Lots of people may find soccer strange. But anyone who finds it strange because you can't use your hands obviously hasn't spent much, or any, time thinking about games.
I mean, isn't it strange how in basketball you can only move the ball by bouncing it up and down? It's much easier to carry it.
You know, if you had to go off on an indefensible hare-chase about sports, you should said that golf is not really a sport. Probably still indefensible, but less so.
Surely you understand the basic principle, which is that we set ourselves restrictions in games and then challenge ourselves to succeed in spite of them.
True. And it would have saved Arbusto Contra Mundum the bother of trying to find any allies at all in the entire world, because everyone would agree that it would be a hopeless search. Even in Britain, given the choice between America and Football, no one would have to think twice.
And if you doubt Europe's ability to deploy large numbers of combat troops rapidly across long distances, just think about what happens every World Cup.
It's very, very rare for a game not to involve the arms/hands. Aside from track and field. I can't offhand think of another game with points that is like this.
Also, shouldn't we declare war on the metric system before we attack soccer?
we set ourselves restrictions in games and then challenge ourselves to succeed in spite of them
Yes, but there's a difference between making it more difficult to do something with your hands, and forbidding their use entirely. Watching humans playing soccer is like watching a jumping toad contest in which the toads have their legs tied.
One more thought. Only Americans call the greatest game "soccer''. Please use its proper name - FOOTBALL, And hey - we the English invented the game - along with golf, tennis, badminton, billiards, et. etc.
While I agree with most of Peter's sentiment, I'm skeptical of the claimed separation of sport and state in Europe. Certainly there's more than footie to the bitter rivalry between Celtic and Glasgow Rangers, as well as Atletico Bilbao's tradition of only employing Basque players. I mean, AC Milan is owned by the Italian Prime Minister for cripes sake!
Back on topic...it's the inherent difficulty that makes the game so transcendant when it's played well. Not everyone can dunk like Dr. J and not everyone can have the ball on a string like Zidane, but watching the best overcome what should be the laws of physics is a thrill to behold. I won't defend (or watch) ugly, amateurish soccer anymore than I would a pickup game of hoops at the YMCA. However the sport can, when played at the highest level, be pretty fantastic.
With all due respect, fuck no. Football is a sport unto itself here, and, I might add, one that is vastly more enjoyable as a spectator sport than soccer.
Don't do it, SB! You may say that the pleasures of the old "Standpipe Bridgeplate" moniker will be available to us in memory, summoned up with a touch by the new dry-as-dust "Standpipe." But what about the children? Will our children ever know "Standpipe Bridgeplate"? We must fight this shortening now, for posterity's sake. It's like in vitro meat.
Standpipe Bridgeplate is a lov'ble cockney sonnavagun down on his luck but quick with a pint and a joke. Standpipe is a mirthless scrivener quietly rotting away in the bowels of some bleak and lightless cubicle farm. Bridgeplate is a merciless paramilitary killing machine with only dim memories of his once-human past.
I must second apostropher's notion in 21. I understand why foreign nationals may want to continue using the term, but when folks from the States try it, there's always an air of trying-too-hard-to be-Euro. We're developing our own soccer culture, and we'll do it with a different name, thank ya very much.
Sorry, please return to regularly scheduled debates on handle usage. ;)
Who is the mysterious Isle of Toads? Is Toads a he or a she? Is Toads, or has Toads ever been, affiliated with U. Chicago? These are all questions posed in this comment.
Not everyone can dunk like Dr. J and not everyone can have the ball on a string like Zidane, but watching the best overcome what should be the laws of physics is a thrill to behold.
It's called "the beautiful game," Ogged. And I would agree that it is beautiful because it is so hard.
Totally off-topic, but I thought I'd point out that this AdRants post manages to provide the conceptual continuity between thesetwo Unfogged comment threads.
Is it really a "common" sexual hand gesture? I suspect that if you pulled that one on the average American woman, you might be introduced to another common sexual manuever: the biting of your cock.
