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 have a small problem. I really like the World Cup. Yet the games are played in the morning, with the last game finishing up shortly after lunch. I sometimes watch one game in the morning, but I have to record the rest and watch later in the day as time permits. I also occasionally do this for hockey games, particularly eastern ones that begin at 4:00pm here on the West Coast.
Of course, I spend a lot of time online, working and playing in the real-time, flow-oriented social web. So there’s a high risk of my learning the outcome of sports events before I get to watch them. I’ve heard similar complaints from people who time-shift television shows–the finale of Lost, for example, or the season premiere of True Blood.
I address this problem by going very light on Twitter, Facebook and, uh, high-risk blogs until I’ve watched whatever I recorded.
Smart Filters to Avoid Disappointment
There arevariousapps which offer muting functionality for individual keywords or users. What I could really use is a view of Twitter and Facebook that magically removes all messages related to, say, the World Cup.
How would we achieve this? The simplest route would be using bundles of related keywords as a filter, maybe gathered through a crowdsourced process. For the World Cup, we might block all country names and team nicknames for starters. Then maybe common terms like ‘goal’, ‘keeper’ and so forth. Next you’d probably want to block all player names. This presents an immediate problem, as you’re filtering out a bunch of common names like Lee, Kim, James and Green.
Ideally, I guess you want a service that can algorithmically discern between “Blimey, England keeper Robert Green concedes an easy goal” and “Blimey, our England office is never going to make our goal of going green this quarter.” Presumably the service would track a user’s historic data, too, and adjust the prediction based on the likelihood that they’re talking about soccer.
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.
For reasons I can’t quite grasp, I enjoy watching the FIFA World Cup more than any other sporting event. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the most-watched sporting event (and, quite, possibly, any event) in the world. The final is as close as I’ll probably ever get to the shared experience of the Moon landing. Or maybe it’s just that the football/soccer is terrific, and the stakes are as high as they get.
It’s got nothing to do with national pride, because Canada’s men’s team has only ever qualified once, in 1986. They were knocked out in the earliest ‘group phase’, and in fact never scored a goal. I live in hope that they’ll at least make it back to the World Cup in my lifetime.
For those unfamiliar with the tournament, 32 national teams qualify. This time around, those 32 are whittled down through regional competitions from 204 member nations over a year and a half leading up to the World Cup finals. Here’s where they come from:
Europe: 13 places
Africa: 5 places (and South Africa, the host nation)
South America: 4 or 5 places
Asia: 4 or 5 places
North, Central American and Caribbean: 3 or 4 places
Oceania: 0 or 1 place
The selection process is incredibly baroque–it’s worthy of a Common Craft video. However, this Wikipedia article does an exquisite job of laying out all the permutations, and staying up to date with the ongoing matches. If you’re supporting a particular nation, or are remotely interested in the competition, this (combined, perhaps, with the newly-revamped FootyTube) is a terrific way to keep abreast of each nation’s shifting fortunes.
To answer my own question, as of today, only five teams have qualified for the tournament: Australia, Japan, South Korea, Netherlands and the hosts, South Africa.
A quick OCD aside: there are actually 208 FIFA members–Brunei, Laos, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines failed to register for the tournament. Wikipedia lists 203 sovereign states, so now I’m curious about the members on the FIFA list who aren’t on the list of sovereign states (and vice versa). A few examples of non-countries on FIFA’s list include the Faroe Islands, Palestine and Bermuda. I’d be curious to find an exhaustive comparison of the two lists.
