Green Bay So Excited about Playing Bears, They've Forgotten How to Spell

I'll be rooting for my hometown Packers this weekend when they take on the Bears (in another of my former cities), but I'm amused/embarrassed by the headline misspelling that's been ricochetting around the internet. The Green Bay Press-Gazette misspelled the name of the city they're taking on in the NFC championship. Way to go, Gazette. If you're going to make a big mistake, do it in the biggest typeface you've got.

As you can imagine, the Chicaco – I mean Chicago – press has been having a field day with this.

Who's Writing Huffington Post's World Cup Blurbs?

Someone should tell whoever writes these things on Huffington Post that goals are a natural part of soccer, and not every goal is shocking or stunning. Unless it's scored by Germany, in which case it's apparently Nazi-related.

Discovering the Joys of ESPN 3 -- Go Vfb Stuttgart

While trying to check something on my cable setup the other day, I came across a note on my cable system's web site about ESPN 3, which is an online-only "channel" for subscribers to the cable system.

I went to the ESPN 3 web site, and found that it includes live and archived video of recent games of all kinds of sports. What pleased me most was seeing that it included German Bundesliga games. I got into watching the Bundesliga (that's the name of the German federal league in football, or as American's call it, soccer) almost 10 years ago when I first moved to the Bay Area and found that Fox had a channel that showed European football, including Bundesliga. Rupert Murdoch is, of course, partial to die Englisch sprechende folks in the UK, so the Fox channel mostly overdoses on all the ManU and Liverpool games you can choke on.

But when I first moved out here, the channel showed Bundesliga games, and I began watching. Wednesday and Sunday mornings, I developed a love for soccer for the first time in my life, and -- on a whim, because there's no real reason I should choose any German city to root for over another -- I made Vfb Stuttgart my "home" team, based on the slightly ridiculous reason that one branch of my ancestors came from the Württemberg area, which is now the Baden-Württemberg state of Germany. (My maternal grandmother came from the Berlin area, but Hertha Berlin, um, isn't playing so well ...)

So what?

Well, this isn't the most important blog post I'll ever make. But I'm just writing it to thank the good folks at ESPN for doing this, something that really expands the content that people can receive. Ever since the Fox channel stopped showing Bundesliga games, I've been unable to satisfy my interest in Stuttgart. That dissatisfaction has ended.

Seriously. Check your cable system for ESPN 3.

Athletes with Guts: Iranian Soccer Team Shows Their Colors

The captain and five other memebers of Iran's national football (er, soccer) team wore green armbands during the first half of a game against South Korea in Seoul. Watch the BBC News report:


As they mention in the video, these players are due to return home after the game, coming back to a country that has banned foreign reporters, is killing and beating up protestors and other opponents of the religious regime, and frantically trying to put a stop to the biggest threat to the government since the 1979 revolution. Godspeed to the protestors, I think, and good for the national team players who demonstrated some real bravery.

I'd love to see some MLB players sport a green armband or ribbon. It might not be their country, but it's a universal cause.

Packers Could Go All the Wa--- Wait? What Happened?!?

So here I am, at home in San Francisco, the transplanted Wisconsinite that I am, actually able to watch a Green Bay Packers football game on local television, courtesy (and I use the word loosely) of Fox. I'm not a rabid football fan; the Chicago White Sox and Vfb Stuttgart are the teams I follow more closely and in the sports I like more. But I am a Green Bay fan, a fan of the city where I grew up and of which I remain parochially boosterish (to slaughter several language cutoms at once).

But the game. It was a rematch with rivals Minnesota, which claimed to be on the upswing after being rejuvenated by the previous week's win against San Diego. And the Pack, well, they're just the most exciting team to watch these days. Between the always-exciting Brett Favre and a high-achieving band of first- and second-year teammates, they've built up a winning record that has made the national media take notice of a town they usually don't talk about unless it's used in a sentence in December with "the frozen tundra of."

Oh, yeah, the game. So the Packers play a great game, beautifully executing a running game, the one component of a championship team they were supposedly missing. They stopped Adrian Peterson, the Vikings' supposedly heroic running back. They ran in for touchdown after touchdown, running the score to 27-0 midway through the third quarter. Then suddenly a Fox sports broadcaster cuts in and announces that because the Packers are so far ahead, Fox is going to switch to a "more competitive game." And so goes one of my few chances to see my hometown team out here on the West Coast. Thanks, Fox.

Now, presumably, Fox thought that West Coasters who were watching NFC Central game were only doing so because they were football nuts and would watch any game, so better serve them up with one that is more "competitive." But I differ. The people watching were a mixture of people like me, who specifically wanted to watch those two Midwestern teams (and a goodly portion of whom were happy to see li'l ol' Green Bay take the stuffing out of Minnesota), and the people Fox thought were watching the game anyway --they'd watch anything. So, if the second group of people will watch anything, why not let 'em keep watching a game that they'd be talking about on Monday morning at work? They'll be happy (being relatively easy to please, anyway) and the people like me would be happy, too.

Instead, Fox didn't let either group see the entire game.

Oh, the Packers won the game 34-0. I would have loved to have seen it. Some other network, please buy the NFL rights from Fox.