School is Almost Upon Us

8/24/2010 – 10:56 am

school
And summer has nearly evaporated. Summers always promise much fun and usually they deliver, but not without the added stress of having something planned most weekends, the routine of packing and unpacking, and squeezing the daily grind into five days instead of seven. All of this is compounded with a baby too. I’m looking forward to having a standard routine as well. I’m not very good at getting intellectual work done in small pockets of time (15-30 minute unpredictable windows) and by 8:00 pm I’m pretty exhausted. Along with watching Grey on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and putting in many shifts the other days, I haven’t gotten nearly as much done as I would have hoped. Such is life.

While I haven’t produced much writing wise, I have read quite a bit both on creative writing pedagogy as well on video games and gaming. In the past 48 hours I sent an abstract to a call for papers on digital role-playing games, and I also sent a paper proposal to a conference on new media and teaching writing. While I’m not sure either the abstract or the paper proposal are direct hits (in the former I talk about how digital RPGs can be used rather than giving a deep analysis of games themselves, and in the latter I’m speaking about creative writing not composition) I figure it’s well worth a try. Creative writing in general tends not to garner much attention outside creative writing circles, and creative writing circles tend to focus predominantly on issues of craft. I’m doing a cross-disciplinary thing focusing on using digital media and creative writing, and not much out there explicitly asks for this kind of work. Over all, that’s probably a good thing.

gaming
In brief gaming news, I’m seriously questioning whether I’ll buy FIFA 11 this holiday season. I’m not quite sure why FIFA 10 receives such rave reviews unless it’s based on online play, which I don’t do. I’m fed up with a lot of the gameplay, especially the lopsided refereeing (as you go up in difficulty the referee gives you cards for any tackle and lets the opposition maul you) and the utterly random results from simulated games. For as much as EA sports does to keep the focus firmly on the European leagues and their big teams, I don’t understand how over the course of a season a team like West Brom can finish in the top five of the Premier League while Man Ure finishes ninth—a simply impossible scenario.

Also, I’m tired of the league always playing out the same way. Whatever team I choose starts the league slowly, it looks like I’m well out of the title race after 15 or so games, yet somehow I put together a string of results at the tail end of the season as the league leaders collapse, and my team wins the league with points to spare. The narrative stays the same no matter the league, no matter what team I choose, and it has been this way for years. I also am pretty sick of EA not featuring more than a few international teams from any region but Europe. Pro Evo Soccer beats EA hands down in this category, even though they don’t have nearly the same kind of player and team licensing. As I grow older and crabbier, I find that I’d rather play with anonymous players than the over-hyped, spoiled superstars I already read about every day. Maybe Pro Evo is the way to go after all…

I officially gave up on Dragon Age: Origins and picked up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year edition for $20 on Half.com. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m really interested in playing it. I did most of my reading on gaming and role-playing after having finished Fallout 3, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how some of my developing theories about RPG character creation and world-building fare when I’m discovering a game for the first time.

Current Mood: Flat Affect from Parenting |

By Trent | Posted in Gaming, School, Teaching | Comments (0)

Things I Did During Summer Vacation

8/16/2010 – 12:42 pm


We just got home from an action-packed vacation to Colorado. Amy had a conference in Snowmass Village, CO so we extended the trip through the week, spending time in Aspen and Estes Park, the home of Rocky Mountain National Park. In chronological order, here are some memorable moments:

  • Riding the gondolas up to hike above Snowmass Village and Aspen
  • Watching a bluegrass band perform at over 10,000 feet
  • Fly fishing the Roaring Fork river and having a nice rainbow trout on the line before it twisted away from the net
  • Introducing Grey to his first goats and cows at the Snowmass Rodeo
  • Helping a couple and their dog after they slid off the road at Independence Pass and totaled their car*
  • Eating on the deck of our rented home in Estes Park, looking out at Rocky Mountain NP
  • Hiking up to Lake Haiyaha past Bear Lake, Nymph Lake, and Dream Lake at RMNP
  • Seeing a moose alongside the trail at RMNP and a pair of elk with huge racks outside our home in Estes Park

Overall it was a wonderful trip and Grey is proving to be a very patient and resilient hiker. He loves the outdoors, although he’d prefer walking on his own two feet than riding in the backpack. Soon, little buddy, soon!

