Well, one thesis done and two more to go!
My flight is on Friday, the 13th of August (not superstitious) and I will be coming into Detroit in the evening.
Recovering and Preparing!
Well, at this point I believe that I am almost 100% again, having spent the majority of the past 2 days sleeping, trying to recover from the home rugby tournament we hosted over the weekend. I’m going to go work out and see if it worked! Unfortunately that was my last game for the Freiburg Rugby Club!
On a better note, Germany plays against Spain tonight in the semifinals of the World Cup! Yeah! This should be an excellent game, the winner of which goes on to play in the final match and the loser plays in the second match for 3rd place. Germany’s going to need some luck, seeing as Paul, the psychic octopus, predicted a win for Spain!
On the tech front, the Amazon Kindle is now at a point at which it could actually be useful to a literature student such as myself! Now they allow zooming on PDF documents. This is important, seeing as I work from PDF documents about 50% of the time, and they are generally copied two to a page, and rather small. With this most recent development, I actually now have interest in purchasing one, seeing as the ability to read PDF documents away from my computer, or download books instead of purchasing them would save me loads of money, not to mention the paper/trees it would save!
Now that I’m done with that advertisement, I wish you all fun watching the semi-final match! I will be watching it and enjoying a cold beverage, or two, as soon as I’ve finished my final essay for my internship!
This post is brought to you by the song Vultures by the John Mayer Trio and by my new interim contact/consulting website.
World Cup and the understanding of sports
Well, sorry I’m getting to this late, but it’s World Cup season! That wonderful time of year where the #14 ranked US plays a draw against #8 ranked England, thanks to a goal by Green with an assist from Dempsey and New Zealand’s relatively unknown “All Whites” (they’re called this because the rugby team is the “All Blacks”) draw against the defending world champions, Italy!
This time could also be known as “every single German, including those who neither know what teams are in their own first division, or what the offsides-rule means, become infallible soccer geniuses”. These same infallible geniuses assured me for months beforehand, that the U.S. was not going to win a single game even in the Group Phase, and are now searching for excuses why we aren’t doing quite as poorly as they expected. The question, however, that peeves me, and that I have now heard once too often, is “Who are you going to root for after the U.S. gets knocked out?”
The answer they wish to hear, is of course, Germany. But it’s not the truth anymore. I’m tired of trying to defend my team, a team which has a long way to go, but has also made it a long way! We need not offer any further excuses! The Germans have suffered a loss, even when we haven’t, and their arguments are just as thin as ours. The two explanations for why the Germans are not going to get knocked out and why they should win the whole tournament are as follows: they have a soccer tradition and they have the proper genes.
That is correct, they have the proper genes. It was explained to me by a dead-serious German fan, that the reason the US will lose, is that we don’t have the proper genes. Not because we concentrate on other sports, or didn’t have as much of a widespread interest, but rather, because we didn’t have the proper, soccer related genes. This, of course, meaning that the Germans did indeed have said genes. Sound familiar anyone?
Secondly, they have a tradition of soccer. My flatmate just told me today, that Germany is better than the US at World Cup soccer, and will definitely go farther, because they’ve done it more often. Never mind the fact, that all of the favorites this year have played in such a stunningly poor manner, that nobody knows what to expect, the Germans are going to win it, because they have been here more often and have won the title before. So the U.S. is doomed to never win, because we’ve never won it before.
Aside from my small, international sports disagreement, this World Cup has been full of fun and exciting developments! (Aside from the Vuvuzela, that is. Click here for a video about them, and to hear the mini-vuvuzela, which is described by the narrator as “a duck on speed”) As I said, all of the favorites are royally screwing up and allowing traditionally worse teams, a chance at the next round! Excellent!
This post brought to you by US Soccer player Clint Dempsey’s Rap Debut
Birthday!
My birthday went very well! We Barbecue’d (Sören had his birthday on the 1st) and had a grand time.
My presents included, for those of you who couldn’t guess, three coffee cups!
Unfortunately, rugby was canceled once again on the weekend following, so we had to resort to grilling at the pitch and having a cool beer in the finally hot Freiburg weather!
University starts up again this week, at full swing this time, and my internship as well! Wish me luck!
This post brought to you by the letters BP and an oil spill.