Yes, but there's a difference between making it more difficult to do something with your hands, and forbidding their use entirely. Watching humans playing soccer is like watching a jumping toad contest in which the toads have their legs tied.
You're just perverse.
I can't believe I went all the way to Hyde Park to go to the library, and the first place I go is ... the linux lab.
Only Americans call the greatest game "soccer''. Please use its proper name - FOOTBALL, And hey - we the English invented the game - along with golf, tennis, badminton, billiards, et. etc.
Actually, 'soccer' comes from an acronym for the sport's early association in England, something like SOCA or SOCCA.
1889, socca, later socker (1891), soccer (1895), originally university slang, from a shortened form of Assoc., abbreviation of association in Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football); cf. rugger, but they hardly could have taken the first three letters of Assoc.
There's a really good part of Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue about words and phrases which the English dislike and dismiss as new-fangled Americanisms but are in fact elements of old-fangled British English which has faded out of use in the UK.
Yeah, I think I remember him saying that. Since what he wrote is just a (very very funny) popular summary of a number of other people's primary source research, where he sometimes tries to assess who is correct in disputes between his sources, that would not really be surprising.
Anyway, while a global war against soccer would no doubt have a unifying effect for the country, it undoubtedly be a foreign policy disaster, spreading our forces too thin over too many fields of battle (the mideast, Europe, Latin America and Japan) exhausting us both economically and militarily while uniting our soccer-playing foes and possibly catalyzing the formation of the very soccer caliphate feared by so many soccer hawks here in the states. An abysmal prospect. Better to pick a cheap police action against curling.
The poetic beauty of the war against global soccer is that it requires no boots on the ground. In fact, we wouldn't even have to drop bombs: just golf balls and golf clubs, which the local children would gratefully take up and use to put divets in all the soccer fields.
I'd rather watch soccer than football. The continuous action, the graceful play with the ball, the nuances of positioning, it's cool, zenish. Plus the crazy hairdos.
Also, I submit that soccer is not odd because our drive to invent games necessitates that we would invent a game to be played only with the feet. What would be odd was if we didn't have a sport only played with the feet; to have so many games exploring so many different uses of the human body and not to have explored that fairly obvious one. As regards baa's objection that there are few sports involving only the feet, well, it's not easy to think of a sufficiently different sport involving only feet, is it? Soccer's uniqueness is in no way contrary to its existential necessity.
Ogged does in fact love him some soccer, but loves him some petty squabbling even more.
Ogged does in fact hate him some soccer, but only because he's jealous of all the incandescent monkey sex soccer fans are having, and not for any reason pertaining to its merits as a sport.
Another proposition: ogged's post is really motivated by the same sentiment behind "I only hate him if he was the armless kid," and his prior post on mocking the developmentally challenged (and the one before that on kicking the homeless for sport).
Proposition 5: Ogged is a Shi'a mole sent to weaken the US by convincing it to attack every country in the world that enjoys soccer (that is, every country in the world).
The glowing monkey should've known the scientists were going to kick it out of the lab if it kept telling them about all the great sex it was having. You just don't disrupt the scientist/glowing monkey relationship like that.
One more thought. Only Americans call the greatest game "soccer''. Please use its proper name - FOOTBALL, And hey - we the English invented the game - along with golf, tennis, badminton, billiards, et. etc.
Posted by: peter hinchliffe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:09 AM
Not true about only Americans calling it soccer. I know an older English lady (okay she's welsh, but she's highly anglicized and has lived in Oxford for more than 60 years) who calls it soccer too. She reserves the term football for Rugby.
Football will always mean a bunch of big fat guys with helmets pointlessly crashing into each other in the hopes of moving an oblong lump a couple yards down a field of astroturf, and fuck anyone who says different.
With all due respect, fuck no. Football is a sport unto itself here, and, I might add, one that is vastly more enjoyable as a spectator sport than soccer.
Fuck I hate Americans. Now where that goddamned suicide bomb belt thingy?
This is late but I don't really understand 61. If there were a global war on soccer, wouldn't we start by invading Canada because of its support for curling? And the possibility that Canada would give curling irons (or whatever they're called) to the soccer players? It all makes so much sense to me.
So long as someone else maintains it in that condition, I approve heartily. Me maintaining a home in that condition has been tried and proven to be unworkable. Cooking, sure. Sewing, knitting, crochet? Fine. Generally obscure domestic skills (e.g. brewing)? I'm all over it. Day-to-day maintaining of a tidy home? Not so much.
Leave it to me to be away when we finally get around to bashing soccer. Grrrrrrrr. Thank goodness Apo was here to hold up my end of the argument in 21.
So breezing through this discussion I see soccer... beauty... beauty because it is hard... and interesting hair styles? This was all said to promote soccer as a sport?
Soccer is a fine sport in which your whole body gets some exercise. Some of us appreciate the sport whereever and whenever it is played regardless of who is playing it.
Soccer is a fine sport in which your whole body gets some exercise. Some of us appreciate the sport whereever and whenever it is played regardless of who is playing it.
Isn't it very strange that humans would play a game that doesn't allow them to use the appendages with which they're most dextrous?
No, actually it isn't remotely close to being the sort of thing that a reasonable person would contemplate considering strange, even for a little bit.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 9:53 AM
Boy, are you wrong.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 9:54 AM
Lots of people may find soccer strange. But anyone who finds it strange because you can't use your hands obviously hasn't spent much, or any, time thinking about games.
I mean, isn't it strange how in basketball you can only move the ball by bouncing it up and down? It's much easier to carry it.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 9:56 AM
Those aren't analagous, as you can surely see.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 9:58 AM
You know, if you had to go off on an indefensible hare-chase about sports, you should said that golf is not really a sport. Probably still indefensible, but less so.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 9:59 AM
Ben—now do it Zizek style!
Posted by Standpipe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:00 AM
Could it be that certain US citizens have brains which operate on too unsubtle a level to appreciate the world's finest game?
Come to Europe, where we enjoy sport for its own sake, and don't feel the need to mix it in with poltics.
Posted by peter hinchliffe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:00 AM
Surely you understand the basic principle, which is that we set ourselves restrictions in games and then challenge ourselves to succeed in spite of them.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:00 AM
True. And it would have saved Arbusto Contra Mundum the bother of trying to find any allies at all in the entire world, because everyone would agree that it would be a hopeless search. Even in Britain, given the choice between America and Football, no one would have to think twice.
And if you doubt Europe's ability to deploy large numbers of combat troops rapidly across long distances, just think about what happens every World Cup.
Posted by ajay | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:03 AM
It's very, very rare for a game not to involve the arms/hands. Aside from track and field. I can't offhand think of another game with points that is like this.
Also, shouldn't we declare war on the metric system before we attack soccer?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:04 AM
But, baa! To declare war on the metric system would be to declare war on SCIENCE!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:05 AM
we set ourselves restrictions in games and then challenge ourselves to succeed in spite of them
Yes, but there's a difference between making it more difficult to do something with your hands, and forbidding their use entirely. Watching humans playing soccer is like watching a jumping toad contest in which the toads have their legs tied.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:06 AM
One more thought. Only Americans call the greatest game "soccer''. Please use its proper name - FOOTBALL, And hey - we the English invented the game - along with golf, tennis, badminton, billiards, et. etc.
Posted by peter hinchliffe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:09 AM
I've been thinking again about soccer, and I'm disturbed.
I've been thinking again about biscuit conjuctions, and I'm frugal.
Posted by Standpipe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:12 AM
Imposter.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:13 AM
If you're so sure, email me a question only the real Standpipe could answer.
Posted by Standpipe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:16 AM
Also, should I assume that your answer to this question is now inoperative?
Posted by Standpipe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:33 AM
Huh.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:35 AM
While I agree with most of Peter's sentiment, I'm skeptical of the claimed separation of sport and state in Europe. Certainly there's more than footie to the bitter rivalry between Celtic and Glasgow Rangers, as well as Atletico Bilbao's tradition of only employing Basque players. I mean, AC Milan is owned by the Italian Prime Minister for cripes sake!
Back on topic...it's the inherent difficulty that makes the game so transcendant when it's played well. Not everyone can dunk like Dr. J and not everyone can have the ball on a string like Zidane, but watching the best overcome what should be the laws of physics is a thrill to behold. I won't defend (or watch) ugly, amateurish soccer anymore than I would a pickup game of hoops at the YMCA. However the sport can, when played at the highest level, be pretty fantastic.
Posted by Scott | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:40 AM
RE 13
I want the US to win the world cup just for the resulting "Football has a new name" articles.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:40 AM
Please use its proper name - FOOTBALL
With all due respect, fuck no. Football is a sport unto itself here, and, I might add, one that is vastly more enjoyable as a spectator sport than soccer.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:43 AM
When I was a kid we played soccer against a team that had a kid with no arms. We thought that was totally unfair.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:45 AM
I hear you, SP.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:45 AM
Don't do it, SB! You may say that the pleasures of the old "Standpipe Bridgeplate" moniker will be available to us in memory, summoned up with a touch by the new dry-as-dust "Standpipe." But what about the children? Will our children ever know "Standpipe Bridgeplate"? We must fight this shortening now, for posterity's sake. It's like in vitro meat.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:47 AM
I initially read 23 as "I hate you, SP." Made less sense, but funnier somehow.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:50 AM
I only hate him if he was the armless kid.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:51 AM
It looks like people feel strongly about this. Names and authenticity are so confounding!
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:51 AM
Standpipe Bridgeplate is a lov'ble cockney sonnavagun down on his luck but quick with a pint and a joke. Standpipe is a mirthless scrivener quietly rotting away in the bowels of some bleak and lightless cubicle farm. Bridgeplate is a merciless paramilitary killing machine with only dim memories of his once-human past.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:56 AM
Toads, since you know so much about the Bridgeplate, tell me this: where has Alameida been?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:04 AM
I must second apostropher's notion in 21. I understand why foreign nationals may want to continue using the term, but when folks from the States try it, there's always an air of trying-too-hard-to be-Euro. We're developing our own soccer culture, and we'll do it with a different name, thank ya very much.
Sorry, please return to regularly scheduled debates on handle usage. ;)
Posted by Scott | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:07 AM
Very funny, ogged.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:09 AM
Who is the mysterious Isle of Toads? Is Toads a he or a she? Is Toads, or has Toads ever been, affiliated with U. Chicago? These are all questions posed in this comment.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:10 AM
Not everyone can dunk like Dr. J and not everyone can have the ball on a string like Zidane, but watching the best overcome what should be the laws of physics is a thrill to behold.
It's called "the beautiful game," Ogged. And I would agree that it is beautiful because it is so hard.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:13 AM
Unitas Unilateralism. We'll tell the world what fucking football is or isn't. Holy shit, I feel like Toby Keith.
Posted by Kriston | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:13 AM
it is beautiful because it is so hard
Thanks, ac.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:13 AM
And tell me that Bill Bradley couldn't have won the 2004 election with a basketball-centric platform.
Posted by Kriston | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:14 AM
Soccer forbids the use of hands.
Hackeysack forbids the use of hands.
Soccer is morally equivalent to soccer.
All hackeysack players need to be punched in the nuts.
I leave the remainder of the equations as an exercise for the student.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:14 AM
All hackeysack players need to be punched in the nuts.
