Why I’m Pulling for the USA in the World Cup

by
John McFetridge

It used to be when the Stanley Cup playoffs rolled around and teams started to get eliminated, we Candians would cheer for any Canadian team left – even a rival would be better than an American team (even one full of Canadians) winning the Cup.
So it’s tough for me to pull for the Americans, but I have my reasons (and I’m even going to try and make a vague connection to crime fiction and publishing, so that might be worth reading on to see).

My friend Adrian McKinty wrote a blog post recently where he pointed out that the USA can never be underdogs. As he said, “The most economically powerful country in the world is a lot of things but it ain’t never gonna be no underdog.”

He’s right, of course. The USA is only an underdog in soccer because they haven’t gotten around to it yet. When they do there’s no reason a soccer game between the USA and Spain won’t look like a basketball game between the USA and Spain.

Sometimes I point out to people that when you lose a soccer game to Canada you’ve lost to eleven guys who couldn’t make the hockey team. Well, if you lose a soccer game to the USA you’ve lost to eleven guys who couldn’t make the football team, the basketball team, the baseball team, couldn’t run track fast enough and probably got cut from the lacrosse team and the bowling team.

When the LA Galaxy is in town to play Toronto FC we make fun of Landon Donovan a lot – sure, he and Edson Buddle are still scoring goals for LA even without Beckham - but take a look at him, or any American soccer player, and try and picture them playing in the NFL or the NBA.

Or, imagine how much of the soccer net LeBron James could cover if he’d taken up that sport at five years old instead of basketball. I’ve been watching past World Cup highlights of goalies (er, sorry, “keepers”) make some diving saves and I think there are a few dozen wide receivers and defensive backs in the NFL who could be just as good or better (in fact, the USA have produced some top keepers, but so far that’s really only been scratching the surface).

A lot of kids play soccer in the USA, but not the way they play basketball. Kids only play soccer in the USA if they get driven to the game in a minivan. At home they have basketball nets in their driveways. They play basketball on every piece of flat ground they can find. Soccer hasn’t become a part of the culture in the US. Yet.

But if the USA goes deep into the World Cup that’ll move it a step closer.

Now you’re probably thinking, why is that a good thing?

And here’s where I make my connection to crime fiction.

Because it integrates the world a little more.

What I really mean is it integrates America into the rest of the world a little more, makes America more 'just another country' and less isolated. Right now I’d be surprised to hear anyone who reads a lot of crime fiction say, “I only read American books,” or “I only read British books,” or Swedish or whatever. No, crime fiction is international and better because of that. Reading books from other cultures helps people understand one another a little better, see things from a different perspective and maybe even think of things in a different way.

There’s a good book called (in America) How Soccer Explains the World . Of course, an American wrote a version called (in America) How Football Explains America . They both make some good points, but America isn’t so different from the rest of the world anymore (that’s something we can see from up here in Canada). Or maybe America isn’t any more different than Germany, Nigeria, New Zealand and Chile – and the rest of the World Cup teams are from each other.

So yes, as McKinty says, America is a lot of things, but it ain’t never gonna be no underdog. And that’s probably true of soccer soon enough.

And I think the world will be a little bit better when it’s fully integrated.

In the meantime, stuff like this is still really funny:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nations-soccer-fan-becoming-insufferable,17553/

Hold On

By Jay Stringer

Just something i've been kicking around for awhile. A flash piece about the end of the world. It's not a full flash challenge, but if you want a stab then link to your story in the comments.

***

When the world ended it took us several days to notice.

Somehow that news seemed to pass us by. Our lives continued, we commuted to work as normal. Some people talked about a crisis, about international news, but most of us ignored it.

We were so used to the imagery and the fear. Flames and bombs on our television screens. Scrolling news on our computer screens. You begin to ignore it, to live with, to accept it. Sitting in the bar, or riding the subway home, you tune out to the images and the sounds. Some far off place is in trouble again, why should we care? As the days passed, fewer and fewer people were commuting, but unless it affected me I wasn’t going to stop listening to my ipod.

The horror finally set in when the screens went blank on day four. Our news, our voice. Our knowledge, our comfort. We woke up one day to find it had been taken away without warning.

No television.

No internet.