* – We drove from Aspen to Estes Park via Independence Pass and the weather got worse and worse as we climbed. It began raining hard at the top of the pass and the rain turned to hail and ice. My father-in-law was driving about 15 mph, slower around curves. A car passed us going about 25 or 30 and we commented on how it was way too fast for conditions. We were still talking about it when we rounded the next corner and saw tire tracks veer across the center line and disappear into the ravine.

Bob pulled the minivan to the side of the road and Amy, her dad, and I left grandma with the baby to double-check. The car had indeed slid off the road and smashed into a cluster of trees about thirty feet down the ravine, shattering the windshield and totaling the car. Incredibly, both the driver, his wife, and their blind dog emerged alive and without any (apparent) injuries beyond minor scrapes, but they were in serious shock. A nice couple made room in their SUV for them, and we headed down the mountain. Despite a half-dozen people heading in either direction saying they would call as soon as they had cell service, apparently none did. We stopped at the first small hunting lodge we found and Amy called emergency services, who were unaware of the accident. The better part of 20 minutes later we were passed by a police car, an ambulance, and a fire truck heading up the pass from Leadville.

While certainly not a highlight of the trip, it will be something we will all remember for the rest of our lives. Although I do try to drive responsibly in inclement weather, this accident served as a sickening reminder of how little it takes to lose control of the vehicle. It’s also nothing short of an engineering miracle that the couple not only survived the crash—they had to be going at least 30 mph and plummeted about 30 feet down the ravine, undoubtedly getting airborne in the process–but they walked away. They looked to be in their mid-70′s, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that they’ll live to tell about it.

Current Mood: Kinda sad to be home |

By Trent | Posted in Travel | Comments (0)

More Reading, More CW Pedagogy, More Gaming

8/10/2010 – 2:06 pm


Reading upon reading upon reading on creative writing pedagogy and gaming. I’ve got at least three decent paper ideas that I should start writing any day now (one on creative writing pedagogy in the digital age, one on role-playing games and CW, and one on video games and CW) and there are plenty more bubbling in the background. If I’m not careful, this could expand into a book-length (or dissertation-length) document.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m reading a ton of fascinating stuff on CW pedagogy, much of it I heartily disagree with. Though it’s an oversimplification to divide the positions into two camps, I’ll do it anyway: there seems to be a craft-centric, pro-workshop camp and a camp that thoroughly questions this traditional approach to teaching CW. I’m firmly in the latter camp. In short, my position is that craft should be one element (and not necessarily the most important element) taught in CW courses. Why? Plenty of reasons: it reinforces the notion that some students are naturally “better” writers and discourages the rest; it reinforces the notion that publication is the be-all, end-all for judging a piece of writing’s worth; it elides discussion of the materiality of texts and the act of writing; it places the instructor in the role as the arbiter of taste in the classroom. I’m sure there are more, but those are some that come to mind.

So if we don’t focus solely on craft in CW classrooms, what else do we focus on? Well, for one we can develop students’ digital literacies by having them compose different texts in different media, and in doing so work in unestablished genres. We can focus on the rhetorical qualities of a piece of writing, and address some of the race/class/gender assumptions in a given poem or story. When we focus solely on craft, we lose a lot. In the end, students will probably have a better idea of how to write a “good” poem or story and how to identify elements that make a particular poem or story “good,” using what’s been published as the yardstick to define “good.” But to what end? Ultimately this a pretty conservative, self-affirming teaching strategy suggesting that appreciation of literature is important in and of itself, and that’s that.

The CW pedagogy I have in mind, in theory, does more for students. Lessons about rhetoric and social, historical, and material conditions can be transported to other types of reading and writing. It helps develops technical skills too, and draws awareness to how craft functions across different media. Or to put it another way, CW instructors can either see ourselves as fighting the good fight, taking up posts on the ramparts of Good Writing against the semi-literate barbarians of poor taste, or we can put the obsession with craft on the back burner and choose to approach CW courses as a way to engage with students’ ideas and creativity in a more open, fluid, negotiated way that will be far more beneficial that how to appreciate a poem from a (or an alleged) master.

