apeman

You'll have to take my word that I conceived of this post before the WC began and am only now getting around to writing it. If you choose not to believe that apology, just accept it as an emotional look into the dark heart of a disappointed fan the day after his home side got bounced from the tournament and the evening after a player he had long considered the hope of his club franchise took a quiet exit from a tournament that he never managed to affect too terribly much.

The knockout stage is set and the time has come for all Pandagoalians to get their picks in! You can check out the brackets at Fifa.com; consider this an open thread for everyone to go on record. I'll use comments to, to avoid influencing others from the bully pulpit.

Sometimes being a soccer fan in the US can get you down. If you ever mention that you're a fan of the game, people feel it's their duty to make some wisecrack about how stupid and boring it is. If you have a lot of conservative friends as I do in Richmond, those wisecracks often have a personal, acidic edge to them.

Bonjour and Happy Father's Day, Pandagoalians! I just spend the last two days traveling with my family to Quebec City. We're finally settled in and drinking wine, so I'm back in action. Hope to get a real post (other than this technical business) up tomorrow, or possibly drunkenly later this evening.

This is sort of my specialty, so hopefully I won't make any errors, but you see errors in these things all the time, even on official sites, so if I do screw it up let me know in comments and I'll update. The scenarios are in order from most to least likely. I'd give you odds but then you'd go and gamble and lose and blame me.