World Cup--New Erin Rules

June 14, 2010

After such a late night Saturday, we took an easy Sunday, with not much besides tv soccer..

Here’s the prediction box so far (based on the revised Erin Rules below):

	Vickie		Davis		Erin
	Correct	Incorrect	Correct	Incorrect	Correct	Incorrect
June 11	0	2	0	2	1	1
June 12	3	0	1	2	1	2
June 13	2	1	1	2	1	2
	5	3	2	6	3	5

Did I tell you what I saw about 3:00 in the morning driving in from Rustenburg after the game? We were still outside Johannesburg proper. The bus pulled to a stop at a traffic light. I looked out the window and saw a black lab eating some road kill it had drug off to the side. I looked harder. The tail was swishing back and forth, catlike. I looked even harder. It wasn’t tall enough to be a lab. Leopard, actually.

This morning we had a driver take us to the Sturkfontein Caves. There have been remarkable discoveries here of pre-hominid skeletons, including one that archeologists are digging out right now. We didn’t get to walk right up to the dig site, but we could hear the tapping and shoveling noises just down the path from us. This area of South Africa has a number of archeological sites of note, and the amazing thing to me was that they have uncovered a large variety of pre-human species, some of which continued and grew into lines of homo that persisted, while others went extinct. This changed my thinking about the development of humans, which I had somehow imagined as an unbroken line of progress (like the cartoon always depicts--I look for an upload).

Here’s another observation that might interest my non-soccer fans, particularly the ladies. You might consider Brazil-2014 for you next big vacation. Every place we have gone, every buss ride we have taken,, every congregated crowd has been about 85% men. If you separate out the couples, the crowd remains large, but the man-to-woman ratio grows even larger. Trust me, if you could tolerate someone who would prefer soccer to the mall, you might not find better odds.

We have refined the Erin Rules of Prognostication:

Rule 1: Always pick the United States for the win.

Rule 2: Always pick Cameroon for the win (in honor of Elvis and James—the guys that trained both Erin and Davis in soccer).

Rule 3: Always pick South Africa for the win because they are a great host country.

Rule 4: Always pick the green team for the win.

Rule 5: Pick a tie if two green teams play (except when governed by Rule 2 or Rule 3).

Rule 6: If two non-green teams play, pick the team that has more smiling team members in the Official Match Program.

Vickie:

Holland-2 Denmark-1

Cameroon-2 Japan-0

Italy-1 Paraguay-1

Davis:

Holland-2 Denmark-0

Cameroon-0 Japan-1

Italy-0 Paraguay-1

Erin:

Denmark-win (smile rule)

Cameroon-win (Cameroon rule)

Italy-win (green rule)

Walter has also joined in the predicting:

Holland-2 Denmark-1

Cameroon-2 Japan-0

Italy 1- Paraguay-0