Anyway, here’s a (sloppily formatted) list of some of the stuff I’ve been reading. I really need to start building a running bibliography of everything I’m reading, since I plan on citing so much of it in the near future. For what it’s worth:

  • Amato, Joe, and H. Kassia Fleisher. “Reforming Creative Writing Pedagogy: History as Knowledge, Knowledge as Activism.” Electronic Book Review, 2001.
  • Bizzaro, Patrick. “Research and Reflection in English Studies: The Special Case of Creative Writing.” College English 66.3 (Jan. 2004): 294-309.
  • Heliö, Satu. “Role-Playing: A Narrative Experience and a Mindset.” Beyond role and play, 2004.
  • McFarland, Ron. “An Apologia for Creative Writing.” College English 55.1 (January 1993): 28-45.
    –. “Ron McFarland Responds.” College English 56.2 (February 1994): 220-222.
  • Ritter, Kelly, and Stephanie Vanderslice. Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2007. Print.
  • Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative across Media: the Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004. Print.
  • Tychsen, Anders . “Role playing games: comparative analysis across two media platforms.” Proceedings of the 3rd Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment, p.75-82, December 04-06, 2006, Perth, Australia.
  • Sanders, Scott Russell. “The Writer in the University.” ADE Bulletin 99, Fall 1991. 22-28.
  • Tychsen, Anders, Newman, K., Brolund, T., and Hitchens, M. 2007a. “Cross-format analysis of the gaming experience in multi-player role playing games.” In Proceedings Of DIGRA 2007 (Tokyo).
  • Wandor, Michelene. The Author Is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.


As you can see, I’m still grappling with the notion of narrative, game play, and creative writing. I borrowed Dragon Age: Origins from a friend because so many fans and critics raved about it, but I’ve put in maybe 10 hours and I’ve been left cold. I’d characterize game play as short bits of action followed by excruciatingly long cut-scenes that reveal more of the story. It’s an interesting attempt at fusing play with narrative, but for me it fails on both accounts. If I’m playing a game, I want more game; if I want story, I’ll read a book. Despite claims that the player helps shape the world through play, it feels very much like a “pearls on a string” story where the player more or less goes through the motions, revealing a pre-scripted plot. Perhaps I haven’t given the game enough time to open up, but the game play (especially combat) doesn’t offer enough to hook me either. It’s a lose-lose for the kind of game I’m interested in, especially because the main story offers very little originality, blatantly ripping off Lord of the Rings with a small twist here and there. It does encourage me to write something about how games ought to be redefining the limits of genre rather than simply restating all the old tropes and trappings from the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

The more I read about gaming and role-playing, the more I love Fallout 3. Alas, I’ve pretty much exhausted what the game has to offer and wasn’t too impressed with the add-ons Point Lookout and Broken Steel. Fallout: New Vegas doesn’t come out until sometime later this fall, and I’m also not digging Bioshock as much as I hoped, because it’s another pearls-on-a-string games, like Medal of Honor or any of a long line of excellent level-based games. It’s just not what I’m into at the moment.

So I’m strongly considering springing for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which has been called the spiritual predecessor to Fallout 3, only with a fantasy rather than post-apocalyptic theme. I’d also like to compare these games with Mass Effect, a deep-space RPG to compare player creation and world exploration in the early moments in the game.

It’s research. Really, it is.

Current Mood: Did I mention I’m on vacation? |

By Trent | Posted in Gaming, Reading, School, Teaching | Comments (2)

Things I Have Been Doing That Aren’t Blogging

7/29/2010 – 11:33 am

It’s funny: with the World Cup over and the limericks drying up, I’ve hardly visited this space in almost three weeks. Considering that I’m the author of this blog, I should probably remedy that. But baby-watching takes up a lot of time and I’ve been busy with other pursuits. In order, they are:


Reading. Very little of it would be called “pleasure reading,” though I’ve enjoyed most it. Only a couple of books on creative writing pedagogy, but mostly it’s been on gaming and digital pedagogy. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game is on deck next along with Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan and Unit Operations by Ian Bogost. But I’ve been reading a lot of articles, many from the journals Computers and Composition and Game Studies on, you guessed it, writing pedagogy and gaming. Why so much on writing pedagogy (first) and gaming (second)? See below.

