By historical standards, the US is in an absolutely killer bracket group of four. Every nation in the group has played in a final, and three out of four have won a world championship. In fact, only one final has ever been played without at least one member of the group: 2007 with Germany vs Brazil. That year the US and Norway (both in the group) played for third place. Every women's World Cup has seen at least two of these teams among the top four.
Because I didn't watch the men's World Cup, I'm not going to watch this one. Don't want to be sexist.
It looks like each of the 3 African teams are playing the European nation that originally colonized them.
Yeah, I think every game from here on out is no better than 50/50 for this team. We're hurt by injuries (Macario, Swanson), but this team just isn't at the quality to be likely champions.
I've been waking up for most of the 6 am matches and any time the USWNT is playing, and watching replays on the shitty Fox Sports app and Telemundo/Peacock otherwise. This has been an amazingly bonkers World Cup.
Meanwhile, I don't know if this is paywalled but it was a helpful explanation of what the hell has been happening with the USWNT: https://theathletic.com/4739186/2023/08/01/uswnt-portugal-world-cup-problems/
3
If England make it through to the finals they'll potentially have to play: Nigeria, Jamaica, Australia, and the US. I guess it's one way to deal with your colonial legacy.
Also the schedule was set assuming the US would top their group, so their side of the bracket is scheduled for US prime time, 9 PM EST. Instead the Netherlands topped the group, meaning the Dutch games are all at 3 am in the Netherlands and the US games will be at 4-5 in the morning EST.
I've found the schedule harder to follow because of the sometimes US prime time than if it had all been in a middle of the night block.
8: Yeah, it's a mess. Lots of fans also bought tickets to wrong games.
Have watched the USWNT matches and (i) the team is no longer dominant, (ii) it can still win the whole thing (as several other teams can), and (iii) waking up for the 3AM ET match with the Netherlands was hard, and trying to go back to sleep afterwards without obsessively checking social media about the match was even harder. I think the match with Sweden is on Sunday at a slightly more sane 5AM ET.
The two sides of the bracket are also pretty unbalanced. England and France on paper should progress pretty easily, not that it means anything in this tournament. Meanwhile the other side is a complete death battle. I'm hoping Japan or Sweden take it but it will be a struggle.
Also I'm hoping the former colonies crush their colonizers but realistically my guess is Morocco is a bloodbath, 5-0 to France, Nigeria keeps it close but loses 2-1 to England and honestly Jamaica vs. Colombia is a toss up. I could see either team win comfortably or end on penalty kicks.
12: What's funny is that before several upsets most people thought the other side of the bracket would be the tougher one!
7: well, that's the whole point of cricket, really.
15: That makes me think of Cat Valente's enthusiasm for Eurovision
Viewers can vote from home alongside a panel of judges, but the key element is that you can't vote for your own country, so Eurovision ends up being a glam rock snapshot of the current European political situation in any given year, as alliances come together. The whole point of it in the first place was to unify Europe again after WWII. It's a bright mirrorball of pop art, but it's got darkness at its heart.
I love Eurovision. I genuinely believe it's one of the best things humanity has ever accomplished, and no that's not a joke. When else has our species ever looked around and thought: we've just annihilated each other for a decade. The whole continent is a smoking ruin.You wanna...sing it out?
I had no idea it was that old. I assumed it was Reality TV era.
16: It's basically an international drama factory, since it's not only who votes for who but who didn't vote for who, or who ranked someone lower than they did last year, or whatever. It makes the countries themselves reality TV stars.
16: has anybody here read the book? Sounds fun!
16: has anybody here read the book? Sounds fun!
I read it; I didn't enjoy it as much as I did the linked blog post -- I think it was in the uncanny valley of resembling Douglas Adams, but clearly not being Hitchhiker's. But I really enjoyed parts of it, and would recommend it.
ABBA got their start winning Eurovision.
It was supposed to be 'ACAB', but they did the form wrong.
I had a vivid and explicit sex dream about Melania Trump last night. I'm sickened by myself.
If you have s first-lady thing, the one from Canada is now single and, so far as I know, not evil.
