The thieves of glory

One of my passions is soccer (no, really..?) and particularly the local soccer teams, the Timbers on the men's side and the Thorns on the women's.

Laid up as I am I spend a fair bit of time watching both teams - and the Timbers are, after a pretty awful start, on a bit of a tear so Howay you Timbers! - as well as thinking and writing about them over at my other gig, Riveting!

So it was with sickened horror I read this past week that the Thorns' coach during the 2014 and 2015 seasons was a loathsome rapey scumbag who was savaging his own players while we all cheered and sang for him and them and then got away clean after being fired for fucking up the 2015 season on the pitch.

It's a sad, tired, familiar old story, but carries a heavy blow because it comes so close to home.

Anyway, I'm still immersed in this mess as I go through the boring daily round of my rehabilitation, and though I don't want to go any deeper into it here (you can read my full thoughts on the mess over here), I just thought I'd mention it briefly. 

I'm sick, sad, and angry at everyone - in my club, in the league - who had a role in this desecration of the young women of my beloved Thorns and, through them, many of my own happy and cherished memories.

I have SO fucking had it with these people

 So there's not a lot I can do with this damn knee. I can't drive, so I'm locked within the distance I can walk. And I can't walk very far, so I'm pretty much under house arrest. And I can't sit up for long without the damn thing swelling up and bitching at me.

So I spend a lot of time sprawled out on the couch or the bed; reading, cruising the 'Net, dozing or sleeping. It's about as fucking mind-bendingly boring as you'd think, so when there is something to do, I'm all about it.

Yesterday (Saturday) evening the Portland Thorns soccer team was scheduled to play the Washington club here at 7:30. I'm still too banjaxed to go in person (and, frankly, even with the club requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test, not all that excited about mobbing up with people...) but I was really looking forward to enjoying a couple of hours of soccer and cheering for my club over the screen in my lap...until I went to the club site and was met with this:

It turns out the the visitors had a teensy-weensy little pathogen problem:

"Spirit have 4 positive COVID cases; multiple sources also tell me that the club has “multiple” unvaccinated players. One source said # as high as 8."

So. Here's the thing.

NWSL teams roster between 22 and 24 players. So assuming the high end number is correct, a third of the roster is unprotected against the Plague at a time when vaccination doses are aging out for a lack of willing arms to receive them.

Think about that.

A business that is a part of a public accommodation industry - an entertainment or hospitality business that is centered around hosting the public - has not required it's employees to meet the most fundamental of public health measures; preventing or slowing the spread of disease when preventive measures are easily available and free. And the employees have refused to voluntarily meet that simple and logical standard.

As a result the other party, the business that has been responsible (the Thorns roster and staff are fully vaccinated) has lost a massive chunk of revenue and has been put at a competitive disadvantage by having to reschedule this game. And thousands of people like me are out their ticket costs.

Which is better, mind you, than having these disease-riddled harridans show up and breathe the Plague all over everyone.

But.

Here's the thing.

I'm sure that these players had all the usual bullshit excuses. Muh freedums! Don't know what's in it! God will protect me! Personal choice!

To which I simply reply:

You're running a public business that relies on public health measures. You're a restaurant, and an inspection finds that a third of your kitchen staff refuses to wash their hands after taking a dump?

You get shut down. Period. No explanations needed, no excuses accepted.

No health inspector would buy your bullshit that God protects you from getting shit in the food. Or that it's your choice. Or "freedom!" means you get to decide whether to follow simple basic public health regulations.

Kitchen closed. Boom.

And yet...because a bunch of lunatic QANuts and Three Percenters and Republicans and antivaxxers have decided to make "I will wash my hands after taking a shit" into a political issue, the rest of us are supposed to humor these fucking ninnies and accept losing our time and money and health and, possibly, our lives.

I lived with a lurking sort of low-grade fear, like the point man in an ambush terrain, for over a year until I could get vaccinated. It's hard to explain just how liberating that two-weeks-past-the-second-Pfizer moment felt. Finally! I had my MRAP. I had my mine plow! I could look forward to a normal life again. Yay, medicine!

Boy howdy, was I fucking wrong.

I'm SO fucking done with these people.

There's lots of other reasons to be done with them, too. But this - this idiotic demand that the rest of us go live in the QAnon Bronze Age with them when there's an actual modern world just over there - this just sends me into a flame of utter rage. Like the Emperor Caligula I can only wish that they all had one neck so I could choke the life out of them and move on with all the other, less easily solvable, problems we should be dealing with.

But no. And here we are.

Whoa-oh-oh, it's magic!

  

In my other avatar (soccer punditry on the topic of Portland's women's soccer team, the Thorns, and you can read that stuff here if you have a mind to; it's under "Thorns FC:", it's good stuff, and there's not even a subscription fee, so, go, read!) I've been constantly running into this person who is violently opposed to the way the U.S. women's soccer is set up.

Because, you see, it screws over the players; the ur-scream about this comes together in a piece entitled Drafted and Shafted: Life in the NWSL in the online magazine Twentytwo.

And here's the thing about that; yes. I totally agree. 

The way American women's soccer is set up, the rules under which it operates, is designed to keep player salaries low, in much the same way that the rest of the U.S.'s economic life is designed to keep a thumb on the pay scale of everyone outside the C-suite.

But in the National Women's Soccer League the thumb is brutally visible because there's a side-by-side comparison that isn't as brutal to the players, and that's the big European women's leagues; the English FAWSL, the French D1F...in fact, most of the European leagues work very differently from the one here.