No phones.

There were no battles or dust clouds, no speeches and no sirens. Just silence.

A few hours after that we lost the street lights. All of them. We’d gone to bed in our own world and woken up in a whole new one, a world of darkness. People ran out into the streets and hallways, forced to talk to strangers for the first time in decades. We all asked the same questions;

“Are we under attack?”

“Has the economy collapsed?”

“Are we at war?”

A city full of people asking questions, and we’ve still not heard any answers. We got scared in a hurry and soon forgot how to be anything else.

On the fourth day I tried to open a tin of beans. The electric opener wouldn’t work anymore, and all I had was a pen knife. It had an attachment on it that I knew, somehow, was meant to be a tin opener, but I didn’t know how to use it. I had to hit the tin with a lump hammer until it burst open.

And it started getting really cold at night. More than usual, though I don’t know if it was because the world had ended or just because the electricity was off. An apartment block down the street burned down, because the family in 14C started a fire in their living room to keep warm. There was no fire service to call, and we couldn’t spare the water. People just watched it burn.

A week later the noises started. Shrieks and howls after sunset. They were distant at first, but they got closer of the next few nights until they were coming from down in our streets. My neighbour said he saw some of them. Howlers he called them, and said they were us, “Just people like us, but crazy lookin’. Like animals. Saw one carrying a lump of fresh meat. Hope it was a cow.” He said maybe they were just people who'd listened to the silence for too long.

People got too scared to go out at night. We stayed in our apartments and listened to the Howlers.During the day we met out in the streets, talked about simple things like heating and plumbing, medicine. Simple things, yeah, right. Not so simple now that we didn't have wikipedia. If the world ever comes back, if we live through this, I'm going to make changes. All that stuff that's on wikipedia? I'm going to write it down in books. More, some of us are going to learn it, know it, just incase.

My boyfriend went out to get some food the day after we ran out. He hasn’t returned. That was three days ago.

I think I heard some of the howlers a moment ago, but it’s still daylight. That can’t be, can it?

I’m scared. I’ve forgotten how to be anything else.

Seasonal Reading List

By Steve Weddle

OK. Have you gotten your summer reading list together? Oh, for joy. Books to cram into totes and suitcases and head for the beach or the lake house. How delightful.

Smells like a crock of crap to me. And I'm from the country, so I know what a crock of crap smells like.

As a faithful consumer, I'm supposed to pick up my "Summer Reading" special in my local paper or magazine. Or listen to a list on the radio. Then run down to the discount superstore, pick up 128 oz jug of cheese doodles and a couple of "30% OFF LIST" books and read some light thrillers about some dude tracking down dirty nukes and spilling his seed. Edge-of-your-lawn chair stuff. Read a few pages, then get up to the check the ribs on the grill, then a few more pages. Then pick it up tomorrow while the kids are covering themselves in suntan lotion. Then watch the sun go down and pick up another one the next day about a too-smart woman who comes to a small town and uncovers a dirty little secret -- and a little something about herself, too. Light reading. The inconsequential stuff. Book 18 in a series of books when you can't remember what happened in 7, 9, or 15. Or the one that is basically just some notes for someone to use in making the TV movie next year.

While some of these summer reading lists might accidentally have on them a book that I want to read, most of them strike me as a cataloging of the disposable.

In the winter, I'm supposed to read bigger books. I think this comes from the days when paper was cheaper than coal and folks bought a bunch of books by this dude called Marcel Proust. Read a little, burn the rest. Or maybe read non-fiction in the winter. A nice popular nonfiction book, one about the history of cumin and how the story of the world can be told through that spice. (I think it's a spice. They mentioned it in that TV show with Helen Hunt and that guy who used to be really funny.)

But big, long, brain-taxing books in the winter. And quick but thick page-turners in the summer. Why is that? Why is it that our reading habits are dictated by the seaons? Am I not supposed to read anything in the autumn? Catch up on the free stuff over at Gutenberg?

If summer is the time we're supposed to head outdoors and enjoy our vacation with our family, why am I supposed to read books that are "unputdownable"?

Why do we buy certain books in certain seasons? Will they spoil like fruit? Like a crock of crap?

Do you read different types of books in the summer? The winter?