Today I went to a football game at Yankee Stadium. Or, as we call it in the U.S., soccer.<\/p>\n
It was really fun. I had not been to a live soccer game in years, since my time in Brazil. And in the end the home team won, which always makes (nearly) everybody happy.<\/p>\n
There were lots of kids there — a lot more kids than I’ve ever seen at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. It’s great that young kids in New York are interested in soccer. I’m not sure what it means. Perhaps it represents a demographic shift, or maybe young kids just find soccer more fun and exciting than baseball or American football. Whatever the reason, I think it’s good.<\/p>\n
Speaking of American football, we had a bit of a chat about why that game is called football. I had always wondered about that. After all, you don’t really use your feet to play it. And come to think of it, you don’t really use a ball. More of an oblong shaped thing.<\/p>\n
Somebody said that it’s called “football” because the “ball” is a foot long. That sounded intriguing, so I looked it up when I got home. And it turns out that’s not true. The actual reason, as well as the reason we call the other game “soccer”, involves a complicated and somewhat politically charged history.<\/p>\n
But this has been an exhausting election season, and I find myself tired of political football. So maybe I’ll go into that history another time. For now, I’m just going to kick the ball down the field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I went to a football game at Yankee Stadium. Or, as we call it in the U.S., soccer. It was really fun. I had not been to a live soccer game in years, since my time in Brazil. And in the end the home team won, which always makes (nearly) everybody happy. There were … Continue reading “Football”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18001"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18002,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18001\/revisions\/18002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}