Have I mentioned that I bought season tickets for the Vancouver Whitecaps inaugural season in Major League Soccer? Somebody also kindly bought me a membership in the Whitecap’s fan club, the Southsiders, for my birthday.
Because I’ve been traveling a lot this spring, I’ve only been able to get to one of the first six home games. And, unfortunately, I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow night when the Whitecaps play Toronto FC as part of, ahem, the Nutrilite Canadian Championship, a mid-season tournament featuring four Canadian teams. I am Fail Fan.
I have two tickets available for tomorrow night’s game, which starts at 7:00pm at Empire Field. They’re row Z, section 224. That’s about midway up, roughly parallel to the 18-yard line on the stadium’s west side. The seats are under cover, should it be raining. I’ve added their location to this too-small map of the stadium:
The seats are directly above a walkway, which means there’s nobody in front of you. That’s great, though there is a railing in front of you. This isn’t a problem for adults who can enjoy a good view over it, but may present an obstruction to little people. My nephews apparently didn’t mind, because they were free to stand up and weren’t intimidated by people standing all around them.
Also, the seats are on the aisle, so if you put the shorter person in the aisle seat, they have a decent view around the railing. Here’s a view from this seat. The railing is out of frame, to the viewer’s right. Cliquer pour agrandir:
I’m selling them for what I paid, $100, or (considering the Canucks are playing tomorrow night and it’s short notice) the best offer I receive in the next, say, eight hours.
Don’t worry, I had no idea who she was until last week either. It turns out she’s a Paraguayan lingerie model (that site is moderately unsafe for work and has cheesy auto-playing music). However, she recently rose to fame (or, at least Internet fame) as an eager fan of Paraguay’s World Cup team. She’s been photographed in a rather snug Paraguay jersey cheering fervently for her nation’s team. Her outfit apparently had no pockets, as her phone (a Nokia E71, in case you were wondering) was conspicuously nestled in her bosom.
Here is the most safe for work photo I could find of her:
She must have a savvy publicist. It’s an obvious strategy, I suppose, to position an attractive model at an event in close proximity to many (male) photographers. The bonus here has been Paraguay’s surprising run of success. They beat Japan to get to the quarter-finals. They face Spain on Saturday, and they’re likely to lose.
Millions of fans are hoping otherwise, of course. Because Ms. Riqulme has promised to run naked through the streets of Asuncion in the unlikely event that Paraguay wins the World Cup. This is an another savvy PR trick, riffing on a similar promise that famous (and, I should add, portly and middle-aged) footballing legend and Argentinian coach Diego Maradona made.
Unfortunately, the odds favour Maradona’s nude run.
I didn’t really understand the prominence of music during the World Cup until I lived in Ireland. Typically, each World Cup has its own song–here, for example, is Ricky Martin’s song for France ’98–and many nations produce a song for their team as well. This is England’s song from 2006. Surprisingly, England’s Football Association opted not to produce a song for 2010.
This year is no different. I’ve been a little confused, because I’ve heard two songs prominently associated with the event. First, there’s “Wavin’ Flag”, a song by Somali-Canadian artist K’naan.
It’s been made an unofficial anthem of this year’s World Cup courtesy of Coca-Cola’s marketing campaign. Here’s a quieter version, recorded on CBC’s Q. I’ve heard K’naan sing live a couple of times on TV, and, charitably, he’s struggled.
The song is still used today almost everywhere in Africa by soldiers, policemen, boy scouts, sportsmen and their supporters, usually during training or for rallying. It is also widely used in schools throughout the continent especially in Cameroon as a marching song and almost everyone in the country knows the chorus of the song by heart. The song was also popular in Colombia where it was known as “The Military” and brought to the country by West African DJs.
Neither of the new songs are classics–they’re catchy bits of pop bubblegum which ought to last for the tournament, and then be scooped up by the Ghost of Pop Culture Past.
Regular readers will note that lately I’ve become interested in information visualization and infographics. I have no more than a layman’s knowledge, but I’m a huge fan of how a great infographic (whether interactive or not) can succinctly illustrate a whole bushel (that’s right, I said ‘bushel’) of information.
The latest example is this amazing World Cup schedule. It gracefully enables you to explore a complex schedule–32 teams, 30 days, 10 venues, 64 games–along a number of axes.