Also, I decided to keep my Kindle 2 but I won’t say it was an easy choice. I wavered on sending it back during the 30-day return period a couple times. Before I get to the negatives, let me say that I really enjoy reading on it. The underlining function and note taking is almost perfect, especially when the underlined sections automatically get copied to a text file that can be transferred to the computer. I also like how the Kindle comes free from any management software; you connect to a PC with the USB cable and it shows up like an external hard drive. It makes transferring files a snap.

Sort of. My biggest, near-deal-breaking complaint? The needless difficulty in getting non-Amazon purchases onto the thing. I’m impressed with the free 3G coverage so you can download any Amazon Kindle book from most urban areas, but I wanted a reader for academic articles, not the latest paperback thrillers. After much (too much) trial and error, I figured out a system where I can download a PDF or HTML file, process it using the third-party application Mobireader (which lets you set the metadata and does a nice job formatting), then importing it to another third-party application called Calibre (which is an e-book organizer), and then getting it onto the Kindle. It was a pain to figure out, but the process goes smoothly now that I know what I’m doing. If I save up a half-dozen files, I can convert and transfer them in five minutes or so.

I also don’t like how none of the nifty features (like having your items or notes backed up to the Amazon site) work unless you buy Kindle content from Amazon. Yes, I realize that Amazon wants to make money on the books, not necessarily on the device, but it still cheeses me off. It’s so close to being a perfect solution for me, but the inconvenience factor is pretty significant. I keep telling myself that $189 isn’t so bad (even if a new Wi-Fi only model is coming soon for $50 less) but it’s the principle of the thing.


Okay, so it’s not school per se, but kind of. I’m teaching Intro to Creative Writing entirely online in the fall and there’s a significant amount of prep work to do to make administering the course tolerable. I’ve also been fooling around with Jing, a free screen capture software, to do weekly introductions to course material. It’s pretty cool and I think will work well.

I’m also about 75% done planning my Business Writing course, complete with assignments. Although it might surprise many of my colleagues in creative writing, I’m quite looking forward to it. As I’ve read more pedagogy across sub-disciplines—composition, creative writing, and professional writing—I’ve discovered that 1) I really like to teach in general, and 2) I specifically like to teach writing, in general. Some of my friends would teach creative writing and nothing else if that was a possibility (typically it isn’t), but not me. In fact, I’ve found myself struggling with teaching creative writing over the last couple semesters and how to teach it better going forward. This isn’t to say I think I do a poor job teaching it; students like the course and I get very good evaluations. But I’ve felt like I’m not burrowing deep enough, overturning or challenging students’ ideas about creative writing—or creativity, or writing.

Which brings me back to my reading. Happily, a great deal of the creative writing pedagogy I’ve been reading speaks to the concerns I have. Many critics push back against both the traditional workshop model and using “classic” texts to teach students how creative writing more or less works. While I do think that this workshop model can work (my raving reviews of Clarion attest to that), I don’t think it works very well for the kinds of undergraduate creative writing courses we teach. In part, I think participants in the traditional workshop model benefit if they already have in mind what they want to do and need some help figuring out how to make that work, or work better. That doesn’t describe the majority of my creative writing students at all. A good number of them seemed stumped as to what they want to do, and reading a selection of different short pieces doesn’t seem to inspire them very much.

This is where gaming comes in, specifically role-playing. In role-playing games (either the tabletop dice-rolling D&D of my youth, or deeply immersive, open-world video games like Fallout 3 and others) you create a character from the ground up. You give him/her specific attributes, skills, abilities. You make up a back story for characters and dream up their motivations. Then you set them free in a fictional world, one that also needs to be created from the ground up. You have to think deeply about how your created character would realistically react to certain situations, interactions, confrontations. The “story,” or perhaps the narrative arc we ascribe to a series of temporal events, can’t happen until events have played out, and then we have tons of questions: what would have happened if the character had done X, Y, or Z instead? Would the character react differently next time? How will these decisions impact the character’s future? Quite a lot of this is unknown. Just like life, right? It’s also clear that players (again, whether it’s tabletop or digital gaming) form strong bonds with their created characters and experience a whole range of emotions as their characters progress. It’s the kind of thing we want novice fiction writers to feel as they write stories.

