“If you’ll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you’ll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.”
— Berke Breathed, on his old comic strip Bloom County
First, the bad news: the Los Angeles Sol, the team with far and away the best regular season record and the playoff runner-up of Women’s Professional Soccer’s 2009 inaugural season, has folded.
Next, the so-so news: this bad news for L.A. might not be as bad as it looks at first glance for WPS as a whole. Basically, the Sol’s demise came as result of the club’s uniquely bizarre ownership situation, and everyone knew from get-go that this end was always a possibility for the L.A. franchise.
LA's loss, Philly's gain
AEG, the ownership group of the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer, got the Los Angeles Sol up and running last year. However, AEG made it very clear from the start that getting the club up and running was all it would do. AEG’s involvement was to last for just one year, and after that it would sell the team to a local ownership group and be done. When the sale fell through last week so close to the start of the 2010 preseason March 1, the team had to be folded.
If an established club that predated WPS like the Boston Breakers or Washington Freedom folded, or if one of the other teams saw its owners unexpectedly bail, it would have been a disaster for the league. That isn’t what happened, though. Instead, L.A.’s owners bailed exactly when they said they would bail right from the start. This is definitely a hit to the league, but certainly not an unexpected nor catastrophic one. Even with the Sol’s demise, the 2010 edition of WPS will actually have one more team that it did in the inaugural 2009 season. A dispersal draft of the Sol’s players was held yesterday.
Which brings me to the good news: we got their goalie — 2009 WPS All-Star and Canadian National Team member Karina LeBlanc, as well as the 25th overall pick from the 2010 WPS College Draft (also a defender). Suddenly, an already strong-looking Philadelphia defense looks even stronger than it already did. Going to southeastern Pennsylvania actually works out to be a pretty convenient job move for LeBlanc, who is also an assistant coach at Rutgers University. It should also make things interesting when the Independence plays its first-ever preseason exhibition match against Rutgers March 7.
One the whole, 2010 is looking to be an incredible year for soccer fans around here, as long as Women’s Professional Soccer survives and Major League Soccer’s owners and players get their collective heads out of their butts and get a new collective bargaining agreement in place. Both the Independence of WPS and the Philadelphia Union of MLS look like they’ll be a lot better than typical expansion teams, provided they get a chance to actually take the field. Until those issues are resolved, that’s what worries me.
By the way, if you’re wondering why the heck you should care about the the future of professional women’s soccer, read this, and this one, too.
Update (2/9/10): It looks as though WPS is continuing to work on getting a permanent ownership group for a Los Angeles franchise, and that it has every intention of getting a team back in L.A. in 2011.
I apologize for yet another lame blog post of no substance, but I figured I’d post the links to download Philadelphia Union’s 2010 inaugural season schedule that showed up on the club’s Facebook feed a couple of hours ago in case anybody wants them.
The schedule is available in iCal (.ics) format (for iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, Mozilla Thunderbird with Lightning, Outlook, and a heap of other PIM programs) here: http://bit.ly/aYx4kO
It’s available in XML format here: http://bit.ly/aVPZ8w
It’s in HTML here: http://bit.ly/avvkKq
That is all.
The kids who made this thing are geniuses:
I live in a very conservative, deeply religious, and rather rural area. That combination of factors means one thing: there are lots of roadside signs emblazoned with some random vindictive King James Version Bible verse telling passerby to repent or go to Hell.
Most of them hang over or under the mailbox in front of farms, and they are generally permanent signs that appear to be professionally made. Most often, the sings will feature one verse on the obverse and another verse on the reverse. They’ve been a regular feature of the landscape of the Pennsylvania Dutch country for as long as I can remember.
However, nothing lasts forever. Change is coming to Lancaster County, and I encountered evidence of this region’s social evolution while driving along a back road several days ago. For the first time ever, I saw an angry Bible verse road sign, not with a different verse on each side, but with a brimstone-stoked King James verse on one side, and the same thing in Spanish on the other side.
Can’t you just feel the approaching enlightenment? Lancaster County is slowly becoming multicultural in its passively-aggressive vindictive obnoxiousness. That’s progress, right?
The two year-old and I are fencing with empty wrapping paper rolls. I’ve taught him to say, “En garde!“
Like many people, we keep a list of necessary items to purchase from the grocery store to ensure we don’t end up buying a lot of junk we don’t need. When we run out of something, it gets added to the list, and once enough stuff is on it to justify making a run to the store, I go get everything. Sometimes this method can generate a pretty random list. Here is how it started off a couple of days ago:
If this combination seems strange to you, you’ve obviously never made a frozen waffle ceviche cured in ice melter and wrapped in tape. Yummy!
It’s official. Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field needs a courtroom in the basement, just like the old Veterans Stadium had. If you don’t think so, just check out the following footage of the stupid, loutish motherf — oops, I mean Philadelphia Eagles fans — in action during Sunday’s home game against the San Francisco 49ers, one day after a blizzard hit Philadelphia.
Apparently a couple of 49ers fans had the temerity to exist, so a whole section brutally assaulted them with snowballs. If you recall, the Veterans Stadium courtroom came into being following the snowball plagued “Bounty Bowl II.”
What a bunch of classy troglodytes. My solution to this clearly recurring problem is simple: if it snows in Philadelphia, the Eagles have to play on the road, regardless of whether they have a home game scheduled. Period.
One would think that the good people of Gävle, Sweden would have gotten the hint by now. Their 43 foot high straw Yule/Christmas goat was just set alight yet again. It’s been burned down 24 times since the first goat was erected in 1966. That one was burned down, too. The goat has also suffered dismemberment and was once even run over with a car. Here’s the news report from when it was burned in 2005 as well.
A webcam showing the current burned out goat is available here. The now deceased goat also has its own blog, as well its own Twitter feed.
The goat’s final tweet was: “I’m gone dear friends! Someone se me on fire at 3 AM. Terrible hot under my lovely snow blanket! So sad today. Farewell & Merry Christmas…”
Even weirder, the goat’s penultimate tweet was tangentially related to Tiger Woods: “Elin Nordegren (still married to T Woods) might be on her way to Gävle to celebrate Christmas with her mom at the castle. Twin sister here!”
Still, the goat seems to have a sense of humor about its travails, having also tweeted, “Santa Claus and a ginger bread guy set me on fire a few years ago – using flaming arrows. The competition is hard!”
I don’t know about you, but I would have gladly paid to see Santa Claus and a gingerbread man shoot a giant straw goat full of flaming arrows.
Maybe it’s time that Gävle takes a different approach to the goat’s struggle to exist. Embrace the annual arson. Turn it into a festival. Just imagine: BURNING GOAT!
Captain Obvious, also known as Dr. Brian Primack, says, “Students who listen to music with the most references to marijuana are almost twice as likely to have used the drug than their peers whose musical tastes favor songs less focused on substance use,” following a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.
What is not yet known is the following: “Although it may be that heavy exposure to music about marijuana causes marijuana smoking, it may also be that those who smoke marijuana seek out music with lyrics related to marijuana,” Primack said. So of course there will need to be more studies, for which I’m sure the NIH will gladly pony up more cash.
Your tax dollars hard at work.