The female hackeysack players, they should be punched where?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:16 AM
In what would have become their nuts if they had realized their full human potential, Aristotelianly speaking.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:18 AM
Happy to oblige.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:18 AM
Frankly, I think you knew that.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:18 AM
All hackeysack players are douchebags
All douchebags are male
Female hackeysack players grow testicles
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:19 AM
No offense or anything. Just pointing out some logical conclusions.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:20 AM
40 to 35, I fucking hope?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:20 AM
Totally off-topic, but I thought I'd point out that this AdRants post manages to provide the conceptual continuity between these two Unfogged comment threads.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:25 AM
Wow, apo, that's amazing.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:29 AM
Is it really a "common" sexual hand gesture? I suspect that if you pulled that one on the average American woman, you might be introduced to another common sexual manuever: the biting of your cock.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:39 AM
I'm a gentleman, me.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:39 AM
Yes, but there's a difference between making it more difficult to do something with your hands, and forbidding their use entirely. Watching humans playing soccer is like watching a jumping toad contest in which the toads have their legs tied.
You're just perverse.
I can't believe I went all the way to Hyde Park to go to the library, and the first place I go is ... the linux lab.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:43 AM
The above was, of course, me.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:45 AM
Only Americans call the greatest game "soccer''. Please use its proper name - FOOTBALL, And hey - we the English invented the game - along with golf, tennis, badminton, billiards, et. etc.
Actually, 'soccer' comes from an acronym for the sport's early association in England, something like SOCA or SOCCA.
Play ultimate.
Posted by handyman | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:45 AM
It's called "the beautiful game,"
By the Brazilians; I don't think anyone calls what most Europeans play beautiful.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:46 AM
1889, socca, later socker (1891), soccer (1895), originally university slang, from a shortened form of Assoc., abbreviation of association in Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football); cf. rugger, but they hardly could have taken the first three letters of Assoc.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:47 AM
There's a really good part of Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue about words and phrases which the English dislike and dismiss as new-fangled Americanisms but are in fact elements of old-fangled British English which has faded out of use in the UK.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:55 AM
have
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:56 AM
The chapter on swearing in that book caused me to laugh so hard that I had tunnel vision from lack of oxygen.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:01 PM
You can't argue with that, and there's no way that a steady bombing campaign would increase the incidence of soccer.
Are you sure about that?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:15 PM
I really hate you guys sometimes. Anyway, different objectives, different results.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:17 PM
According to the internets, Bryson is complicit in what Geoff Pullum called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Reader beware.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:24 PM
Yeah, I think I remember him saying that. Since what he wrote is just a (very very funny) popular summary of a number of other people's primary source research, where he sometimes tries to assess who is correct in disputes between his sources, that would not really be surprising.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:36 PM
Anyway, while a global war against soccer would no doubt have a unifying effect for the country, it undoubtedly be a foreign policy disaster, spreading our forces too thin over too many fields of battle (the mideast, Europe, Latin America and Japan) exhausting us both economically and militarily while uniting our soccer-playing foes and possibly catalyzing the formation of the very soccer caliphate feared by so many soccer hawks here in the states. An abysmal prospect. Better to pick a cheap police action against curling.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:51 PM
undoubtedly will be
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:53 PM
The poetic beauty of the war against global soccer is that it requires no boots on the ground. In fact, we wouldn't even have to drop bombs: just golf balls and golf clubs, which the local children would gratefully take up and use to put divets in all the soccer fields.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 12:54 PM
I thought they'd plant the fields with the seeds of democracy and let a new era of global prosperity bloom.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:01 PM
I know it says isle of toads but I keep reading I love toads.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:02 PM
I'd rather watch soccer than football. The continuous action, the graceful play with the ball, the nuances of positioning, it's cool, zenish. Plus the crazy hairdos.
Also, I submit that soccer is not odd because our drive to invent games necessitates that we would invent a game to be played only with the feet. What would be odd was if we didn't have a sport only played with the feet; to have so many games exploring so many different uses of the human body and not to have explored that fairly obvious one. As regards baa's objection that there are few sports involving only the feet, well, it's not easy to think of a sufficiently different sport involving only feet, is it? Soccer's uniqueness is in no way contrary to its existential necessity.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:21 PM
I don't have the rulebook in front of me, but I'm quite certain that cyclists are not allowed to pedal with their hands either.
