Soccer Season, Fall 2012

We played our first game of the fall season today, played quite well, in fact. I managed to keep a clean sheet, helped a great deal by my team, who spent most of the game hammering at the gates of the other team's goal. We won 3-0. The other team was gracious and played well, they just couldn't impose their will on us.

Longer-term readers of the blog might remember me mentioning muscle-tits and other characters from previous seasons of play in this league. Well, it appears that muscle-tits and his team are no longer allowed to play in the league, something I must say was a bit longer than it should have been in coming. That said, I am content with the league's decision. The reason I say it was a bit too long coming was that Muscle-tits had an incident with the refs at one game. Another incident with a different team led one ref to ask the league to bar a player from play. When he didn't get a prompt response, he walked away from the league. Well-liked by his peers, many of our other refs walked away too. I understand the response, I just wish people were a bit more patient all around.

So now the league needs referees. They pay, if anyone reads this and is interested.

Ah, well, one must take the good with the bad. At least muscle-tits won't be screaming invective at me or anyone else in the league. Hyper-competitive pricks can find somewhere else to masturbate upon their self-recognized magnificence, I'm playing soccer!

Damn, But We Got It Easy

Watching Sundance today and this documentary rolls on, Heavy Metal in Baghdad . The film follows a Heavy Metal band called Acrassicauda, which means 'black scorpion' in Arabic.

These kids, fans of all things metal, started a thrash metal band in the midst of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.  They had a small following even then.  They continued to play after the US invaded, managing to put on one show.  Then the shop they practiced in was destroyed  by a bomb and things became even more difficult.  The band scattered to the different nations that would accept them, but the core came together again in Damascus, and put on one show...

The film illustrates, better than any other program I have seen, how hard it is for artists, or for that matter, regular folk, to just live their lives in the world's war zones.

They just want to play.  They just want to pursue their dreams.

They thrash the metal, bang the drum, and raise the hairs on my arms: