Staggering clear from the flaming wreckage of a miserably failed pass last night.... I really did not need to run into my ex's best friend and have him tell me how unhappily single she is and how she could so do with finding a nice boyfriend. No, that's just Fate taking the piss.....
In fact, it happened twice in quick succession. Although 'ex' is not really the right term: well, one was an ex, The Ex Who Would Still Be Current Girlfriend If There Were A Just God; the other was my Rebound Fixation (who might/could/should have become a girlfriend if she weren't too busy ever to go out on dates).
Yes, Fate, I feel, is trying to tell me something. Something no doubt prefixed by a taunting Nelson Muntz ha-haaa. Probably something like, "You couldn't get laid at a porn star convention!"
(Hat tip to The British Cowboy for that last reference, of course.)
12 comments:
Totally tangentially related, but one of the greatest disappointments of the US is the failure of sports fans to have the sort of humor that was rife on the terraces back home.
I tried to explain to an American the difference between booing the opposing teams center forward (tedious, common in the US) and the British version,w hich woudl be songs such as "You couldn't score in a brothel..."
Football songs/chants were what made the games so much fun to attend. And some of them were actually very witty, if in a pretty sophomoric way.
One of my favorites was after I abandoned the trips to Brum to watch my beloved Villa (because they had gone all seater and were charging more than double to sit where I previously stood) and started going up to the Manor to watch Oxford Utd of a Saturday. There was a steward who always used to patrol the fence in front of the part of the stand where we stood. He was a man of generous girth, so whenever the game got boring, a mighty chant of "Who ate all the pies" would come up from the 2-3,000 of us in that part. To his credit, the steward would always turn round and wave at us when the identifying line was sung.
For those not cognizant of British football humor, the song goes as follows:
"Who ate all the pies,
Who ate all the pies?
You fat bastard,
You fat bastard,
You ate all the pies."
Repeated ad nauseam.
Thanks for the reminder TBC - I now nostalgically recall singing that ditty at the top of my lungs on a chilly night at White Hart Lane. Gloriously fun and yet amazingly banal.
Booing sounds like hard cheese to me and not at all sportsman like. Glad to hear that you are endeavouring single-handed to change the US nations sporting habits. Maybe its time to compose some new bespoke football/baseball/basketball chants to encourage them. A good challenge actually.
Glad to see you are out of Court TBC!
A dozen or more years ago, I went to the Rugby Sevens Tournament in Hong Kong (free tickets from a buddy in the merchant banking biz). It was a gloriously sunny weekend in early March. Someone had brought along one of those beach toy inflatable Orcas, and it was doing quite a bit of crowd-surfing..... which at one point prompted a chant (from pretty much the entire stadium - deafening!) of:
Who ate all the seals?
Who ate all the seals?
You, Killer Whale!
You, Killer Whale!
You ate all the seals!
I like to think that I started that one.
It may not be so, but leave me with my memories unsullied by contradictory truth, please.
fabulous!
and agreed, in the USA, to my knowledge, we aren't anywhere as witty with our voiced dissatisfaction or insults. Overall, we're pretty polite peeps, or maybe just so in my neck of the woods -- and, apparently, with TBC's influence, not just so any longer in NoVa.
Which meant that as a child, when I witnessed 'em fur'ners engaging in most unpolite behavior (granted, i would, at the time, be a visitor in their home country - from Asia around to Europe) I would be left with my 10-year-old mouth hanging open, eyes wide with shock, ears burning from the indecency of it all...
I'm over it now. bring it on.
I often fondly remember the eye-opening (ear-opening, mind-opening) moment when as a child of 7 or 8 (Hereford Utd, in the mid-70s..... possibly against Portsmouth in the Cup....), I heard my uncle (in every other circumstance, the most mild-mannered and clean-spoken of men) yell: "Oh, Referee! I'm going to shoot your fucking guide-dog!"
You don't get that in the States, do you? I wonder why not.
Did you declare yourself to Madame X at last?
I'm sorry it didn't go well. Please don't be too discouraged. It may have been just the wrong timing. Your charm and persistence may win the day yet.
Not out of court yet, more's the pity. One more week, but I am snatching a few moments on the weekend to post.
I still remember going to a game against Spurs just after David Pleat, then manager, had been caught paying two working girls to, in the immortal words of the tabloids, "perform a lewd sex act" in the back of his Jag. Happy times.
I do enjoy the more in depth, pre-prepared terrace songs. And I am sure Froog will agree with me that there is a distinct pleasure to be gained from lower division football.
Yes, they do say that, don't they?
Aren't all sex acts 'lewd'?? I thought that was the point!
Mr Snopes, you naughty man, you know I cannot discuss the details of my stuttering 'romantic life' too openly. Read between the lines and you will find the whole sorry tale of ineptitude and despair.
Cowboy, I haven't been to much football since the '70s - when I was rather spoiled by being able to support an over-performing, fast-rising non-league side (the Hereford glory days). One of the great joys of lower level football is definitely being able to watch your side dish out the occasional spanking to much grander clubs!!
I saw Oxford Utd play a few times in the '80s. (Do you remember that improbable year they won the League Cup?? I think that must have been just before you came up.)
The last game I saw in England, I think, was 10 or 12 years ago: Huddersfield Town getting an absolute drubbing against Leyton Orient. I think it ended 7-1. I froze my nadgers off; and I still get nightmare flashbacks about the meat pie I ate. Yes, the delights of lower division football. Quite so.
No, I tell a lie. Richard P (the sometime Huddersfield fan) took me to see his local side in Eton a few years back. Not even sure what they're called - Eton Royals, is it??
I've been to quite a few games here. The Workers' Stadium is quite an impressive venue - and it never, ever gets anywhere near to selling out, so you can go and see the Beijing team (relatively inexpensively) any time you feel like it. The problem is knowing when the fixtures are!! Also, alas, it is currently undergoing refurbishment for the Olympics, and the alternate stadium they're using is frigging miles away - by perverse coincidence, they seem to be having their best season for ages.
I think I mentioned to you that I got tickets - FREE, through my 'guanxi' - to the Final of the Asian Cup a couple of years back: China vs Japan. Now that was a sell-out.... and quite a spectacle.... and a wretched result for the home side. We shot the ref's guide-dog afterwards....
Australia is the same. No amusing songs, no witty repartee.
I think there is a causal link with having to hire a professional singer to sing your national anthem at the beginning of each sporting event.
Actually feeling the need to sing your national anthem at every event, no matter how minor, seems to be to be deeply wrong and indicative of general low national self-esteem but then having to pay someone to sing it for you because no one knows the words. How sad is that.
But it gets worse. Christmas Eve we have the ghastly television spectacular: "Carols (sic) from the Domain". Various D list celebrities screach out overblown renditions of Santa Claus is Coming to Town and the like. Not a single Christmas Hymn let alone carol and no congregational singing whatsoever. Deeply wrong.
God, did I really say Portsmouth? It was Plymouth. And we went down to a stunning breakaway goal from a young Paul Mariner. He looked quite tasty at that level - rather less so when he got into an England shirt.
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