Posted by ogmb | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:30 PM
Also baa's "for points" rule is unjustifiable. Hackeysack was mentioned above, albeit by a hater.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:32 PM
I don't have the rulebook in front of me, but I'm quite certain that cyclists are not allowed to pedal with their hands either.
I'm pretty sure they don't steer with their feet, but then, it's not as if soccer players don't use their arms and hands for balance.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:33 PM
"it's not as if soccer players don't use their arms and hands for balance."
Or for scoring the occasional goal, too. Just ask Maradona and the "Hand of God".
Posted by Scott | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:39 PM
Two propositions.
Ogged does in fact love him some soccer, but loves him some petty squabbling even more.
Ogged does in fact hate him some soccer, but only because he's jealous of all the incandescent monkey sex soccer fans are having, and not for any reason pertaining to its merits as a sport.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 1:47 PM
Another proposition: ogged's post is really motivated by the same sentiment behind "I only hate him if he was the armless kid," and his prior post on mocking the developmentally challenged (and the one before that on kicking the homeless for sport).
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:03 PM
proposition 4: soccer is actually a red herring to draw away attention from the fact that Ogged is a xenophobe.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:05 PM
I am assuming, since the world revolves around my little self, that he does this to bait me.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:06 PM
Proposition 5: Ogged is a Shi'a mole sent to weaken the US by convincing it to attack every country in the world that enjoys soccer (that is, every country in the world).
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:10 PM
Scientists did try to make a glowing monkey. Scientists did not however attempt to gauge its skill as a lover.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:14 PM
Scientists did not report trying to gauge its skill as a lover.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:20 PM
Scientists did not invite journalists to the after-party party.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:20 PM
Scientists were worried the glowing monkeys would be promiscuous and unfaithful. Not that scientists are prudes or anything.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:23 PM
The glowing monkey should've known the scientists were going to kick it out of the lab if it kept telling them about all the great sex it was having. You just don't disrupt the scientist/glowing monkey relationship like that.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 2:58 PM
Scientists will respect the glowing monkey in the morning. Scientists promise!
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:02 PM
One more thought. Only Americans call the greatest game "soccer''. Please use its proper name - FOOTBALL, And hey - we the English invented the game - along with golf, tennis, badminton, billiards, et. etc.
Posted by: peter hinchliffe | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 10:09 AM
Not true about only Americans calling it soccer. I know an older English lady (okay she's welsh, but she's highly anglicized and has lived in Oxford for more than 60 years) who calls it soccer too. She reserves the term football for Rugby.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:15 PM
And should Italians also stop calling it "calcio"?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:20 PM
to be honest, no one really cares what the Italians do.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:32 PM
and who cares who invented badminton, either?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:34 PM
Football will always mean a bunch of big fat guys with helmets pointlessly crashing into each other in the hopes of moving an oblong lump a couple yards down a field of astroturf, and fuck anyone who says different.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:35 PM
"glowing monkey" shall henceforth be a term for a lad or lass with sex appeal.
I expect this to take off in the way "cow eyed" caught fire in the public's imagination.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:37 PM
And the scientists?
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:38 PM
some of them aren't fat, and run very fast. Some of them are very tall and slow and throw. Some of them are kickers.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:38 PM
we are the scientists, Isle of Toad. And we are the makers of music.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:38 PM
and dreamers of dreams, etc.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:40 PM
We are the prophets of old, who of luminous primates fortold.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:43 PM
I hate American football, BTW.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 3:52 PM
and I like it, apropos of nothing.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:12 PM
Re 71: I love petty squabbling, I don't much like soccer, but will watch if the Brazilians are playing. I am not jealous of monkey sex.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:16 PM
Because I could not shine for him,
My monkey shone for me;
The midnight lab knew fur and flab
And luminosity.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:24 PM
I am not jealous of monkey sex.
You know I was just using "monkey" as an intensifier, right?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:25 PM
To the tune of 'The Yellow Rose of Texas.'