In a nutshell, I’m researching the intersections of gaming, storytelling, and creative writing pedagogy. I’ve proposed a theory-based gaming and creative writing course for the spring semester but I don’t have high hopes it will be approved. What I’ve also learned, somewhat surprisingly, is just how conservative creative writing is as a discipline. There’s an obsession with teaching “craft” as the be-all, end-all for creative writing courses, yet I see this as an extremely limited way to teach creative writing in the twenty-first century. While I don’t object to students producing a well-crafted short story, I don’t see the necessity in using Carver and Cheever and all the rest as a means of getting students there. I also don’t see the need, whether on the production or consumption side, for things like paper.

One battle at a time… Gotta go, baby’s up from his nap.

By Trent | Posted in Reading, School, Teaching | Comments (2)

The Last Limericks of the World Cup

7/29/2010 – 10:34 am

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Much-belated posting of the last limericks of the 2010 World Cup. All apologies to the authors!

“PAUL THE OCTOPUS, VERSION 1″ by Troy Hergenrader
The psychic who swims with the sharks
Finished seven for seven on marks
If the atmosphere suits him
Let’s hope ESPN recruits him
As a replacement for Lalas and Harkes

“PAUL THE OCTOPUS, VERSION 2″ by Troy Hergenrader
This salt water psychic’s sharp mind
Went seven for seven – wunderkind!
He attended no college
Still has more soccer knowledge
Than Lalas and Harkesy combined

“WC 2010 RETROSPECT” by Troy Hergenrader
Though some viewed their play as a drag
The trophy the Spanish did snag
The Dutch ended hacking
And the Germans sent packing
Maradona is still a douche bag

“STATISTICAL ANOMALY” by Dr. Goose
An astute statistician from Grantham
Electrified footballing fandom,
When he published a shocker
That the points scored in soccer
Were so low that the outcomes were random.

By Trent | Posted in * Footie, Limericks, World Cup 2010 | Comments (0)

World Cup Limericks, Final Match and Review

7/16/2010 – 12:14 pm

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“NO GUTS, NO GLORY” by Paul Thompson
Al fin no estuvo el “beautiful game,” (In the end it was not a)
Instead Dutchmen again ashamed,
But pain they did inflict,
Alonso’s ribs so well-kicked,
De Jong like the rest playing without aim.

“GOOD LUCK IN THE USA” by Paul Thompson
I wonder if a new era we’ve found,
Where the scoring need not abound,
Simply bunch up the back,
Wait for a counterattack,
That’s how our new champ was crowned.

“RADIO NOWHERE” by Paul Thompson
The folks that are heading up Sirius,
With an attitude oh so imperious,
On 214 the matches they are,
Too high a channel for my rental car,
Other drivers must have thought me delirious.

“NUMBER ONE LOCKSMITH” by Paul Thompson
In the aging Diego Forlan I believe,
Unveiling top world talent from his sleeve.
While Kaka and Messi backpedaled,
Uruguay almost medaled,
Perhaps our last chance to see that great weave.

“AND HIS FIRST NAME IS ‘NIGEL?’” by Paul Thompson
What kind of a Dutch name is de Jong?
Seems better suited in Hong Kong.
For the Chinese he could play,
“A new great wall” they would say.
And probably improve his ping pong.

“THE DARK ART” by Trent Hergenrader
Hitman DeJong and his crew
Kicked the Spaniards all black and blue
He gave Alonso angina
So now f— off to China
And master the art of Kung Fu

“A SPANISH DEFENSE” by Trent Hergenrader
“Spain scores not enough goals,”
Mutter the cretins, the vapid, the trolls
Forgetting that teams gladly sat back
To wait for counter attacks
Rather than get smashed by 6 like the Poles

By Trent | Posted in * Footie, Limericks, World Cup 2010 | Comments (3)

World Cup 2010, Final Thoughts (or rather thoughts about the final) and Spain in General

7/13/2010 – 10:01 am

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But first, this…

Spain Wins WC

Spain totally and unreservedly deserved to win the World Cup
If there’s one thing that had really gotten on my nerves the past couple weeks are the moaners complaining that Spain is boring because they don’t score lots of goals and that they wished Germany had gone through instead because they were the better team. Which is utter nonsense. I think what these critics are failing to appreciate is 1) just how difficult it is to play like Spain, and 2) just how easy the Spanish players make it look. There were two moments I would refer to, one in the semifinal and one in the final: for a fleeting moment both Germany and Holland attempted to play the much-maligned “tippy-tap” soccer between defense and midfield as they advanced over the halfway line; in both cases, the ball picked up speed after about the third pass and it became impossible for the players to control, leading to a dangerous Spanish break the other way.

