Living on shingles time

I've now been cooped up in the house for a month, which would have seemed unthinkable a month and a day ago. But it's hard to expect the Spanish Inquisition that is shingles until you have experienced it. And I apparently had a particularly nasty case.

So I haven't written much because I haven't done anything, plus my mind's been clouded by medication, so I haven't thought about much either. What I have done, aside from sleep, is watch sports on TV.

At this point in the year, baseball is getting down to the finish and until a few days ago there were multiple games of interest on every day. Now we're in the playoffs at the point where there are 4 series going so there are still at least 2 games on ever day. This weekend will spell the end of that.

I really don't like football very much. Yes, it's entertaining in spots and it looks great on TV, but it's got two serious problems for me. First, there's only one game a week. I understand that teams need a week to heal after each game, but there's nothing about that that has to be true. If football was played every day like baseball, people would play it differently than they do now. So that means 3 hours of entertainment per week. Not very much for someone who has 18 hours a day, 7 days a week to fill up.

The second, more serious problem, is that football is dumb and kind of sucks as a sport. I know this isn't the commonly held belief, but it's true. Football is a simplistic game that totally lacks subtlety, played by people encased in so much body armor that they barely look like people. The only way we know there are actually people in there (aside from the current inadequacies of robotics) is that the players get hurt and if it were robots out there they would get broken instead. And the basic rules are very simple:  See that line I drew down there? You've got 4 chances to get your team there with this ball while we try to stop you. You can either run there or throw the ball to a teammate who runs there. And we try to stop you by...well, stopping you.

That's it. Everything else is embellishment. I'm not saying the players aren't great athletes who make some very entertaining plays sometimes, but at its core it's boring and brutish.

Anyway, this wasn't intended to be a knock on football beyond its general lack of availability to me while I've been sick. What has been available is European soccer.

As is my norm, I have done exactly zero research to determine if what I'm saying contains even a grain of truth. But I promise you I will say it as if I am absolutely certain of it, this being a skill I acquired in the advertising business.

European soccer on American TV consists primarily of the English Premier League and the EUFA Champions League, one of which is based in England and the other somewhere in the EU (see, that wasn't so hard). I believe that they are separate leagues, but there are teams that are in both and teams in both leagues have players from multiple nationalities. This is puzzling, and if I really cared I could figure out how it works, but remember that I am on painkillers.

The Premier League is more confusing because you have to know both London and Great Britain geography to have a clue where any of these places are. How am I supposed to know where Tottenham is in reference to Chelsea or West Ham or Wigan? And there do seem to be a certain number of English players on all of the teams. Many of the foreign players do seem to have a strong attachment to their English teams, but that attachment seems to me of the financial sort.

The way the whole thing works is that there a Premier League and then a Secondary League and then a Tertiary League and on down until they run out of soccer players. Your team can move up by finishing in the top 2 in your league or down by finishing in the bottom 2. All the national leagues throughout the world are like this except the United States, which is too small to have multiple leagues. There's a playoff at the end of the season which has a prize of a trophy for the team and the right of that team's hooligan fans to riot in the other team's town.

The UEFA Champions League is clearly a misnomer as all 30-odd teams in it could not be champions unless there were a pretty substantial set of ties or if they mean the league has a champion each year. You might say, that would be silly, all leagues have champions, but this is Europe we're talking about and maybe they think that their championship is the only "real" championship.

The league uses the accursed "Group" system that you would see if you watched the World Cup which you probably didn't. The teams are divided into groups of 4 and each team plays each other and the 2 teams who do the best move on to the next round. This setup allows the organizers to "randomly" stuff their team's biggest rivals into one group and see them try to kill each other off. That is why this kind of group is called the "group of death." In reality, the players rarely die during soccer game. Rowdy fans die much more frequently.

This is running long so I'll pick it up in another post.