And I keep pounding on her about that. The primary reason that the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different is because the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different. 

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

The European leagues came together through a long period of accretion, and the primary factors that dictates their forms, and drives their economics, are 1) the ubiquitous nature of soccer in Europe, and 2) the promotion-relegation system.

Europe is soccerland.

Across the continent no sport is as popular, no sport is as rich, as soccer. That's where the money is. That's where the best athletes go. That's where the fans are.

There's a huge pot of cash sloshing around there...and...there's about a gajillion teams sucking it in.

Because the other part is that there's no way for some Richie Rich to "create" a team out of nothing. There's no empty place waiting for soccer; every little town and city has its own team playing in whatever league it plays in, from the megalopolis - usually the capitals - where there may be half a dozen huge clubs, to the tiny little villages where the baker is the goalie and the local gigalo is the star striker. 

There's no way for a team to come into a soccer league by "expansion" the way, say, American hockey or baseball or football leagues "expand".

So what you do, if you're a Russian criminal oligarch or a grubby Tuscan plutocrat or an Emirati oil sheik looking for secondhand sporting glory, is you buy into an existing team and turn on the firehose of money to buy good players and fancy facilities and take advantage of "promotion"; the system where if you finish on top of your little podunk-y league you move up to the next bigger one.

And up, and up, until finally you're in whatever your country calls your top flight, "Premier League" or whatever.

And then you keep splashing out the cash to win trophies (and money from broadcast fees and endorsements and everything that goes with being a Big Side) and get spots in "Europe"; the UEFA Champions League that brings you even more money.

One problem with this - for the sheiks and oligarchs - is that there's a downside - "relegation".

Your team has a shitty year? Down you go! Back to the second division, where your TV money is less and your endorsements are crappy and you're out of "Europe". If you're really unlucky you might have to sell your good players to cover expenses. You might go out of business! It's rare, but it's happened.

And the other downside is that because there's no league-wide rules on pay for any of these leagues...you're in an open bidding war with the other owners for those good players. You have to pay them the heavens and the Earth. The last figures I read suggested that a typical US soccer team in Major League Soccer passes on something like 40-50% of the revenues in the form of salaries, while a typical top flight English club (a Premier League team) has to pay out something like 70-80% to the players.

The recent attempt by the big European clubs to form a "Super League" was largely about changing all that.

The idea was to create a structure more like American sports. No promotion or relegation, no risk of losing out on the big paydays. What do you bet that the next step for the SuperLeague would have been a pay cap?

 

Right now, the way they're set up, the European leagues are good for the players, not-bad for the owners and the league, and not all that great for the fans.

Outside of their passion for their clubs, a lot of French and British and Italian fans will tell you about the way those clubs, desperate for money, strip-mine their wallets. Punitive ticket prices. Broadcast rights - many of the biggest E.U. clubs have set up their own streaming channels that you have to pay for if you want to see the away matches. You're gouged on matchdays and away days both.

We do things differently here in the U.S.

Here things are set up for the owners (well...sorta except in Major League Baseball, where the owners were too stupid to realize that the Reserve Clause was a fiction until the Messersmith Case tore down the free agency wall and set the players loose upon them. But the collusion the baseball owners replied to Messersmith with shows that they haven't given up trying to regain the whip hand over those damned players, and though MLB doesn't have a hard cap it has a "luxury tax" that tries to do the same thing).

Every other U.S. league has a hard cap. Every league restricts free agency in some form. Every league has a "draft" system by which players are brought in not through negotiations between the player and all the clubs in the league but through a system that funnels players at the drafting clubs. Every league is a closed system into which new clubs can come only through "expansion" - meaning cash on the nail.

That puts the players behind the owners in line for the lolly, which sucks for the players.

It also puts the fans in a weird position; dependent on the largesse of the owners for a way to be there to support the professional team of their choice. Their ticket prices don't depend as much on the paydays of the players as the profits of the club. And there's the problem of access; unless your city has a rich person who wants your sport in that city...you don't have it. Most U.S. leagues prevent fan ownership of professional sports clubs in that league.

IT also kind of sucks for the fans because the relatively low pay in the U.S. soccer leagues is a big incentive for the best soccer players - who have the option that the baseball and football and basketball players don't, of going outside the U.S. for a bigger paycheck - to leave the U.S. teams and fans behind for greener playing fields.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because in my conversations with this person they kept crying out with anger at the way the U.S. women players were being screwed and demanded that change to the way the European leagues work.

And I kept repeating that to change the way the players got paid you'd have to change the way the U.S. leagues work to the European model, and that was exactly what the people who controlled the league didn't want and wouldn't allow, so that this person might as well demand that we all get rich, be cute, and get a pony. 

Nice idea, not gonna happen.

And that as a fan this person might also want to be careful what they wished for, because if that change that isn't gonna happen DID happen the competition within U.S. women's soccer league would also very likely change to what the way the competition in the European leagues work, or, more accurately doesn't work; a tiny handful of top clubs bankrolled by criminal oligarchs and plutocrats and oil sheiks would win all the time, and a collection of impoverished tomato cans would constantly lose to the rich fatcats.

In the top French women's league the fatcat is Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, owned by some plutocrat named Aulas. This outfit has won their league fourteen years - fourteen fucking years - in a row (their rivals, Paris Saint-Germain, finally kicked them off the top step this past season to stop them going to fifteen) and that's not uncommon.

