The World Cup: Shut Up Already.

What would it take to get me to watch a World Cup match? Easy. Hold in it Glasgow, pipe free gin into the stands, and issue kilts. That way, there’s at least an even chance of something more entertaining than the scoreless ennui of soccer breaking out, like say, the cry of a thousand slurred brogues rising from a chundering mass of corpulent, bottle-swinging hooligans.

There are several reasons why I’ve found the coverage of the World Cup especially tedious this year, beginning with the fact that with all of the bots and filters I’ve set to pick up “North Korea” stories — not to mention the vast network of OFK informants, thank you! — soccer has never been this hard for me to ignore. I did think this was funny, though:

[source; hat tip to Dan O’C]

But the coverage of North Korea’s play at the World Cup has been unusually tedious and grating for all of the things a thousand small minds have written, all based on an idea so stupid it should be grounds for court-ordered sterilization: that politics should be kept out of sports, except when it isn’t. Meaning, we politely turn our blind eyes to the tears of the grieving families of the Cheonan dead and steel our indifference to the dying in Kim Jong Il’s prison camps while his Goebbelsian minions stage farces like this (more), haggle over venues for political reasons, and dragoon players into service as propagandists.

Surely if anything is worth that compromise with the familiar companionship of evil and stupidity, it can’t be a game with the Hot Action Quotient of a Tom Cruise marriage.