Sunday, June 28, 2009 - Posts
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For the U.S. national team, the Confederations Cup was a crap sandwich with the crap on the outside. After starting the tournament with feeble losses to Italy and Brazil, Team USA scored five straight goals in ripping through Egypt and Spain. That streak ran to seven goals in Sunday's final, with Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan out Brazil-ing the Brazilians, scoring on the kind of spectacular strikes that usually come off the feet of the guys in the yellow shirts. The Guardian's live commentary, having referred to the Americans as "raggy gits" prior to kickoff, described the action as "frankly surreal." In the last 45 minutes, alas, the gits once again turned raggy, the Brazilians resumed being Brazilian, and surrealism made way for futbol vérité.
Loads of pundits have compared the Americans' win over Spain to 1980's "Miracle on Ice." One major difference: After taking down the USSR, the U.S. hockey team beat Finland to win the gold. Brazil ain't Finland, and after a dominant first half the Americans were lucky to lose by just one goal—a header by Kaká that clearly breached the goal line was, inexplicably, not counted. (If nothing else, international soccer tournaments are a good reminder that the officiating in the NBA could always get worse.) According to U.S. captain Carlos Bocanegra, his squad got trounced by Brazil in group play because they gave the Samba Kings "too much respect." The Americans played a far less-reverent first half in Sunday's rematch, but the underdogs ultimately fell back into bad habits, giving the ball away too easily and failing to shut down Kaká and Luis Fabiano. The United States' loss, however, wasn't a failure of strategy or fortitude. The team with the better players won.
Does the team's second-place finish augur better days for U.S. soccer? ESPN's commentators put a happy face on Sunday's loss by arguing that the national team will now assuredly have greater confidence for the 2010 World Cup. But as the Americans' topsy-turvy Confederations Cup revealed, confidence on the soccer field comes and goes in minutes, not years. More significant than some vague sense of emotional uplift is the possibility that, as George Vecsey pointed out on Wednesday, the national team's impressive showing might earn them an easier draw in 2010. The United States, clearly lacking in skill compared with the likes of Spain and Italy and Brazil, still needs all the breaks it can get. For a game and a half at least, the U.S. got the feeling of scoring and swaggering like Brazilians. It was frankly surreal, and it was fun while it lasted.
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When word of Michael Jackson's death first spread, Google News went on the defensive. CNET is reporting that Google initially interpreted the tremendous spike in Jackson queries on Thursday as evidence of nefarious web sabotage and, in response, did the search-engine equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and singing "la-la-la" (or "ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa"): Many users who searched for Jackson news around 3 p.m. received an error message that read, "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
Slate's Jody Rosen is among those who have remarked that, with Jackson's death, the "monoculture," long on the wane, enjoyed one (final?) astounding spasm: For a few days, everyone was talking about, reading about, and listening to one man. The Google News story—along with stats demonstrating that Jackson drew in Yahoo's biggest single-day audience ever (16.4 million unique visitors, surpassing the previous record of 15.1 million set on election day, 2008) and dwarfed Iran and swine-flu posts on Twitter—raises a related question about what happens when the supposed agents of the monoculture's fragmentation—Google searches, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, MP3 blogs, etc.—all collude to resuscitate it. With the possible exception of Obama's win, Jackson's death is the most significant culturequake of the 2.0 era (which missed 9/11, Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the O.J. chase). And so it's not just that, for a spell, everyone was talking about the same thing again. Isn't it also the case that more people were talking about the same thing than was ever possible before?
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