium on all the various labels I have placed on my children and will hereafter do my utmost not to make them repeat embarrassing stories.

Otherwise, Turkey Day was fab.

Hope yours was too.

p.s. I am also thankful for anybody who ever reads this exercise in egotism. Because like Opal said in Because of Winn-Dixie, music (or, rambling in cyberspace) is better if someone's listening.

The Nelson Mandela Cup

We won it.

And closed out our national soccer year.

It wasn't a great game, as they go, but the pickings are slim here as the MLS season ends. Mostest had some moments, Freddy had one wtf moment - the bad kind - and who knew Steve Cherundolo could score?Soccer players. They come in all sizes.

Expansion Draft Tomorrow!

I thought this was supposed to be the off season. It's two days until Thanksgiving, tomorrow is my son's birthday and now I have to figure out who will become a Quake tomorrow from this list.

I knew I should've called in sick today.

Ok, San Jose can only take 10 players, and only one from each existing team. So, three lucky teams will get a pass. Lucky, of course, being a very relative term in MLS. I'd say FC Dallas would feel very lucky to have the Quakes choose Denilson. I mean, of course, if they *were* stuck with his contract, and they are not. RBNY fans would like to see Claudio Reyna chosen, but apparently management still thinks he's worth something.

Without any sort of logic at all, I pull out my Magic Crystal Orb of Knowledge, and out of the swirling twirling mists of sweat and desperation, I see the Quakes taking:

Ramon Nunez, of Chivas USA
Nicolas Hernandez, of the Colorado Rapids
Stephen Deroux or Guy Kpene, of D. C. United
Craig Waibel, from the 2007 MLS champs Houston Dynamo
Jose Burciaga, from Kansas City
Kelly Gray or Josh Tudela, from Team Beck-itt


That's 6.

Ok, from RBNY, they take Joe Vide if they have any sense at all. I'd choose Andy Dorman from the Revs, but I think he's headed across the pond so I'll go with Avery John. Ned Grabavoy out of Columbus and Dario Sala of FC Dallas complete my picks.


Tomorrow, 1 pm eastern I'll find out how right I am.


***UPDATE! UPDATE!

I got one right! Vide goes.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Mathis Moseys Over to L.A.

Why?

It's a mystery rolled up in a dilemma riding a fast train to Huh?

I'm guessing it has something to do with the Expansion Draft, and hopefully he'll be Rimando'd (TM pending) right back.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

I guess you could say it was an emotional moment.

Or maybe there's something we should know about these two.

There is indeed: they just won an MLS Championship. No word on Disney World.

Dynamo (sans Ching and Clark) 2, Revolution 1. Revs scored first (Twellman - always effing Taylor Twellman!) and I thought, that's it. May as well go clean the bathroom, because I'd rather scrub the mold off the toilet than see TNT go all Golden Boy on this game. My son convinced me to watch 15 minutes of the second half. De Rosario setup Ngwenya, who missed but picked up a lucky rebound and put that one away. Game on. Approximately 10 minutes later, De Rosario swatted in a pretty darn sweet header and that, friends and neighbors, was all she wrote.

I believe I saw Taylor Twellman weeping in the dying minutes, and I was glad.

(Well, ok, no, I actually felt kind of bad for him then, but keep it quiet).

Word Association

Or perhaps, song association.

It was a Warren Zevon song, to be precise. Carmelita. The first verse: I hear mariachi static on the radio/and the tubes they glow in the dark/and I'm there with you in Ensenada/and I'm here in Echo Park.


... and I got so homesick. Lonesome. Lost in a nostalgic haze.


I want to be 8 again. Beside a cold Pacific ocean. Under a big, big sky.

Bringing Sexy Back

to L. A.?

Ruud Gullit will get his freak on with the Gals.

I'm not at all sure that since the Coming of Beckham that they have lacked for sexy. But it will be nice to see a real team effort. I just want to make sure we're all on the same page as to what constitutes sexy and in an effort to make that perfectly clear, I offer these two examples.


This photo is many, many things but sexy, it ain't. I often wonder if he lost a bet and *had* to.

The water is overkill, btw.

















This photo is Sexy Incarnate. I just want to touch. I chose NOT to go with the obligatory Beckham photo because there's more than one side to sexy, see?

We Won the MLS Western Conference

and all we got were these lousy t-shirts. And baseball caps. Anybody else think it's funny to give soccer players baseball caps?

Ok, just me then.

Another fifty cents down the drain. I ended up rooting (and by "rooting", I mean half-heartedly watching and sometimes snoring) for Kansas City. So, on Sunday November 18, Houston meets New England in a high noon showdown. Woo. Hoo. I guess I'll watch and I guess I'll root for ...

New freakin' England.

The Streak Continues

My streak of cheering for losers, that is. Chicago toddled out of New England town, without a win and without an Eastern Conference championship. Without anything at all. And I am out one more quarter. I really should learn not to bet on these games. I'm going with Houston to beat Kansas City on Saturday, just because I want them to lose. I want them all to lose.

Anyway, cheerier news in L. A. I don't really think a lack of sexy is their problem, but it will be way cool if Cobi becomes assistant coach.


And a not-so-random hottie. I said it, and it came true. I am not ALWAYS a jinx.
So, rain is not always a bad thing.

Yee. Freakin' Haw. Eastern Conference Final Tonight

The Demon Overlords of New England versus the Satanic Sissies of the Chicago Fire. ESPN2, 7:30 PM.

No, I'm not excited about. The degree of indifference I feel would SLAY them if they could feel it. S-L-A-Y. But I'm gonna watch it. Because I am *so* dedicated to seeing New England defeated, broken and bloody that I'll even cheer for Cuauhtémoc Blanco.

obligatory soccer hotties here