For anyone who has been watching, it should be pretty clear that the Spanish mentality is not to do nothing with the ball, but rather only to risk giving the ball away in safe areas of the pitch and when a goalscoring chance is on. What makes them special is that they maintain possession when, by all rights, they should be turning it over. Xavi and Iniesta both spin away from pressure and open up the other side of the field. The team, especially the defenders, are always moving to give the talented midfielders options. Spain’s back four are probably more skilled than the midfield unit of most World Cup squads, and they tend to play it out of the back rather than lumping it up the field. Against Germany, Sergio Ramos, the Spanish right back, camped out on the corner of the German penalty area and the central defenders Puyol and Pique spent more time in the center circle than in their own box. Yes, Spain retains possession and strokes it around waiting for an opportunity to come open, but the difference between them and boring teams, I humbly submit, is that they do about 85% of it in their opponent’s half. This is not as simple as it looks, or everyone would be doing it.

Spain is guilty of one crime: poor finishing
Spain racked up too many 1-0 victories but, again, it’s way too simple to conclude that they play a defensive and boring brand of football. It’s worth noting that this World Cup-winning squad effectively played without Fernando Torres, even though he started most of the games. He looked leggy and his touch was awful. Perhaps you can criticize Del Bosque for putting him in there, but it seems fairly obvious he was hoping el niño would play himself into form, even though that never happened. You have to remember though that Torres is Spain’s first-choice striker to be the physical presence to intimidate defenders and win headers in the box. You can blame Del Bosque for not choosing their second big man, Llorente, and instead put in the small and quick (like the rest of the squad) Pedro. But you can’t blame him too much, because Spain dominated every game and won the World Cup, so his strategy worked.

I also can’t defend Spain’s penchant for trying to walk the ball into the net. All throughout the tournament, Iniesta was guilty of trying to find a pass rather than shooting when a lane opened up, so it’s a bit ironic that he smacked in the winner. Today he twice had the opportunity to hit left-footed shots from good positions but chose instead to try and cut back to his right, and both times he lost the ball. To me he never looked 100% fit and I wonder if that played on his mind. Still, I would have appreciated more shots from around the box by Xavi, who has his chances too.

I think people who say Holland should have won the match due to their better chances should take off their oranje glasses
Yes, Robben was stuffed on two clear breakaways that would have changed the game. But from where I was sitting, Ramos missed a wide-open header in the opening minutes and Fabregas missed his wide-open chance as well. Scratch those out and Holland didn’t offer much else, whereas Iniesta had two other good looks before his goal and Navas came extremely close to scoring off a deflection. It was a tight, tight game and it easily could have gone 1-0 the other way. But from about the 75th minute through the extra time, there was only going to be one winner.

Teams adopt certain styles in order to win; you have to credit Spain for forcing every team to play defensively
Let’s be clear: Germany scored 4 goals against England and Argentina because those two teams believed that they could win the game by attacking the heart of the German defense. They pressed forward and Germany sprung a lethal counter. In this tournament Germany won by absorbing pressure and breaking fast on the counter attack. They benefited from early goals against Australia, England, and Argentina and went on to cruise. They struggled in the game against Ghana when they did not score early, and obviously lost to Serbia when they didn’t score at all. Based on the Serbia and Ghana games, England and Argentina believed they could get at Germany. And obviously they were wrong.

Let’s be clear about this too: no one took the game to Spain. If you followed any of Spain’s friendlies or qualifiers, Spain pasted teams that had the gall to actually try and play an open game. Apparently Xavi Hernandez recently said the same thing in a pre-final interview. Rather than going out to play their individual brands of soccer (regardless of what that might be), teams set up to try and nullify Spain instead. This is a perfectly fair thing to do, too. It just doesn’t allow for the expansive football that fans like to see. Again, I would humbly suggest this isn’t Spain’s fault and for them to alter their tippy-tap, possession heavy football would give them less of a chance to win. So why would they do it? They’d didn’t and, oh yeah, the won the World Cup without ever really hitting top form.