So alongside the chance that such a change would be financially good for the players but not the fans, the chance that such a change would be also not be good for the fans of most of the clubs who want their clubs to actually win something worth a shit is pretty high.

We bang on about this every time the subject comes up, every time we do I say all these things, and every time it makes absolutely no impression on this person. 

They insist that the magical solution is just to change things! Change things! Then everything - for owners, players, fans - will be better! Change is better! Just change things in the U.S. women's league to be more like Europe that in some magical way can totally just happen regardless of the social and political and economic differences and the utterly incompatible priors and all.

Not only can't I convince them that the change they're demanding aren't just improbable but impossible...but that if they could happen they might not be good for them. Good for the players, good for the league, good for the owners...but not for them.

They are completely certain that the something they want is both just a matter of wanting to do it bad enough and when it happens it will make the magic and everything will be better for everyone.

And the reason I went through all this?

Is because I'm seeing more and more of this sort of magical thinking on all kinds of subjects other than soccer.

Climate change?

Even if you don't slam head-on into the Great Wall of Republican Stupid, there's a crap-ton of people, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, that somehow think that we can have the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum without changing our Netflix viewing habits.

The idea seems to be that somehow we'll all magically be juuuuuust fine when the oceans rise three feet. The idea that our Pacific Northwest forests might burn? Yeah, well...ummm...

A third of our citizenry refuses to be vaccinated against a global pandemic? Sure! That'll be fine!

Allowing private equity execs the freedom to further advance the Second Gilded Age? Sure! What could go wrong?

Auditing votes all over hell? Sure! That'll Stop The Steal, which is totally a thing, and just needs the right magic and you people will see!

Look.

I get it. I mean, religions are concrete proof that humans ever since Olduvai indulge in vast amounts of magical thinking. It's not that I don't understand that people still cling to seeing the world around them as what they want it to be.

But, silly me, I thought that the whole point of the Enlightenment and the primacy of the hard sciences was an indication that the practical alternative to all this magical thinking was actual observation-analysis-deduction-conclusion. That the point of universal education was to make the vast majority of us comfortable with the idea that we don't have to believe in "belief"; that we can examine physical conditions and evidence draw the most-logical inferences from them.

But apparently not.

The problem here is that in the 14th Century us humans had a lot less raw physical power. We could change things; cut down trees, dig canals, build cities...but only to a fairly limited extent.

Now?

Christ, we can destroy ourselves and our planet if we choose to with the push of some buttons.

We're insanely far above and beyond the global Apex Predator. We're an unstoppable force. We're the gajillion-pound gorilla. We're on track to change everything from our climate to our ecology, and we seem unable to get past the way we thought 10,000 years ago when thunder was a message from the gods, in everything from soccer to social order.

That's...probably not good.

Sniper!

Emily Sonnett of the U.S. women's national soccer team demonstrates a perfect backflip-tuck-and-roll in the opening minutes of the second half of the Olympic qualifying tournament match against Canada.

Sonnett played centerback here in Portland for many seasons, and was a player who consistently frustrated me because she would play 89 minutes of great, technical defending and then would undergo some sort of brainfart or mental holiday and make a ridiculously massive derp. She did this as a rookie - which is fine, you're a rook - but kept doing it all the way up until she was traded in the offseason last autumn.

Obviously I hope the Thorns pick up a solid CB who won't take those little mental rest breaks to replace her. I won't miss the tooth-grinding frustration of those derps.

What I will miss is...well, Sonnett.

In the oh-so-serious world of professional sport she's a genuine goof, a real character; funny, playful, silly, endearing...I have NO idea what she's like as a person (other than possibly one of those people who you adore while driving you nuts with their antics) but as a player-character she's just fun.

And she had the best, the very best, faces.

You never have to guess what Sonnett is thinking. Whatever it is, it light up her face like a good deed in a weary world.

Dammit, Sonny...now you've made me go all sentimental over you. Good luck in Orlando.

Except when you play Portland, of course.

Sorry. But there's love, and there's soccer; it's not life and death. It's way more important than that.

In memory of..?

...the Seattle dead of World War 2, apparently.

This past Saturday I finally did something I've wanted to do for a long time.

No! I didn't convince my wife to make love in a hammock. C'mon! That's nuts; you could hurt your back that way!

Nope. I rode the Portland Thorns fan bus up to Seattle for the women's professional soccer match between the Thorns and the home Seattle Reign.

The bus ride was...well, about what you'd expect from a bus ride between Portland and Seattle (though the delays in Tacoma were surprisingly few, and shorter than I would have expected...)...though the pickup soccer at the Scatter Creek rest stop was fun. First time I'd kicked a ball around since my new hip, and I was pleased with my agility.

But it was just a long, dull bus ride enlivened by the fact that we had a pony keg of Lompoc Brewing's fine Kick Axe ale broached in the left rear seat. I don't usually start drinking at nine a.m., but needs must. Mmmm. It is a damn fine breakfast drink.

We made excellent time - overcalculated those delays in Tacoma, no doubt - and arrived outside the Home of the Reign more than hour before gate time, so several of us wandered away to find another place to kickabout. Some admired the bizarre organic metal shell of the EMP music building, museum, whatever; it looks like an aluminum tumor. That and the ginormous steel stalks next to the parking lot. As art they're kind of shit. As toys, on the other hand, they're a lot of fun. It's pretty amazing how far you can get them to flex...