And I could use a rebound, honestly.
https://fifpro.org/en/who-we-are/what-we-do/foundations-of-work/how-fifpro-helped-make-the-2023-women-s-world-cup-more-professional-and-equitable-for-players/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/06/sport/brazil-womens-world-cup-iran-protestor-spt-intl/index.html
(Via FP.)
19-20: I liked the book enough to write about it twice, and I'm looking forward to Space Oddity the sequel. My second bit is mostly about the Valente vs Adams comparisons:
So Valente is going full-tilt at a windmill that has bested many a lance in the forty-odd (some very odd) years since Hitchhiker's was published. Why does it work in Space Opera? Three reasons, I think. First, over-the-top is one of her natural idioms. The long and funny and occasionally random list; the apparent non sequitur that comes to a sharp point; the piling on of absurdist detail and action -- all of these are apparent throughout the Fairyland books, for example. When Valente moves this approach to space, it doesn't mean that she's doing Douglas Adams. It means that she's doing Valente in space, which happens to read a lot like Douglas Adams.
More at link along with a reminder that even Douglas Adams was really Douglas Adams only about half the time.
Now that you've played the B-side first, the main review is here. I did nearly get wildness overload about a third of the way through the book, and I can sympathize with people who find Valente simply too much.
Major drama at this year's Eurovision because next year is the 50th anniversary of ABBA's epoch-making win, and, as you know Bob, Eurovision is held in the country that won the previous year's contest. The Finnish entry was clearly -- by miles and miles and miles -- the audience favorite, to the point that the live audience was spontaneously breaking out in chants of the Finnish song's chorus so loud that the presenters had trouble talking over them. Anyway, the juries kept piling on points for the Swedish entry, a very middling typical Eurovision song by a previous winner. When the popular vote started coming in, Finland was crushing it, racking up points from everywhere. Drama.
25. This sort of dream never happens to me. Famous or infamous people are never intimate characters in my dreams.
Have you tried watching Zardoz? That always gives different dreams.
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Got lunch for five in an Eastern European city and the bill came to 1488.00 in the local currency, yikes. No we did not order the Hitler prix fixe.
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That's why you should always make people pay for their own lunch.
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OMFG. I'm at the library to get some work done, and it turns out today is national Kirk Cameron Tells Conservatives to Host Events at the Local Library. It's called Brave Books Storytime here, and the local banner advertises, "Especially designed for those who love God and America. A time to gather, to pray, sing, and read BRAVE BOOKS." among other things.
Before they shut the door, I was subject to small talk about the crime rate, especially in California, and how nice the conservative town to the south of us is. It was such a self-parody. After they shut the door, I was able to hear the pledge of allegiance and singing of God Bless America. But not much else.
There is also a quiet gathering of people in LGBTQIA+ shirts and some families sitting outside of the BRAVE ROOM.
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33: Have you been approached to join the Night Watch yet?
There's probably not many Kirk Cameron fans that are also Terry Pratchett fans.
28.2. I briefly worked with a guy who had worked with Douglas Adams on a text based game. He said that Adams was pretty much Douglas Adams all the time, which made it difficult to get anything done because you were in constant hysterics.
I played a text-based version of Hitchhiker's Guide.
37: That's awesome!
38: I did, too. Though I never got tea and not-tea.
Yeah. It wasn't very well executed if you ask me.
I thought there were some clever things in the text game that were only tangentially mentioned in the book. How to defeat the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal for example. Other parts were pretty tedious like getting the babelfish in your ear- they required you to save and reload over and over to figure it out.
Yeah. That put me off the whole thing.
That was the only Infocom game I ever beat. All the jokes made enough sense to me that I pretty much walked straight through it.
I never got past the babelfish.
I like my text adventure games (or "interactive fiction" as they've been rebranded) to be small (preferably one room) otherwise you have to take too many notes.
It took me so long to get the fish in my ear.
48: Not-tea for the not-tillerman
50 to 1.
I wasn't expecting a win, but what a heartbreaking way to finish.
We tied and then lost in over time?
