Expanding My Horizons

My baby takes the morning train.
He works from 9 to 5 and then,
he takes another home again
to find me...watching the Manchester United football team! The best freakin' team in all the land! Whoo-hoo!.

(Probably only one person that reads this blog will get that...oh well...mi scusi.)

The World Cup is right around the corner, and so I feel a sense of obligation to provide some sort of preview. The problem is that I don't follow soccer at all. I just never got into the game. The low scoring doesn't bother me, but flopping and offsides traps are the antithesis of why I enjoy watching and competing in sports. So, my soccer knowledge is pretty minimal, having been limited to what information I have gathered from watching movies or playing FIFA on the 3DO and Dreamcast. (For those that missed the six months it was in the stores, the Panasonic 3DO was a video game console in the mid-90s.) However I'm skeptical that in actual soccer, you can score by using a lob instead of a shot and watch the goalie just stare at it because he thinks it's a pass. I'm pretty sure real soccer players are slightly smarter than the AI of a 10 year old video game.

Since I don't have any real analysis for the games, here are a few numbers you can throw around the water cooler.

$6 million- The bonus that the Polish Federation has promised its national team's players if it manages to win the World Cup.
40,000- Estimated number of sex workers who will be in Germany to provide services to fans and tourists.
$70- Entry fee to Artemis (warning: link is not even close to safe for work), a four story megabrothel in Berlin, featuring a pool, three saunas, two pools....and a bunch of whores.
$50- Estimated cost of an average encounter with a prostitute in Germany.
120,000- Number of "encounters"- equivalent to three times with every hooker in Berlin- the Polish National Team could purchase if it wins the World Cup.
1,235- Number of times I had to resist the temptation to make an easy joke about a Polish guy buying a hooker.

Coincidentally, a soccer ball and the herpes virus capsid have the same shape (an icosahedron.) Oh, and I apologize if in the course of throwing these statistics around the water cooler, you are called in by your boss and immediately fired for sexual harrassment. But hey, at least it will give you some more time to watch that riveting World Cup action!

(note: not that I ever really need an excuse to post a picture of the lovely Alessandra Ambrosio, but I should mention that she is wearing a Manchester United scarf in the picture above. Don't believe me? Check out this pic. Or this one.)