Finally we all regrouped outside the gate of Memorial Stadium, where upon entry we discovered that one of the local car dealers was sponsoring a scarf giveaway.

It's a sad comment on what a scarf whore I am that I instinctively scooped up one of these things before realizing that it was a Seattle scarf. Well, okay, a Seattle/Subaru scarf, but...still. A Portland fan wearing a Seattle scarf'd be like pinning a Nazi swastika on a yarmulke. Just. Wrong.

So I scarfed the first vendor I saw and trooped in to find our seats.

The Seattle organization had given us pretty good seats; down front, near midfield - way better than the far top corner we in Portland pen our visitors into on matchdays, sadly. The odd part was that there was no real attempt to segregate us from the Seattle fans. Most of the Portland supporters did stand together in a block, but the outside edges were pretty ragged, and there was a sort of admixture at the fringes where individuals and small groups of Portland fans mingled with supporters of the local club.

One oddity was an apparent drinking restriction to a "beer garden" at the outer wall; I didn't see any beer served anywhere else in the joint and, while I didn't test the boundaries I didn't see anyone with a brew outside the designated grownup space. Maybe this had something to do with the owner, Seattle Public Schools. Certainly the sign on the South Stand pier suggested that Adults and Students were not to mingle,let alone share the Temptations of Demon Drink

Perhaps the other reason was concern for the health of anyone who had drunk enough beer to need internal relief, because the Memorial Stadium bogs were truly appalling. I've used some pretty primitive facilities - I was a GI and posted overseas, remember - but this was perhaps the most noisome toilet I've ever seen in a major city. I'd be shocked if these things had been renovated since the old pile was built back in 1947.

The day was cool and cloudy, the crowd large and enthusiastic, and the match a solid grudge fight between two teams that seem to genuinely like to whip one another. Unfortunately for a Portland fan, we were on the wrong end of the whipping that day.

Thorns FC lost one of our best defensive midfielders to injury early in the first half, making it difficult to defend against Seattle's excellent midfield or fight forward through it. Just before the half hour the Reign scored a goal on some terrific buildup play. Much as we chanted and sang we didn't help; our team was frustrated and penned up in its own end most of the half.

Halftime we were down 1-nil, and by midway through the second half Seattle scored again, this time an an awful error by one of usually-most-reliable defenders and a member of the US women's team. The last half hour and stoppage time was desperate; Portland scored, finally, in added time but then fell apart trying for the equalizer and gave up a quietus to Seattle's Rapinoe to go down 3-1.

The Thorns had not played well and their body language showed it; after the traditional salute-song to the team the fans remained staring uncomfortably at the team's cool-down stretches before slowly trickling away up the steps and back to the bus.

The drive back to Portland was, not surprisingly, quiet, disturbed only by the brake problems on the bus I'd chosen (the "cider bus", named for the hard cider it was stocked with in place of beer, drove on without incident). Perhaps coincidentally it was just as we finished the last of the brew suddenly a chorus of shouts and shrieks broke out from the left rear;

"Ohmigod, the tire's smoking!" "We're on fire!" "Stop the bus! There's something wrong!"

The driver did, indeed, pull to the side of the anonymous stretch of I-5 bordered by empty fields several miles from the next exit. He opened the door and stumped out to see what was the matter. Inside considerable hilarity tinged with nervous laughter considered the possibilities of a tire-fire while the tire was still on the bus.

I texted my Bride: "FYI - brake problems with bus. May be late. On the other hand, may burst into flames. Will advise."

I love my Desdemona. She replied quickly: "In case of fiery death, assure send pictures."

But today the bus was not half in love with easeful Death. After a moment of backing and starting forward the brakes broke loose at least long enough to get us back on the road. We arrived in Portland as the sun was setting, and I walked through the windy cool of the evening back across the Broadway Bridge to my office lot and home.

L'Art de l'Affaire

You know my love affair with the women's soccer game and our Portland Thorns in particular, right?

This winter the Thorns are supposedly negotiating with one of France's top players, Amandine Henry. The news was announced nearly a month ago. But...no deal so far, and nobody seems to know why.

Here's my suspicion: I think the Henry, who has been playing for one of Europe's wealthiest clubs, can't believe the teensy-weensy little salary she's being offered by the salary-capped NWSL. Not sure what the maximum for a non-allocated (that is, a player whose salary isn't payed by one of the national soccer organizations) will be this year, but last season it was only about $37,000.

Even for a women professional getting paid significantly less than a man (and, while this isn't really fair, the women's game also makes far, far less than the men's, so you can see how a team would justify that) this is a pittance by European standards, where a good player can command at least twice that. Henry is said to have made about $70,000 last season playing for the big club Paris St. Germain.

So my guess is that Henry, or her agent, or both, are gobsmacked and unwilling to get over the whole "league maximum" thing and that this is making negotiations...difficult.

Here's how this is playing out in my head:

Henry: "C’est impossible! I cannot believe this, me. Les Thorns d’Portland, home of ten t’ousand seeinging fans and ze maniac Reeveters, smoke bombs bursting in ze air…and zees is EET? Ze boot-polishaire at PSG ees making more than thees!"

Merritt Paulson (owner of the Thorns): "This is it, really. I’m not kidding. This is all we can offer given the hard cap. I wish…but, no. This is really it."