Shoot me down if I'm way off-base* here, but was putting Megan Rapinoe in a lifetime achievement thing as opposed to the best way to win the game? To my very ignorant eyes it seemed like she was a detriment for the whole time she was in there. Failing to handle a lead pass close to the Sweden goal, bending over in front of the Swedish goal to express her disappointment that a rebound didn't come her way WHILE THE PLAY WAS STILL GOING ON and then flubbing the penalty kick.
All credit to Sweden and their goalie though.
Also it seemed like the U.S. was offsides on 75% of their attacks. Maybe that's normal?
I guess I'll poke around for a post-mortem analysis since I spent 120 minutes watching this morning.
*my choice of metaphor emphasizes how little I think about soccer.
54: nobody scored in overtime either so it went to penalty kicks. The US made 4 of 7, Sweden made 5 of 7, the game winner batted away by the U.S. goalie, but just after it crossed 1mm over the line.
This is the worst thing Sweden has done to American since Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö decided that "Elmer Kafka" was a good name for a police officer in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Rethinking that Fjallraven backpack I've been eyeing.
I have to wax them first, so the poop doesn't stick.
I think people don't understand just how old Rapinoe is. She's 38. She's two years older than Michael Bradley and four years older than Jozy Altidore. She's six years older than Bradley was when he got his last cap. Hell, she's only two years younger than Clint Dempsey. It's truly insane that she was playing.
(Pausing to acknowledging that Luka Modric makes no damn sense, but Rapinoe isn't Modric and really no one is.)
How do people even move when they get to 38?
OT: The movie theater doesn't sell beer anymore.
I just watched Barbie and at the popcorn stand they asked if I wanted a gin and tonic with the large popcorn.
On Douglas Adams, the fact that I was 42 when I realized I was trans is a bit of happenstance I wish I could somehow beam back to my middle school self; but then of course I wouldn't have been 42. I forget which Adams volume had all the set pieces about temporal pollution.
We did Barbenheimer as a family yesterday. Both very good movies!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kind of sucks.
The Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, has written reviews from a strategic studies point of view of both films:
Oppenheimer https://samf.substack.com/p/oppenheimer-the-bomb-morality-and
Barbie https://samf.substack.com/p/my-kendom-for-a-horse
Is this the first time England actively hoped for penalties?
I guess the winning strategy of this WC is play 120 minutes of desultory soccer and hope to knock your better opponents out in PKs.
I am #teamSweden but clearly their plan was to pass the ball to the US defensive line, wait for it to come back to their goal box and have their goalie block the on target shot. It felt like they were playing 10 women to 14. At least they didn't move to plan "kick your opponents" a la the England team.
Anyways, from the state of play I don't see how anyone could be rooting for anyone other than Japan to win it.
fuck
https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-amhara-militia-conflict-be7e40d354fd79cd6765be3a97ae7788
The Sweden *game plan* was very clearly to allow the US to bring numbers forward, dispossess them, ideally in the midfield, and counterattack at pace. This would have been a pretty good plan against the US teams we saw in group play, but was thwarted on the day by the quality of the US passing and decision-making under pressure, as well as some unexpected stability out of the defensive midfielder position.
The US wins that game 3 times out of 4, but they were humbled by their imprecision in the box and some really great reaction saves, compounded by their coach's puzzling refusal to take advantage of the depth and fitness of the US bench. Vlatko isn't quite vying for Greg Ryan's title of most inept US WNT game coach in history, but his performance in that regard has been at best uninspiring.
Taking a step back, I think what we're seeing now is the worst of both worlds from the US college development system. The professional European leagues are clearly now developing better talent in aggregate, while the US college system has become broadly good enough to significantly improve the performance of regional national competition. How will the US WNT address player development over the next 5-10 years in response?
72: Also looks like a potentially major regional war is brewing in the western Sahel.
74: Coach Vlatko did remind me of Greg Ryan in bumbledom, but at least there weren't visible rifts within this iteration of the USWNT, in contrast to Ryan's 2007 edition.
75: In addition to the potentially major regional war brewing in the eastern Sahel.
Until they vote for Trump, I can't believe they are economically disadvantaged.
70. Is it just me or is penalties the worst way to decide a tied game ever invented in any major sport? I know England "won", but fuck that. Might as well toss a coin.