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:26 PM
I do.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:26 PM
That song pretty much ruined me for Emily Dickinson poems.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:27 PM
Mutatis mutandis.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:28 PM
We slowly glowed, he knew no haste,
And it was bright as day
My favor gave him seizures too,
For his civility.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 4:34 PM
Fuck I hate Americans. Now where that goddamned suicide bomb belt thingy?
[Storms off to kill infidels]
Posted by Juicy | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 5:50 PM
It doesn't really surprise me that a terrorist named "Juicy" would misplace the bomb belt.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 5:52 PM
You people make me deleriously happy. Purple glowing monkey buttsex.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 8:15 PM
American football as seen from elsewhere:
1. Everybody stands and glares at each other for what seems like half an hour;
2. Everybody runs into each other;
3. Everybody walks off and on the pitch;
4. Everything stops for the advertisements.
(Wash, rinse, repeat)
Posted by chris y | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 2:18 AM
That, my friend, is the essence of sport.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 7:42 AM
This is late but I don't really understand 61. If there were a global war on soccer, wouldn't we start by invading Canada because of its support for curling? And the possibility that Canada would give curling irons (or whatever they're called) to the soccer players? It all makes so much sense to me.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 8:11 AM
If there were a global war on soccer, wouldn't we start by invading Canada because of its support for curling?
On the theory that curling is a gateway to soccer?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 8:23 AM
It is part of the terrible price we are playing for resisting soccer--whether it is in the form of a group of people organized to attempt to kick a soccer ball into a goal, or a global network that outsources its soccer playing, or a bunch of Canadians curling on ice.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 8:39 AM
Canada would give curling irons
Brooms, I thought -- do we have to stamp out brooms generally, even those not used for sport? Because I'm good with that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 9:31 AM
Brooms? That's just silly.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 9:36 AM
What do you have against a clean, well-kept home, LB?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 9:40 AM
Brooms.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 9:41 AM
So long as someone else maintains it in that condition, I approve heartily. Me maintaining a home in that condition has been tried and proven to be unworkable. Cooking, sure. Sewing, knitting, crochet? Fine. Generally obscure domestic skills (e.g. brewing)? I'm all over it. Day-to-day maintaining of a tidy home? Not so much.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 9:44 AM
Fibreglass Reactor? This is serious.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 9:47 AM
We lit the Space where Critters peeped
Through Cages—at the Scene—
We lit the Clutch of Locking Limbs—
We lit our Naked Need—
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 10:14 AM
Dude, you are a sick and twisted person of indeterminate gender. I approve heartily.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 10:37 AM
Or rather—It lit Us—
Our Loins drew quivering and wet—
For only Simian, my Swoon—
My Science—ill-begot—
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 10:50 AM
Text? Anyone? Someone else finish, I'm creeping myself out.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 10:50 AM
We knawed within a cage that beamed
with monkey hair, and bound;
The feces, they were visible,
The panting, chanting sound.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 10:58 AM
I forgot to randomly capitalize
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 10:59 AM
Also to sprinkle dashes.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 11:01 AM
Leave it to me to be away when we finally get around to bashing soccer. Grrrrrrrr. Thank goodness Apo was here to hold up my end of the argument in 21.
So breezing through this discussion I see soccer... beauty... beauty because it is hard... and interesting hair styles? This was all said to promote soccer as a sport?
I think not.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 12:27 PM
Soccer is a fine sport in which your whole body gets some exercise. Some of us appreciate the sport whereever and whenever it is played regardless of who is playing it.
Posted by Andy | Link to this comment | 07-21-05 12:25 PM
Soccer is a fine sport in which your whole body gets some exercise. Some of us appreciate the sport whereever and whenever it is played regardless of who is playing it.
Could you be any more gay?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 07-21-05 12:30 PM
The thrilling conclusion!
Since then—my Lab has Darkened—yet
Seems brilliant as the Day
I first surmised the Monkey's Meds
Would rouse Depravity—
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-21-05 2:04 PM
a most satisfying conclusion. We have learned much from the journey.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-05 2:08 PM