Henry: "Ridicule! Zees ees America! There is always a way aroun’ ze rules, hein? Here, I tell you what; I see in le pissoir you ’ave special pieces of paper for to covair ze seat (which is imbecile, but, whatevair…). You tell ze league zat I am tres délicat and have l'grand fantods de horreur at ze nasty pissoirs ’ere in Portland, so you must stock $120,000 worth of zees papairs! Zen you don not buy ze papairs and geev ze money to me. Corrigé!

Paulson: "Ummm…I…let me see what my general manager has to say. Gavin! Little help here!

This part of the US soccer year is the equivalent of what in England is called the "silly season" (because there's no soccer and everyone gets to trot out their silly speculations). Consider this my bit to keep it as silly as possible...

Radio Check

Still here, though still without much to say. Same issues; the things that matter to me just aren't that interesting to anyone else; home, work, family, and as for the soccer I work out over at my daytime gig at Slide Rule Pass. I did enjoy the hell out of the Women's World Cup, but I know better than to try and write that one up; a lot of work and you'd get better value for your money over at The Equalizer or All White Kit...

As far as blogging goes, I'm farkling about gearing up to writing up the Battle of the Philippine Sea as a sort of send-off to my "Imperial Japan, WTF?" series. Yeah, Leyte gets all the press, but it was the Turkey Shoot that was the USN at the top of its game, that meant Game Over for the Kito Budai. I'll try and get that in later this month.

Part of the blogging roadblock is just Real Life; I've found that I don't have the burning desire to write so badly as to put off everything else I've got going on. Tonight the kiddos are upstairs playing Goat Simulator (don't ask. Seriously, there are some things that, once seen, can never be unseen...) and The Bride is reading the new Shadow Campaigns novel I bagged for her at the county library so I found some time to come downstairs - my computer is back in its old place at the basement worktable - and write.

But the other big part is just the notion of trying to talk about politics or military affairs has just really lost its grip on me. I don't know enough about the politics of places beyond the strandlines to speak sensibly and the politics of my country are, at the moment, loathsome. To me the perfect poster child for American politics is The Donald.

And even here I can't really better the Rude One in his summation of the shitshow that is Trump:

"He's like most of the other candidates rolled into one: a blithering, idiotic, climate change-denying loudmouth xenophobe who wants endless war, Christian "values" (whatever the fuck those are anymore), an economic and health care system that benefits the rich, and a big fuckin' fence with alligators or some such shit to keep out the Mexican rapists. He doesn't need to pander to the baser instincts of the primary voters. He is the living embodiment of the baser instincts of GOP primary voters. That's why he's wiping the floor with virtually every other candidate."

But I can't even find any entertainment in the idiocracy that has become the Republican Party.

Because the way our political system works we get two parties. You can try and come up with another system that produces another outcome, but the bottom line is that the U.S. first-past-the-post election setup produces two big parties instead of the lots of little ones you get in a parliamentary system.

So, given two parties it'd be nice to think that we'd have two, you know, actual parties. Organizations with smart people and thought-out policies that wanted to run a sane and healthy country.

Instead we have a bunch of fairly conservative corporatists who prefer a sort of elite, oligarchic control over the dusky masses...and a Monster Fucking Raving Loony Party of which Trump is not the ravingest fucking looney by a looooong chalk.

It's a fucking fuckstory, and what more can I say other than that..?

I've included a whole bunch of family pictures to give you an idea of what we've been doing that has kept me away from the keyboard; you get the whole spectacle of work and play, house, and kids, and pets. I've also been volunteering to help sell merch for our women's soccer team supporters group the Rose City Riveters, and help out with our friends' project to clean and paint and sell their house; here we are after a long, hot day of exterior painting:

Or pitching in at the local watering hole for soccer, Bazi Bierbrasserie. With my temporary Oregon Liquor Control Commission volunteer server credentials in hand here I am, ready to start pouring for the Women's National Team supporters...

Busy, busy, busy, that's me.

Just not here. I'm sorry.

But if you stick around I can promise you Marianas and Turkeys. This is no shit.

I will tell you one more story before I have to go.

So I go to the Thorns match on the Friday before the Fourth of July. Good match, Portland win, if you give a shit you can read all about it here. Anyway, I get in late as in late-late, nearly midnight. It's hot, damn hot as it was for nearly the entire month of June. But not hot enough to explain the expended kitchen fire extinquisher sitting on the dark front steps. Interesting, I think, and go inside.

Everyone is sleeping in the Little House. The only creatures stirring are the two expended Roman candle launchers sitting silently in the kitchen trash. Interesting, I think, before heading into the shower and the bed.

So it's not until the next morning that I find this:

My Bride explains that my son and his pal were playing in the street with the pair of fireworks they were allowed the night before the tradition of Expending All Rounds (of illegal fireworks smuggled in from Vancouver) in the paved "playground" of Astor School at the east end of Amherst Street. She wasn't sure how the fireball landed in the city strip, but she thought that one of the boys might have aimed it down and it skipped off the pavement into the grass.

Which, explosive as flash-paper after weeks of drought and days in the nineties, ignited.

This little inferno took a shovel and the extinguisher and the neighbor's hose - the lighted section was in front of the house two doors down from ours - to kill. I think my Inamorata realized that the fault was not so much in her stars or in her son but in herself for not insisting that the boyish pranks be shifted to the inflammable asphalt of the elementary school.

Missy was properly disgusted.

"I had nothing to do with this." she sniffed. "It was those boys!"

I smiled and agreed and felt thankful that all that had burned was some dead grass. And climbed into the Honda and drove away.

Woolgathering

No real agenda today. Slow at work so I'm stealing company time to just idle around this shebeen without any actual purpose other than maundering, so please excuse my disorganization.

One thing I completely failed to post about was that the Bride and I had a very muted (Muted? Nonexistent, more like...) acknowledgment of our twelfth anniversary Monday week; it was back in October of 2002 that we wrested legal sanction out of the State of Oregon for our mutual concupiscence.

She was utterly whacked from yet another day tangling with The Boy and I was working late and still trying to get my hands on her anniversary gift. I did get it, a couple of days later, and we had a quiet moment last Friday remembering why we then, and still, long(ed) for one another. Along with her soft green scarf and handmade necklace I gave her this:

Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories,
O you my every pleasure, you my every duty!
You shall recall our pleasures and ecstasies,
The warm peace of our hearth, the evening's placid beauty.
Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories!

Legal sanction is all well and good. But there must also be ecstasies.

Did I mention how I so don't have anything to say about politics because my growing conviction that between the idiot "news" media and the idiot 27% (and you have that pin-up of Cheney in your cubicle so you know who you are...) that we've pretty much achieved Peak Stupid, and that whatever I could say would either be superfluous or ignored?

Yep.

I'm not sure which disgusts me more, the whole "To arms, to arms, the Sunni militia is coming!" nonsense, or the headless panic over a blood-borne pathogen that has a total U.S. morbidity of three and mortality of one.

On the former that fat bastard Brecher has been right all along, and on the latter...well, I don't know how to put it better than Pierce, so I won't:

"There evidently is going to be a strong constituency on the committee for some kind of travel ban on the countries in Africa on which the disease is laying waste, even though every expert in the world is saying that this is a terrible idea. (Governor Rick Perry, whose state is ground zero for Ebola in America, apparently believes there already is a travel ban on flights from Europe, to which he has brought the Spectacles Of Wisdom to "burnish his foreign-policy credentials," which is putting a shine on a sneaker, but never mind. This is leadership? Has anyone told Ron Fournier?) There also is going to be a lot of election-year posturing and political bloviation. Fear will be mongered. Distrust will be sown. And the statistics will tell us that, throughout last year, we lost 30 people a day. No, wait. That was due to firearms. My bad."

My pal Lisa over at RAW had a good point about one of the real problems these fucking idiots should be worried about; that after thirty-some years of treating medicine as a commodity the for-profit medical community has internalized the profit-first-"customer"( i.e. patient)-service-whenever rationale of the rest of the "market". Take it away again, Pierce:

"In case you joined American democracy already in progress, this is the way it is going to work. The private, for-profit hospital in Texas completely screws the pooch. (They sent the tubes containing blood from the late Thomas Duncan through the hospital's general delivery system? This is moronic.) The CDC comes in -- admittedly, after it should have, but there are regulations, beloved of our private-sector fetishists, that got in the way -- and the privatizers and anti-government types set up the CDC to take the fall for the hospital.

(The hospital isn't a terrific place to work at the best of times, as a nurse named Patricia Lawson found out to her sorrow.)

In prepared testimony, Daniel Varga, the Chief Clinical Officer for the Texas company that includes Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, apologized to the House committee. "Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes. We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola. We are deeply sorry," Varga said.

Gee, that's awfully nice of you. Anybody get fired yet?"

As my old pal Struthers would have said, what a fuckin' fucked-up fuckstory.

But are We the People going to act with deliberate care, in light of the best information we can glean from scientific medicine?

Fuck, no, why would we want to do that when we can run around shrieking whatever nonsense Laura Fucking Ingraham, the Tammy Faye Baker of CNN, vomits into her lapel mike?

Gah. I say it's nonsense and I say to hell with it.

Speaking of insanely crazy things, how about this: Iceland - yes, Iceland, famed for herring and...well, herring - defeated the Dutch soccer team - the Oranje, the dreaded Clockwork Orange, World Cup quarterfinalists just half a year ago - 2-nil in Iceland.

Iceland! Sure, the goalscorer plays in Europe but I think the Icelandic keeper is the boxroom guy at the Rekjavik Safeway or something like that. These guys are minnows in the soccer ocean.

This was every underdog story come true. My only regret is that there was no Icelandic announcer to go utterly spastic after the victory: "Queen Juliana! Jan de Hartog! Famke Janssen! Eddie Van Halen! Hans Brinker! We have beaten them all! We have beaten them all!"

Don't get me wrong; I have always been partial to the Oranje ever since the disgrace of Argentina in 1978, when the original Clockwork Orange - Cruyff (who refused to play in the bloodyhanded Argentina of the Dirty War), Neeskens, Rep - was disgracefully robbed of the title. But I love to see these little teams upset the big, rich nations, and in soccer, Holland is very much a have and Iceland very much a have-not.

Except for this once. Wish I'd had the under on THAT bet...

There's a million tales in the naked Facebook; this one is mine.

Back when I was in college, and then later for a while when I was in the service, I had a sort-of-girlfriend.

(BTW, in case you aren't familiar with GFT conventions, people whose likeness I am neither at liberty blue to nor desire to seen blued all over the Internet are always shown from the ankles down, if possible. So this is her, over to the right there, and I should add that whilst I yield to no one in my appreciation for my Bride's attributes my old sort-of-girlfriend still rocks the black slippers...)

I say "sort-of" because I could never quite figure out where I stood with her, or what we were doing. I liked her. We were definitely friends. But we were never lovers, and I'm not sure that we were, either of us, really sure what "love" was, or how to love each other.

