Probably Want to Hire Some Smarter Copy Editors

Uh, how the fuck did, Cambodia (see above) make the Olympic soccer tournament, much less make it out of the group stage and into the quarters?

Oh right. They didn't. In fact, Cambodia totally sucks at football, currently holding down spot number 183 (out of 207) in the FIFA rankings.

Clearly this is a mistake as Brazil was matched up against Cameroon, an entirely different country on an entirely different continent, in the quarterfinals of the Olympic soccer tournament.

My initial reaction was that somebody working at wherever Comcast buys this service from (TV Guide?) is really fucking stupid and when they saw the country abbreviation on an information sheet someplace reading 'CAM' they assumed it was for 'Cambodia.'

But then I thought that, given how fucking stupid Americans are when it comes to geography in particular, whoever had the job writing this copy probably didn't even know there was a country called Cambodia. Instead they saw 'CAM' and checked it against an alphabetical list of countries. When they came to 'Cambodia' they simply stopped and didn't bother to look at the next item on the list.

That's plausible except for the fact that the abbreviation for Cameroon is 'CMR' not 'CAM.'

And you'd have to be phenomenally stupid to get from CMR to Cambodia, because, while Cambodia actually does have an Olympic delegation in Beijing, they don't have an 'R' in the name of their country.

America, trying to live up to every stereotype about it.

Read more on "Probably Want to Hire Some Smarter Copy Editors"...

Lightning Crashes

While I was watching the second semifinal between Spain and Russia, the video feed put up a picture of lightning cracking over the top of the stadium in Vienna. I was watching the match with some friends, and we debated for about two minutes whether it was a live shot or a shot from before the match started. After some quick back and forth, we decided it was from before the match since there was no way they could continue in such conditions. At that point, we dropped it and continued to watch the match.

Well, it would seem that we could have been wrong, since apparently soccer has no contingency plan for stopping a match for lightning. Last weekend, three Cambodian youth players were killed and three others were sent to the hospital when they were struck down by the electrical phenomenon during a tournament match.

The Cambodian Soccer Federation's response was something like this:

Well that sucks. Perhaps we should consider not playing when there is bad weather in the area. Like thunderclouds and such. Oh, and why aren't we being referred to as Kampuchea anymore?

No one could answer him.

Read more on "Lightning Crashes"...