Snow and Kaka

Born to blog? I don't know, I'm all blogged up this morning. There are blog bits flitting around me like fruit flies, but I can't seem to bag one. Sports and world news provided no inspiration this morning unless you want me to detail why Brazil didn't look particularly impressive at the World Cup yesterday while ekeing out a 1 -0 win. You do? Okay, in a nutshell, the MVP of the game went to Brazil's Kaka. I did not make that up, it is a player's name.

In order to watch Kaka I spent a good forty five minutes in a deja vu like trance twisting, turning, telescoping and cursing my new rabbit ears antennae to rid my television screen of snow. As I have chronicled on countless occassions, snow is a bad thing. It causes people to strap boards to their feet in an effort to break bones that would otherwise remain intact and, well, I'll leave it at that for now. Snow is bad, it was on my screen and I was fiddling with one of the world's dumbest looking contraptions like it was 1954 and the Army-Navy game was about to come on. As you will all remember, at least all of you over forty, while the antennae is actually in your hands, you can achieve a watchable picture. It is when you let go of the thing and move away from the tube that the blizzard returns. The best receptor of tv waves, magic or whatever leaps through the air and onto the screen appears to be the human body. With this in mind, I pondered how to get my wife to stand there for two hours while realizing the suggestion alone could cause me grievous bodily harm. If I was going to watch this game being played on a sunny day in Germany, I was going to have to watch it through snow. This trajedy being necessitated by the fact that the most watched sporting event in the world, The World Cup, was not being shown on any of my 300 satellite channels. Well, life is, as they say, hard and then the sun comes out. Literally. The cloudy day we were experiencing here in Panama gave way to sunshine and the snow on my television shrunk to tiny flickering dots that were... bearable. Too bad the game was a clunker.

Adding to my list of sporting complaints are two others I need to vent away. Last night, the third game of the NBA finals, the most watched sporting event in Miami, Dallas and parts of New Jersey, was not shown here either on cable or in snow. What was available, and is too frequently the case, was the Yankee game. I'd rather lose at Scrabble.