If You Hate Soccer

...you're about to be really pissed off about large swaths of the content on this blog, because the World Cup starts on Friday and hooooo boy there is going to be some soccer postin'. Michigan news will be relayed as appropriate as well, of course, but prepare for World Cup stuff.

The latest piece of evidence that the Internet is a wonderful thing came about from my perusal of a NYT article on Barca wizard Ronaldinho. Therein I found this passage:

Ronaldinho received the ball in the center of midfield, 15 yards from the Chelsea penalty area. Around him were four Chelsea defenders. Ronaldinho left one of them for dead and avoided two more. The fourth, the last man standing between him and glory, was John Terry. Ronaldinho's response was to do what he does better than anybody else: the unthinkable. Having mesmerized the Chelsea ranks with the speed of his feet and the swerve of his dancing hips, he met brute force with brute force — and won. He shouldered the English Goliath — perfectly fairly — to the ground. And it was from this abject vantage that London's finest looked on, a picture of defeat, as the samba-loving Brazilian whipped the ball low and true, past the Chelsea goalkeeper and into the net.

Naturally, I wanted to see this thing for myself. A quick "Ronaldinho Chelsea" search later on YouTube and I have the thing in Spanish, French, English, something I don't recognize, the form of a fake Mastercard ad backed by the Decemberists, and Arabic... oh, Arabic:



When I heard the Arabic equivalent for "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAL," I quite literally burst from my seat and ran into the next room, propelled by mad laughter. The score is now Internet 1,220,450, Cotton Gin 0.