I think it's the best method possible and they should eliminate the game stuff from before the penalty kick phase.
It's a terrible method, but it's fast and dramatic.
The bigger problem is that extra time is so often boring because the players are all completely exhausted. I'm not sure what the solution is. I kinda want them to just bring on a bigger goal for extra time. It also would be fun to do some kind of more difficult free kick than a penalty, something where there's like a 20% of success rather than a 20% chance of failure, so there's more heroes and fewer goats.
They should just add more balls to the field. Nothing crazy, just like two more.
That's a good idea. Maybe add one ball, take away one player from each team for each two minutes until there's a score.
It seems extremely unlikely that they'll ever replace penalty kicks because even when they messed with endgame rules for the ill-conceived golden goal experiment, there didn't seem to be any question of extending overtime until someone actually scored a goal.
NMM to William Friedkin. One of the greatest.
New offsides rules for overtime: nobody can cross midfield, and goalies aren't allowed in the goal area.
88: Are you trapped on the half that you were standing on when time was called?
Bring out the giant dowels and make overtime into foosball.
But really, 84 is probably the best option.
No goalies, and if they still can't score than make the playing area 10 meters smaller every 3 minutes. But really after all that playing soccer, people are bored with watching soccer, so maybe the tiebreaker should be something different, like a dance off.
In overtime, you can only use your hands. Including for walking.
Think of all the OnlyHands fans you'd have.
3 balls: one basketball, one volleyball, one soccer ball. You have to dribble the basketball on the field, and you can't let the volleyball hit the grass. If you break those rules, it's a turnover. At the end of the second overtime, your best defender and your goalie have to tie their legs together like in a three-legged race.
Humorlessly, I always thought that goalless draws should go straight to penalties without extra time. If they haven't scored in 90 they aren't going to score, you just make a bad match longer.
Are drawn matches becoming more common? There seem to be a lot these days...
Yeah, it used to be that previously they were just sketched but with computer assistance nowadays a full draw is easier.
NHL OT prior to shootout removes 1/3 of the players from the ice, maybe do that? Isn't there some soccer league that's 7v7? NHL penalty shots also have a significantly lower success rate compared to soccer PKs, about 33%.
goalless draws should go straight to penalties without extra time
They could go back to fully replaying the game some days later. Though IIRC, if the second replay was also a draw, they still went to penalties. There's no escaping penalties, except perhaps by early death.
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The site of Charlemagne's massacre of supposedly 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden in AD 782. It is now marked by 4,500 standing stones called the Saxon Grove, built in 1935.|>
Welp. It looks like my prediction of France beating Morocco 5-0 was optimistic. We may be looking at a US-Thailand score of 13-0. I know it's exciting when the underdog progresses but unfortunately usually the next match seems to revert to the mean. I sort of wish Germany had made it out because they would likely not fold like this.
102: I think this is it. Calling them "standing stones" is accurate but a bit misleading. Looks nice, though.
I also don't enjoy penalties, especially given how frequently they occur. Change some parameter of the game to make OT goals more likely.
It was the Nazism that drew my attention.
Ok, looks like Morocco have stopped the bleeding at 3-0. 5-0 now looks more realistic, if they're lucky maybe they can hold it there or even bring it to a relatively respectable 3-1.
100: The fundamental problem with extra time in soccer is the substitution rules. In Hockey the players only play like a third of the game, so they're not uselessly dead tired in extra time. 7v7 involves even more running, and the players just don't have the legs for it after going a full 90.
What if they had a nap time first?
Now that we've moved past colonial grudge matches we're going to replay the 80 years war and the 100 years war.
I think the general problem with soccer is that the field is way, way to big, which makes scoring grotesquely uncommon. Cut the field in half, so that goals happen more than once or twice a game, and then the need to go to penalty kicks will be sufficiently rare that it mostly stops being a problem.
Shrinking the field would require too much work. Adding more balls would lower the area/ball ratio with less effort.
110 is just completely and utterly wrong. Bigger field means more space to work in, which helps the offense. Plus loads of low-scoring games basically spend the whole game in the better team's attacking third with few goals (because the worse team just puts everyone way back on defense). The hard thing is scoring goals while you're in possession in the attacking third, not moving the ball up the field.
Kiddie soccer is high scoring and played on small fields.
Fundamentally, what makes scoring hard is *goalkeepers*. Which is why I think a bigger goal is the most reasonable way to make things higher scoring.
Though I would say soccer is mostly fine as it is, it doesn't need to be higher scoring. Goals are supposed to be difficult, that's why so many of them are beautiful. Tiebreaks in knockouts are a bit of a problem, and there's lots of problems with the penalty system, but soccer is plenty popular as it is and doesn't need to become basketball. You can always go watch Basketball!
Maybe the little kids aren't good at goalkeeping?
It's the most popular sport in the world, no need to fuck with the size of the field or goals.
So, I'm hearing that you're open to increasing the number of balls.
Everyone seems to miss goals by shooting too high, so move the goal about five feet in the air. To be fair to the goalie you could give them a pogo stick. Oh wait that's quidditch too.
Please. Just dig a ditch for the goalie to stand in and quit being a weenie with these overly baroque schemes.
116 is funny, but also correct!
Like, the problem with penalties deciding games is that they're too easy, and therefore un-soccerlike. Move the spot for tiebreaking penalties back to where penalties have to actually be cool shots to score.
How many 5 year olds could the USNWT take in a match?
(There was recently footage going around of 4-5 professional players vs. 100 5 year olds playing soccer. But they were not members of the USNWT.)
My son was playing 1 on 1 at practice. He went to make a goal, collided into the other kid and they both fell over. In falling the other kid accidentally kicked the ball in for an own goal. My son then had a full on tantrum because he wanted to be the one to kick it in. The conclusion is that 4 and 5 year olds playing soccer are pretty funny.
105: Ah, yes, well,
117: Field size, outside of international matches in the largest stadiums, isn't particularly constrained. The laws of the game allow a factor of two variation in goal line length.
If an association football field seems big, watch a Gaelic football match sometime; Croke Park is approximately the size of Liechtenstein.
95 isn't that quidditch?
I hope not. But I'm not likely to learn what that is.
126: It's Australian rules Calvinball. I mean, obvsly.
So wait -- are the "Long Time Lurker" comments all by the same person? I think we know what that means: a new pseud will be forcibly assigned, and it will be "How The Hell Does A Joke About Ry Cooder Have This Kind Of Longevity?" or HTHDAJARCHTKOL for short.
Huh, now I know where that joke comes from!
See, see, that's what's wrong with pseuds like that -- people don't realize you're a continuous person! I've given up bullying people about it, but I'm still right. (And I have specifically always admired you, lurid, for coming up with an excellently identifiable pseud while still maintaining a connection to your originally chosen lurkey identity.)
No one else's guitar teacher told them to watch Crossroads in middle school? Figures.
Cooder Wooder Shooder is still available
No no no, the one with the Karate Kid and Steve Vai.
It's my birthday and my age can be expressed as: (ab)( ba); or: aab + ab; or: a((ab)a), where a and b are consecutive primes.
This may be the most arithmetically interesting age I've ever been, but I'm not convinced it was worth waiting for.
Happy birthday. I'm not doing math.
137: Maybe I'm doing the math wrong, but I have your age at 7i.
Happy Birthday!
I suppose a more intelligent person would have solved the equations but I just tried for 2 and 3, found it worked, and left it at that.
Looking at it, that's the only possible answer, because if (ab)( ba) = a((ab)a)
then you can divide each side by ba and you're left with
ab = aa+1 and obviously 2 and 3 are the only primes that are 1 apart.
If we relax the prime constraint then Chris could also be 4 or 768.
He's actually 640,000, but he has a punishing moisturising regime.
Sorry, I got 142 wrong. He could be 2 or 5184.
Happy birthday Chris! Waving to you from exactly twenty years behind.
Many happy returns, Chris. Maybe you already know about this, but I've found the connections between random matrix theory and the Riemann zeta function, recently discovered, to be a gift that keeps giving.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1906804116
Roland Speicher's lectures available on youtube are not 100% but are pretty good.
Terence Tao has some also, but those require so much background catchup for me that I've stopped.