Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Soccer used to be about the only sport I didn’t hear about incessantly. But now that the CBC has the broadcast rights here, they won’t shut the fuck up about it. Even on other channels.
I was watching CBC News Network on Thursday and they had a reporter outside of a polling station for the Ontario provincial election. This isn’t an exact quote, but it was something like “We’ve seen quite a few people coming in and out of this polling station. Perhaps they’re wanting to get their voting done early so they can be ready for World Cup soccer later today.”
What’s this World Cup you speak of? I don’t consume commercial media.
This is one of the more tedious parts of the internet
Not posts about a major event (Eurovision/Super Bowl/ Olympics). But posts people who don’t care yet simultaneously manage to ACTUALLY care enough to make a show of declaring how much they don’t care.
It’s like folks that don’t own a TV. As far as I can tell a major selling point of going TV-less is telling everyone within earshot that you don’t have a TV.
Aw, you guys are so preciously weird and unique. You mighty snowflakes, you.
“How long does a football match last?”
“A billion hours apparently.”
Ahem. That’s an American football match. A match of what the rest of the world calls “football” is usually over in under two hours.
You try to explain every 2 years that no, you don’t watch soccer even during the European/World Cup, to every freaking person.
If posting a video like this even prevents one person to explain to me that I should really watch the game because it’s so much fun, I will do it.
Besides any reason to post an IT crowd clip is a good reason.
I prefer this commentary:
Simpsons Explain Soccer For Those Who Love It and…: http://youtu.be/asTgXMFoZ-s
I thought Mitchell & Webb got it pretty well too . . . all sports really:
An appreciation for soccer/football, like anything, is enhanced by knowledge and personal experience.
It’s so popular because so many people around the globe play. If you haven’t, then it would be very hard indeed to appreciate the talent and skills and many subtleties that great players bring to the pitch. These happen frequently, so to people like myself there is much to enjoy simply watching these fantastic players do something that for most people on the planet, myself included, is hard to fathom. Or reproduce.
The World Cup adds a heavy dose of drama to that. Personally, I think the playing quality is better in the UEFA championship games, but the historic nature of the World Cup makes it special.
However, there is no doubt that to those who have no interest, the intense and ubiquitous media attention can be grating. I feel the same exact way about the Super Bowl….but to me it’s even more annoying since the winners are referred to as “World Champions” even though the game is entirely a North American, primarily US, sport.
Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.
Police brutality and widespread corruption is my take on the subject. Fuck it.
As someone who doesn’t pay attention to sports but really likes live sporting events (I get drunk and then get REALLY into it lol), I thought this was hysterical (and I saw the original episode which was hysterical as a whole).
I kind of agree. Especially since they seek out articles which they could have ignored easily.
Not quite. We kinda of came to not having TV reception by accident. Hardware broke down and we didn’t get around to fix it for some months. We then kinda fixed it because a relative insisted on helping, but a couple of months later it broke again.
Since we didn’t actually miss it and I started to despise a lit of the mainstream programmes, we didn’t bother to fix it again.
Only them we noticed how many everyday conversations are about TV shows and silly human interest stories. Which we can’t partake in and have to remind people that we don’t have TV, because they constantly try to tell us about their TV consumption.
It’s a little but like the misconception that gays flautbthei sexuality, just because they do the same thing heterosexual couples do in public like holding hands, kissing, using the partners gender pronoun, etc.
You would surprise how many people insist that we harm our son by nor giving him access to daily TV programming.
Q: How can you tell if a person doesn’t own a TV?
A: Oh they will tell you.
(Works with vegans too)
I agree. It’s a bit like the nimrods who respond with TL;DR after any post longer than, say, a few hundred words.
It’s not enough for them to just not read a post: they have to inform the writer that they didn’t read the post. Internet pissyness, gotta love it.
Extra points if you receive criticism from someone because your post wasn’t about the subject of the post, but a criticism of the reasoning behind why the post was posted.
Yes, but what about Christmas?
The World Cup lasts a month, and happens once every four years. Christmas happens every year, and takes up about a half of it.
I wrote this about it during a previous World Cup. I stand by it today.
Why the World Cup is better than Christmas
Oh, let me count the ways.
No-one suddenly thinks they can demand things of you because the World Cup is on. No one thinks you have to buy them things, or attend their tedious performances, or in fact leave your house at any time. There are no World Cup cards, even though there is actually far more to celebrate.
The World Cup is a celebration of summer, whereas Christmas is a commiseration for winter.
No one says we have lost the true meaning of the World Cup. No one pretends we only have the World Cup for the sake of the children. Children are not annoying for months before the World Cup.
The World Cup goes on for much longer than the build up. You are never sick of the whole subject of the World Cup weeks before it actually happens.
The World Cup has no cranberry sauce in it.
The World Cup is not a huge, tedious, life-dominating pain in the arse. Some people, believe it or not, claim that it is, but those are usually the same people that like Christmas, precisely because it gives them an excuse to demand things of you. Festivals which revolve around sybaritic pleasure and guilt-free self-indulgence are incomprehensible to them, which is odd, because that’s what festivals were originally for.
You would surprise how many people insist that we harm our son by nor giving him access to daily TV programming.
I have TV but no cable. And the TV we do watch is via physical media and internet based - in sum we are very a la carte about it. Frankly, I think this is how it should be - TV on our terms, no commercials, no passive watching of shows you don’t want to watch because there is nothing on and no shows marketed to kids to sell a brand. But yes we get the same thing about our kid from a variety of people. It is interesting how upset people get about that.
A sociologist we are acquainted with argues that we do a disservice to our kid because we are cutting him off from the culture of his age cohort. I guess the argument goes that since I’m a 40ish man from North America I’ll be able to relate to other 40ish North Americans because of our share cultural consumptions.
I don’t buy it personally as I think cultural productions and our relationship to them are more fluid then that.
I used to babysit a couple of kids, starting when they were seven and nine, whose parents didn’t own a television set. The kids were smart, funny, and very creative troublemakers. (I was the last in a string of babysitters. Most of my predecessors didn’t last one night. Admittedly I was the only one who brought a portable TV, but we only watched Sesame Street and The Twilight Zone, and spent the rest of our time together playing games or reading.)
I don’t know if a lack of television made them the way they were, but it certainly didn’t harm them.
I appreciate that it is annoying, but essentially, it is people trying to talk to you about something they are interested in. Something that Boingers, having very diverse interests are normally very much on the “pro” side of.
If someone felt the need to hop on the internet to proclaim “Oh god, it is Game of Thrones season. I hate that shit, please don’t try to talk to me about it”, I’m sure plenty around here would think that tedious.