Lots more. Lots more but this post is already a couple days late. More later.

By Trent | Posted in - Spain/La Liga, World Cup 2010 | Comments (4)

World Cup Limericks, Final Rounds

7/9/2010 – 10:19 am

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Woof. Some truly vulgar ones here. I’ve masked the dirty bits for the gentle reader.

“GOOD RIDDANCE” by Troy Hergenrader
With the own goal the fire was lit
And then Sneijder wrote the obit
So the orange bug bit you
Don’t let the door hit you
By the way, the word Kaka means ‘sh*t’

“EUROLLING ALONG” by Paul Thompson
This PM we’ve two fine nominees,
Having made solid defenses swiss cheese.
La Furia Roja I like,
Not the Muller-less Fourth Reich,
I just wish it weren’t still the semis.

“SAVING GRACE” by Paul Thompson
Suarez’ hand certainly saved the match,
Just before Gyan caught his foot in the thatch.
And like some awful prank,
Off the bar it did clank,
And the last African team was dispatched.

“THE END OF THE ROAD” by Paul Thompson
Poetic participants oh so seduced,
Many limericks the group stage produced,
Enter the knockout round,
The rhymes suddenly not found,
Baldgrenader left to rule his own roost.

“THE NEW BOERDOM” by Paul Thompson
The Dutch seeds in this land are well sown,
Melo’s stomp causing more than Robben to groan.
Then to to Cape Town,
The Boers old stomping ground,
Where the only balls Suarez was handling were his own

“IN VITRO CAN BE MESSI” by Eric Doe
There was a fine Argentina guy
Whose mom’s c— dribbled c** down her thighs
To conceive the young pup
Dad finished off in a cup
A stunt the son didn’t reprise

“NOT EVEN A LIMERICK” by Jeff Magee
F— Spain, F— Spain,
Ask me again and I’ll tell you same
C***suckers one and all
All day long holding the ball
F— Spain, F— Spain

By Trent | Posted in * Footie, Limericks, World Cup 2010 | Comments (0)

World Cup 2010 Limericks, Knock-Out Rounds

7/1/2010 – 8:58 pm

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“SOCCER + TECHNOLOGY” by Troy Hergenrader
No computer chips planted in balls
Or slow mo recording it all
What we need are robots
Programmed to kick twats
Of the line judges missing the calls

“WORTH THEIR WEIGHT” by Paul Thompson
Sayonara to the Nippon Daihyo,
Thanks to the foot of Komano,
No quarterfinal debut,
for the Samurai Blue,
Shielded by bulletproof cans of Sapporo.

“BLACK STARS, NO STRIPES” by Paul Thompson
Thanks so much to the Ghanian people,
For producing a team that’s not feeble,
Beating American again,
Making sure the “World” Cup remains,
More than the best of Europe v. CONMEBOL.

By Trent | Posted in * Footie, Limericks, World Cup 2010 | Comments (1)

World Cup 2010, Round of 16 Limericks

6/29/2010 – 9:12 am

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“SADO-MASOCHISTIC FUN” by Trent Hergenrader
Losing to Deutchland’s a sin
For the English who were praying to win
But four goals they shipped
Their side was well-whipped
Just like those sex clubs in Berlin

“HOMEWARD BOUND” by Trent Hergenrader
First to go out were the French frogs
Next were the Ivorians plus Drog
Then the US dropped out
Not much to cry about
When your defenders are all sucking the hog

“US MANAGEMENT CONUNDRUM” by Trent Hergenrader
Bob Bradley’s management staff
Saw the D make gaffe after gaffe
From the sidelines they’d shout
But could not figure out
How to get them to play the first half

“ITALIAN FACIAL” by Trent Hergenrader
Azzuri critics were all lurkin’
Through two rounds the team was not workin’
Now they’re total disgraces
Wearing not egg on their faces
But rather Slovakian merkins

By Trent | Posted in * Footie, Limericks, World Cup 2010 | Comments (0)