Do the best with what you've got!

The best story out of Euro Cup 2016 will be Iceland and their defeat of England in the round of eight.

2016 will be remembered by Iceland as the first year they ever qualified for a major international tournament in football.  The Icelanders are famous for competing and winning in the World's Strongest Man Competition, Handball, and Chess.

The Icelandic Football Team got beaten badly by France 5-2 yesterday.  This was not completely unexpected.  Iceland's team comes from a country with a small number of players to pick from.  There are only about 330,000 Icelanders in the whole country and probably less than 20,000 males that are of an age between 20-30 that might play soccer.  Amazing that this small group of folks has been able to compete against national teams like  France, England, and the Netherlands with a lot more players to chose from.

Team USA got whacked by Argentina 4-0 in their Copa America run. 

This may have been a fluke and it might not happen again for a long time or it might just be the beginning of something new for Iceland.  It was fun to watch an underdog go so far and I look forward to seeing the Icelandic war chant again.  Huh! 


Germany gets to play France in the next round (July 7) which may be the latest replay of WWII.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two Months and Eight Days

Early voting and mail in voting will take place before November 5, 2024. And on a related front I hope people will notice that it does not take four years of partisan snark and sniping for the voting public to make a decision about who the next president will be.  I voted  in the Florida primary for the November Election on August 20, 2024. Locally, the mood of the electorate in Miami has changed.  A few weeks ago I just couldn't imagine a person born in 1942 running for reelection as president or a person with as much baggage as an ex-president running for office, who could legitimately be understood to be running for office as a strategy for not going to prison.  Assuming he would win, he could, stop any prosecutions and if he lost he could further question what democracy is.  And it is no surprise that the former president has started complaining about an election that hasn't happened and claiming that the opposition will have stolen the election if he does n...
Read more

Internet Dust Ups

 A high school classmate shared on FB, something from a 64 year old commercial pilot who had passed a exam to fly on of the latest jets in their fleet of aircraft.  I was also aware of an FAA rule about retirement at age 65 for commercial pilots.    In the U.S.,  there are no  FAA  age limits for pilots except for commercial airline pilots employed by airlines certificated under 14 CFR Part 121 . These airlines cannot employ pilots after they reach the age of 65. However, these pilots may stay on with a Part 121 carrier in some other role, such as flight engineers. I then went on a digression about the retirement of folks in professions like law or accounting.  From my own experience 30 years at a job or working for an employer is a very good time to start serious planning for the next chapter in your life.   And for my efforts at explaining my work history, working with folks who lost their jobs through no fault of their own.  I wa...
Read more

What Is Official These Days?

 I would guess most people would understand what Official means.  Just because a person holds a public office doesn't mean everything he might do is official and everything he might not do is official as well. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness". from J. Kenneth Galbraith interview. And oh, by the way, moral justification at times isn't much more than a fig leaf, you can bet someone got screwed or got the proverbial get out of jail free card.
Read more