Back in the Saddle after Break

I took a bit of an Easter break the last week–I’m realizing now that I should have announced it beforehand, but since it just kind of happened, and then went longer than I expected, here I am.

I’m queuing up some new shows, movies, and books I want to cover in my Monday Review space, but I would love to get some suggestions for something else I should watch/read.

On a particularly brief note, the original movie version of Fever Pitch (1997, staring Colin Firth and talking about soccer instead of baseball) is on Netflix now.

I watched it.

It had some okay observations on the nature of sports fan-dom and relationships in general, but it was not romantic in the least. If I did a full review for SMTR, it would get a one-arrow.

Interrupting Romance for a Mini Sports Rant

You know, I was planning on writing today about a little theory of mine regarding the cultural differences between romance novels in the United States and romance manga in Japan.

But I am just too stewed about that flagrantly bad call in the World Cup game between the United States and Slovenia to even think about romance today.

Many suggestions abound, but the best I’ve heard is to make all goals reviewable the same way goals in the NHL can be reviewed while play is still going on. Make it so, FIFA!

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, the Americans had a blah-bordering-on-terrible first half which meant they went into the locker room at halftime down 2-0.

In soccer (especially this low-scoring World Cup) that’s like entering the half of an American football game down 31-0.

But we came back. And not only that, once we’d tied the game at 2-2, we SCORED AGAIN with less than 5 minutes to play!

Except then the ref called a foul of some kind (no one really knows what it was at this point, not even the players and coaches) and disallowed the goal.

One of the English-sounding announcers on ESPN radio called it “daylight robbery.” Thank you.