I know that I wasn't, and while she was, and is, a very beautiful, dear, sweet, kind, and loving woman I'm glad we didn't end up together back then for, as my first wife found out to our mutual grief, I was not then fit company for any woman of worth.

Still, we seemed to have some sort of very-close-but-not-quite relationship for quite some time that finally, as such relationships often do, drifted away when we were separated by time and space. We never even had a "breakup" in any real sense. Our association just kind of...stopped.

Decades later, while searching a completely different subject, I came across a short video clip of my not-quite-inamorata singing (and she had, and has, a lovely voice) that led me to suspect that she had moved to the Midwest and married. Several years later, motivated by a sort of vague nostalgia and curiosity, I looked her up on the dreaded Facebook and there she was. Using her maiden name, so, apparently, divorced or separated. Living in Missouri, and now an ordained minister in one of the UCC congregations there. We then resumed our friendship in the modern electronic-epistolary form of Facebook.

And from what I've seen as she was then she is still today a very good person; full of love and kindness, the very sorts of things that it seems to me to be very good for a cleric to be given the responsibilities of the job; caring for the sick and the distraught, guiding the afflicted, celebrating with the joyous and comforting the dying. She seems to me to be very likely to be a terrific pastor.

It is when I think of her that it occurs to me that one of the things that sickens me most heartily about many "religions" and those that preach them is the often-outspoken belief that having breasts and a vagina and ovaries somehow makes a person less...spiritual, less fitted for the business of contemplating, or interceding - if it is your nature to want to and try to so intercede - with the Infinite.

"Let your women keep silence in the churches..."

Fucking Paul of Tarsus really has a lot to answer for in my book.

My former-almost-girlfriend is too gentle to do that good work, but give me the Wayback set to 42AD and a good sturdy baulk of dimension lumber, and old Mister Road-to-Damascus would have been getting a solid two-by-four upside the head.

Asshole.

Speaking of soccer and patriarchal religions, I finally got to watch the Portland Pilots-Brigham Young University women's match from last week.

The game was utterly one-sided. BYU is for real; those gals are solid from front to back, and UP is gonna have trouble making the NCAA Finals with this year's young squad.

But my real thought as I was watching the play was that "Cougars" is an utterly lame name for teams from a school named for a scarey Victorian theocrat with high double-digit wives. Cougars? When the heck was the last cougar exterminated from around Provo, anyway, something like 1888? And, besides, you and I both know that cougars are not what Utah and BYU are all about, right?

It's all about the Mormons, baby.

So. The BYU men's teams really need to play as something like the "Patriarchs". "The Mormon Battalion" would be fine, as well as historical. Or how about "The Sword of the Lord"? Can you imagine the headlines in the sports section: "Sword of the Lord slays Pepperdine"? "Sword of the Lord beheads St. Mary's"? "Sword of the Lord eviscerates Bulldogs"?

Fucking stone cold awesome.

Then the women's teams, seeing how the Mormon Church feels about women in churches and all, could play as the "Handmaidens" or maybe the "Helpmeets" or the "Yeah, We're The Ones Being Fucking Silent in the Churches, You Happy Now, Asshole?"

Either that or both should play as the "Jackmormons". Except I think there's already a band named that.

Whatever. But "Cougars"? Sorry. WAY lame.

And while we're on the subject of "White People That Colonized Places" along with "Lame Stuff In General" I note in passing that the annual Columbus Day contretemps reminds me of the thing about the Admiral of the Ocean Sea that drives me more wild than anything else; his math.

Because, you see, in order to sell his expedition to the Spanish Crown he had to make the idea of sailing west to reach Japan, China, and the East Indies plausible. The farrago about the world being flat in 1492? Bullshit. Learned people knew that as early as Eratosthenes a couple of thousand years before Greek (and Arabic) scientists had figured out that 1) the Earth was a globe, and 2) that it was about 20,000 miles around, give or take a Roman mile or three.

But our boy Chris had to know that short of a ginormous expedition that Reconquista Spain didn't have the cash, the naval technology, or the inclination to outfit a fleet to sail across some 7,000 or so miles of open ocean. And he had to know that even if they had that there was no way in Hell that Ferdinand and Isabella were going to equip some sketchy Italian adventurer with that sort of fleet.

So - through a combination of ignorance, wishful thinking, and plain damn stupidity, Columbus came up with a figure of about 16,000 miles for the equatorial circumference of the Earth and a completely ridiculous distance of 3,000 miles to Sumatra. Here's a good little summary of the sort of bone-headed mathematical and navigational errors that the cack-handed spaghetti-bender had to commit to manage that.

Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of Columbus: “His calculation is not logical, but Columbus’s mind was not logical. He knew he could make it, and the figures had to fit.” Morison seems to find that admirable. I find it as moronic as panic over a bunch of raggedy-assed Arab guerrillas or a West African disease.

But maybe that's just me.

Okay. Enough meandering. I'll leave you with a couple of images:

You sleep in public in this house at your peril. This is "Drachma the Merkitty"; the thing on his head is supposed to be one of those seashall-bra things that mermaids are supposed to wear, but it wouldn't fit over his head, so its a crown. Little guy didn't wake up during the whole dress-up process, so he was pranked for hours whilst he slept.

I tried to explain that this was Cruelty to Sleeping Pets, but the small people merely laughed and continued to prank the little possum. He was quite the surprised kitty when he woke up, too.

