Well, That Certainly Changes My Views on Sweatpants

Every once in a while, withe varying degrees of success, the rest of the world makes a concerted effort to get Americans to care about Soccer*.

*Or 'Football', if you're the rest of the planet

Traditionally American's respond to those efforts with a mighty shrug and a, 'yea, that's fine but I'm good drinking cold thin beer and not using the metric system' and that's that for the discussion.

This year Brazil tried the hitherto untested approach of celebrating the World Cup by crushing and displacing hundreds of thousands of poor people and allowing the organizers to roll naked in cash while they built four additional stadiums above what the competition actually needed on the principle that there is nothing American's like more than arbitrarily abusing poor people while failing to oversee large projects in any way.

And this was a moderate success for a week or two, but then the competition became sort of all about Germany and we still have some mixed feelings about that and so we all just sort of stopped talking about it.

In a desperate attempt to keep the ball rolling (no pun intended) the BBC world service threw in a few public interest pieces on their NPR news broadcast, one of which was about how Manchester United's poor record was taking its toll on their sponsorship deals.*

*One can only assume that they were working on the theory that if you could somehow tie it all back to Corporations throwing money around then the US might care.

This was all well and good, until the news service, speaking in proper received pronunciation, referred to a contract the team had with the sportswear company 'Adidas'.  What was unfortunate was that he pronounced it 'Added Ass.'  As in, 'After eating fourteen buckets of chicken and thirteen live babies, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia realized that he had accumulated twenty pounds of added ass.'

Which is, one would think, the exact opposite of the effect that sportswear might have.

See, this is why we don't care about Soccer.