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m pretty psyched for the forthcoming tournament. More so, even, than our recent Winter Olympics. Given that neither Canada (no surprise there) and Ireland (Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the saints) made the finals, I’m supporting Cote D’Ivoire this year. They’re in the Group of Death, but I’m hoping that playing on their home continent for the first time will enable them to get out of the group.
Are you going to watch the World Cup? What team are you supporting?
Occasionally I have odd little ideas. Sometimes I actually do them, sometimes I just write about them or sometimes I disregard them out of hand. The other day I had the notion to create a Twibbon–a little add-on to your Twitter and Facebook avatars–for Ivory Coast, the World Cup team I’ve decided to support. You can see it on my Twitter avatar.
Then I thought it would be fun to make avatars for the other 31 teams participating in the World Cup. James helped out, and we went to Photoshop Town. If you, like me and most of the rest of the planet, are excited about the upcoming tournament, you can find your team and Twibbon it up.
These can pretty much be presented without comment. It’s really fate that’s cruel in this first one (courtesy of James Mirtle):
There’s no question as to who is cruel in this second video. Those are some serious anger management issues.
The player’s name is Elizabeth Lambert–here’s an ESPN report (auto-playing video ahead) about the match. They rightfully raise two questions about these incidents: why aren’t the teammates of the fouled player standing up to Lambert, and how did she make it through the whole game with only a yellow card?
UPDATE: Phillip sent along this New York Times article in which Ms. Lambert responds to the video. The reporter goes pretty easy on her.
I just read this silly National Post piece about Wayne Gretzky’s interest in his team moving to southern Ontario. The article contains a throwaway reference to the Great One’s ties to California:
“Why would Wayne want to go back to Canada?” asked Hollywood agent and friend Marv Dauer. “He’s been in L.A. for 21 years. His kids are in school here – one of them is a star football player who plays with Will Smith’s kid and Joe Montana’s kid – and his wife obviously likes the good weather.
That’s quite the pedigree. I went looking for confirmation, and found this great ESPN piece about the three superstars attending the same high school football game. It turns out that Joe’s son plays on an opposing team in the same league, but it’s still a charming story.
I’m a longtime player of sports games on the PC, and a recovering technical writer. So I take an interest in the manuals that accompany the games I play. As most gamers will attest, game manuals are usually awful. They’re under-written, incomplete and, for narrative games, spend too much time on useless back story.
This problem is usually solved by the far-superior in-game tutorial. Learning by playing is much more effective than learning by reading. There are few tutorials, however, in sports games. That’s fine, because usually gamers know how to play the sport in question, but not always.
When I worked in Ireland, we often played PlayStation games around the office at lunch time (or, you know, other times). A favourite game (and I don’t think it was my Canadian influence) was EA Sports NHL 2002. Most of the Irish guys playing the game had never actually seen a hockey game, either live or on TV. Their understanding of the term “hockey” was strictly verbal. They had a vague idea what offside was from football (i.e. soccer), but no sense of what the icing rule was about. In any case, they mostly played with those rules turned off.
I was just glancing through the manual of a reasonably new soccer (i.e. football) game, and encountered this section:
These are team-wide tactics which you, as their godly overseer, can instruct them to execute. Though I’ve casually watched soccer for years, I only have the vaguest idea of what these are. Wing Play? Flat back? And ’3rd Man Release’ sounds downright dirty. The manual doesn’t include an explanation of what these tactics are for, how they work or when you might use them. It assumes, like icing and offside, that I already understand them.
From talking to educators and influencers, we’ve learned that our videos are often used to introduce a subject – to get everyone on the same page at the beginning of a class, workshop, etc. Recently, as part of our planning for 2009, we came up with a model that helps tell this story. We call it the A-to-Z Scale.
The scale represents the path to learning a subject. On the left side are the basic, fundamental ideas. On the right, the details and applications of the ideas.
Thinking about sports games manuals, they’re really missing the Gs and the Hs of the games they’re simulating. Most players will understand that you throw the ball in the basket, or hit the ball into the hole with the stick. However, many casual players may not understand the nuances of the neutral-zone trap or the dreaded third man release.
Do we need to grasp these details to enjoy the game? Probably not (though the jargon in an American football game is pretty thick and commonplace), but all it would take is an extra couple of pages in the manual or a game tutorial to explain these concepts. I’d imagine that the developer looks at both of those as cost centres, though, so I’d expect they feel that less is more. What do you think?