I should add that our housecats have a long tradition of that kind of thing. When Maxine was a toddler she would announce a cat-sighting with a noise we called her "cat-scream", a loud squawk that was Maxine-speak for "Aha! Strange furry creature unlike anything ever seen in my orphanage, I shall pat you now!" and would precede a round of violent head-slapping that was her version of "petting the cat".

The calico, Lily, was smart enough to grab a hat at the sound, but Nitty (a.k.a Few Kibbles Shy Of A Full Bowl) would hunker down on the principle of "if I make myself REALLY small she can't see me". Which worked about as well as you'd think it would.

And this:

...is a mural from Honolulu. Naiad sporting with vicious aquatic pandas? Wahine frolicking in the surf with hairy racoon-like menehunes?

Your guess is as good as mine - I got nothin'. But I liked the image, so there you are.

I should really finish up my Panama stories. Soon. Promise.

Big soccer fun

I took my 8-year old daughter to the Portland Thorns women's professional match this past Sunday.

Here's her match report:

“Well, soccer is so much more fun when you’re there! On TV it’s really boring, but when you go there there’s so much to do. I liked the singing, and the colors were pretty (she was talking about the Pride Week tifo I've shown below that the Rose City Riveters unveiled before the match). I liked watching the people run away when the rain came. And the C'mon, Guy (Khao Man Gai) chicken wings were really super tasty, and riding the MAX train was fun. And I want to go back again, because it was really fun and nice.”

“What did you think about the game, sweetie?”

“Well, I didn’t really care much about that. It was OK, I guess.”

I let her know that I thought the game was much more than OK (and it was, a solid 2-nil win for the home team...) and she conceded with the casual carelessness my kid uses when she gives in to me over something that matters to her not a whit. It didn't matter, really. In the words (between mouthfuls of cotton candy) of Stumptown’s youngest soccer reporter: “That was really fun!”

It was a very sweet day. The Girl was her usual cheerful, bubbly self and she loved everything; she loved the train, and the people, and the food, and the colorful tifo that I helped construct, and just being with her Daddy. I looked down at her glossy head and she skipped alongside me back to the truck to drive home and wondered how I had been so lucky to find this sweet and loving little person.

No disrespect to the players, but I think I have the real Pride of Portland sleeping in the little bed in the shed-roofed room at the back of my house.

Love and loss

Wintertime in the U.S. is usually a slow time for soccer players and soccer fans.

We gather in clusters like starlings around the soccer websites to argue and speculate and fantasize about our teams, while they do some workouts or hit the trainer's table to work out the bruises and tears that playing has beaten into their legs.

Not today, though. Our Portland Thorns had one hell of a busy Monday today.

Well, actually, they've had a very busy autumn and early winter; you can read about all the goings-on at the new Slide Rule Pass website, here. I have a new post up there talking about the surprising number of changes that have occurred in what is, after all, a championship team.

Typically sports teams are no different than politicians or armies; if they win they usually aren't much arsed about changing things up. Perhaps a tweak here or a nudge there, but otherwise? No.

The Portland women's soccer team, however, has seen some fairly big changes over the four-months-and-change since lifting the ugly-ass National Women's Soccer League trophy, and today was more of the same.

First, the team signed the German national team goalkeeper, Nadine Angerer.

The keeper we had, the player in goal for the 2013 Thorns, was a wonderfully energetic young woman named Karina LeBlanc who plays her international soccer for Canada. She was Portland Thorns from the top of her bright red mohawk to the tips of cleats on her boots and as such she won the hearts of many in this town, including it must be said, my own.

She just seemed to live inside a world shot full of life, and energy, and love for her sport and everything around her.

That said, as a 'keeper she was not perfect.

She was caught off her line several times during the 2013 season. She seemed to have problems with "distribution", which is a fancy way of saying that when she had the ball in her hands or at her feet she had trouble getting it to one of her teammates.

Perhaps the single biggest issue was not so much about her as about the Thorns defending as a unit; more often than not the Thorns defenders seemed disorganized, unsure of what to do, who to mark, where to go and how. That's a big part of the goalkeeper's brief. She can see the entire field from her goalmouth, and most keepers are expected to organize their backline.

Angerer is known as a very good organizer and tactician on defense.

So, given what happened last season I'm not surprised that the Thorns signed Angerer or, once that deal was done, traded LeBlanc to the Chicago Red Stars for a draft pick in 2015 - a return so small for a starting keeper as to be practically insulting and suggesting that the entire business was part of a backstairs deal that got Angerer to Portland at the price of shipping LeBlanc to Chicago.

On a sporting level this deal makes excellent sense; Chicago sent their keeper to the expansion Houston team and then, in return for not contesting Portland's signing of a new keeper, gets Portland's old keeper. Keeper for keeper for keeper and everyone's happy.

Except...that a lot of people here in Portland genuinely liked, enjoyed, or loved Karina, forgetting that she was a playing piece on a playing field.

Until today.

I know I've said this before, but if sport has any value at all it is as a distillation of human spirit. Sometimes the spirit is the exhilaration of achievement, often it is the grim disappointment of failure.

Today the sport reminds us that anytime we love someone, or something, Fortune holds it hostage against us. If we do not love we cannot lose, and yet we must either choose to love or protect ourselves by not chancing the loss and, in effect, forfeiting the gains of love. Love and loss; for in life as in sport the end of the story is always the parting of ways, the terminator of delights, and the separator of companions.

And yet, if we do not love, what value do we gain?