The US soccer team finally met its match and lost to Ghana on Saturday to fall out of the final sixteen teams. Good. Good for the way the rest of the world views us, as a bunch of bully boys who win way too many sporting events against the rest of the world. Good for Ghana, the underdog African nation. Good for me, who doesn’t really understand soccer, who is unable to distinguish between good play and bad, who finds soccer really boring because of the low scoring. Good for me, who can now stop watching World Cup football games and stop having to listen to that really annoying sound that hovers over every match, that truly awful bee drone created by the Vuvuzela horns in the stands. When I first tuned in to the match between England and the US, I thought that South Africa was in the throes of a killer bee invasion. Then I heard what it was. And I continued to wonder how the sound could be so constant throughout the two-plus hours of a match. Why wouldn’t it rise and fall in relation to what was going on down there on the field? How could fans blow the damn things all the time, without taking any potty breaks or trips to the refreshment stands? How could they retain their sanity, just as I wondered how I could retain my sanity? Even Charles Barkley’s irritating commentary sounds good compared to the Vuvuzela horn.
I've always collected errors in diction, things people mis-hear, like "windshield factor" and "the next store neighbors." Years ago, one of my students wrote an essay in which she described the world as being harsh and cruel, "a doggy-dog world." I've since come to think she may have been more astute and accurate than those who describe it in the usual way. My Stories - Mobridge Memories -
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Most of what I've written has been published as e-books and is available at Amazon. Match Play is a golf/suspense novel. Dust of Autumn is a bloody one set in upstate New York. Prairie View is set in South Dakota, with a final scene atop Rattlesnake Butte. Life in the Arbor is a children's book about Rollie Rabbit and his friends (on about a fourth grade level). The Black Widow involves an elaborate extortion scheme. Happy Valley is set in a retirement community. Doggy-Dog World is my memoir. And ES3 is a description of my method for examining English sentence structure.
In case anyone is interested in any of my past posts, an archive list can be found at the bottom of this page. I'd appreciate any feedback you may have by sending me an e-mail note--jertrav33@aol.com. Thanks for your interest.
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