Man of the Match

For anybody who watched the Netherlands vs. Portugal game, the overwhelming opinion would be that the man with the most influence on the game was Valentin Ivanov, the Russian referee. If you have to give out 4 red cards and 16 yellow cards, then you obviously don't have any control of the game. The game would have been a hard fought battle of 22 men, but ended up becoming a card happy game where the most important name is the referee. Good night, Netherlands, it has been fun watching you play.

Update from Michigan

Well, I had to present my "research" on Thursday. It was very strange because I didn't feel as if I had actually discovered anything new, but still had trouble keeping the explanation of the topic under twenty minutes. I am doing research with my roommate for the summer, which has been very enjoyable. If you care, my research is in Distance regular Cayley graphs of diameter 2 and 3. Yeah, didn't think you cared.

In other news the World Cup is continuing, even without the United States. From here on out I will be rooting for the underdogs. Hoping Ghana beats Brazil, Ecuador beats England, and so on. Not that I am expecting any of these situations to actually occur, but it is much more fun to root for the team that nobody else is rooting for.

My friend Paige is in Romania, and apparently can't shower more than a few times a week. Sounds good to me, but she is not enjoying it. Currently I am reading a book about vampires in Romania (The Historian). I can only hope she doesn't return to America as an undead.

Yeah, this post is random.

Disappointments

The United States and France were both extremely disappointing in their first matches of the World Cup. Two of the teams I root for, either because of individual talents or national pride, let me down this week. The US decided they didn't want to be in the World Cup apparently, and France decided that they would rather beat up on each other than the other team (sounds like a Lambuth team from 2 years ago). Other than that, there have been some very good games that I felt myself pulling for the underdog including Trinidad & Tobago vs. Sweden and Brazil vs. Croatia. In both these games the teams worked very hard and played with a pride and spirit that couldn't be seen by many of the opening teams.

Side note: I hate American commentators. Why do the feel the need to unearth useless statistics like, "This X-Team has never scored a goal in the eleventh minute on European soil at a high altitude." Ok, maybe true, but a worthless fact. An actual "statistic" the commentators felt like sharing was that Australia was the first team to score 3 goals after trailing by 1 goal for 80 minutes. C'mon guys, it is soccer. There are only a few statistics that matter. 1) The score. 2) How many World Cups have they been in. 3) How many World Cups have they won. And as an honorary 4th statistic- How many times have they beaten Brazil. Other than that soccer fans don't care whether they win more when the snow is falling at a 34 degree angle. Just talk about the players and the game. I miss the British (Though, thank God, they do commentate the earliest match of the day).

World Cup!!!!

I am so excited! The World Cup begins today. The downside is that most of the games are being broadcast on ESPN2, which I don't have in Michigan. The upside is that the rest of the games are on ESPN or ABC, both of which I have. This is going to be a very good month.

Michi-hicks

Christie, this post is for you. So, some of you may think that Tennessee is a backwater, hick state. I feel like you can get an actual feel for the population of a place by going to the local Wal-Mart. Everybody shops at Wal-Mart, so it is a good cross-section of the population. If you thought Tennessee was bad, you should visit the Mt. Pleasant Wal-Mart. Yikes! There were kids crying in the narrow aisles, people who went through the store like it was a NASCAR race, and various other scary people. My advice to anyone visiting Mt. Pleasant is to AVOID Wal-Mart.