• The Fellowship of the Vuvuzela: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B2LPxggvqY #
• Peter Cullen based Optimus Prime's integrity and honor on his brother. http://is.gd/d108f #
• You can't spell massage without the letter drool #
• Hey @whitman2010 you owe @FAILBLOG a big fat apology. I want to see it in writing. http://is.gd/d5zu0 #
• Had an awesome writing breakthrough last night. Just got an hour of good work done. Feeling optimistic about Star and Scribe rewrite. #

I was dimly aware that the US got knocked out of the World Cup yesterday. Oh, well. Don’t really care, like most of my fellow Americans. Why?

In the U.S., soccer is for kids. Over here soccer means orange slices at halftime and colorful beribboned scrunchies on golden ponytails. The attempts to build up a pro soccer league have been hampered by the fact that in the U.S., talented soccer players go on to play football, basketball, and baseball teams, which have a higher profile and better funding at the college level. Any would-be goalkeepers are playing shortstop. Anybody with good feet is a running back. So pro soccer players in the US are B-list athletes, and that makes the game boring. America hasn’t had a David Beckham because instead we have Magic Johnson, Joe Montana, Willie Mays, and Brian Leetch.

Soccer is also generally thought of in America as a sport for crybabies, masochists, and psychotic knife-wielding Scottish people. (Thank you, Saturday Night Live.) And the reputation isn’t undeserved; people routinely shank each other over the outcome of fútbol matches in Latin America, and even those oh-so-civilized European fans frequently come up in the news after beating each other up in bars. Americans get spirited about sports and have refined trash-talking to an art form, but with the exception of certain parts of Boston and Chicago, fistfighting is frowned on, and the idiots who trash their city’s downtown after winning a championship tend to be gangbangers looking for an excuse, not sports fans.

And then there’s the players! Professional soccer players must spend half of their training time on the set of a Mexican télenovela. If you can’t fall down, scream, cry, hug your legs, and roll around and whine begging for a penalty. When American teams do this, even the Wall Street Journal makes fun of them. American sports fans are merciless when it comes to crybabies. Whine, and your opponents will mock you, and your fans will tell you to suck it up or suffer the consequences.

Probably the biggest thing to overcome is that soccer lives in the stone age when it comes to technology. Videography at the World Cup, to use the technical term, looks like ca-ca. The NFL provides lush HD coverage, cool animations, computer graphics to help demonstrate how a previous play went, and flying overhead cams. This stuff counts, and the austere, unpolished pitches on ESPN3 don’t impress eyes used to some flair. Even basketball uses several cameras, including Steadicams and rim cams. A world cup match uses film techniques that the NBA abandoned in the 1980′s, and the commentators usually sound like two bored British guys. Oh, wait.

The Super Bowl, the crowning glory of American sporting events, provides a lush mythology complete with commercials, cheerleaders, halftime shows, and special effects at the end of the game. The World Cup offered us . . . the vuvuzela, a device that makes a sound similar to if you fitted a cat’s rear end with an air compressor and blew the air backwards through its digestive system.

The biggest piece of missing tech from pro soccer is use of sensors and video cameras to compensate for the fact that referees seem too busy arguing with crybaby players to pay attention to what happens in the match. As I type this, England is losing to Germany, likely because of the damage done to their morale when referees failed to note a ball that landed a full two feet behind Germany’s goal line. The impact of bad calls seems to be massive on players; with that much at stake, is it that difficult to do what the NHL did and install some frakkin’ sensors? Would it really destroy the game to introduce video review of controversial calls? A soccer fan told me that doing this destroys the “human element” of the game and lessens the excitement. I told him he was a masochist.

They keep saying soccer will catch on in the U.S., but I think it may have missed the boat. Even ol’ Becks couldn’t get people in LA to care, and he was supposed to be the Great British Hope for MLS. As long as scores are low, players are second-rate, officiating is questionable, and tech is outdated, the fans won’t come around. Could it change? Maybe, but not without pretty substantial shifts in culture. Until high school and college soccer gets as much attention and funding as football, the good athletes and coaches will continue to drift away to more exotic and lucrative grounds. In the meantime, all you soccer fans keep nursing those ulcers. I’ll be over here waiting to high-five someone when football season starts.

• Never in a bazillion years would I have ever thought I'd photoshop C-3PO's crotch as part of work-related duties. #
• Why yes, Kevin Costner does have the technology to clean up the gulf: http://is.gd/cRFUn #
• Nothing but love for this kid, who PWNS a greaseball politician treating it like a PR op and not a real interview: http://is.gd/cRZFD #
• I heart @tchochocolate so much. Try it. Nom it. If you don't love it, I'll provide you with a complementary bonk on the noggin. #
• Airport Security: Keeping America Safe from my underwear. http://robotfromthefuture.com/2010/06/tsa-keeping-america-safe-from-my-chonies/ #

It’s been an emotional few weeks for me. First, the horrific news of USC being severely punished for the crimes of Reggie Bush (may he rot in everlasting pig manure). Then, LA reclaims the NBA throne from the Celtics, which makes up for about 50% of the two bowl games the Trojans are banned from. I wondered if LA and Boston would ever get the chance to be true rivals again, and beating them is only made more satisfactory by the fact that Rasheed Effing Wallace made it so far, only to lose. Ha, ha.

I was low, then high, and now find myself back in the depths of confusion and anger. Why, do you ask? After getting back from the airport yesterday, I found that my luggage had been tossed and TSA had kindly left a love note for me.

“Dear Citizen,” it read. “Our number one priority is you. That’s why we’ve searched your luggage without your permission. We know there’s this pesky thing called the Fourth Amendment, but we just can’t help ourselves. After all, arbitrarily invading the private property of US Citizens on low-risk domestic flights really gets us turned on. Turned on about safety. The items you packed made us so hot that it just wasn’t safe to allow them on the plane. So we’ve taken off with your chonies to protect national security. We salute your patriotism.”

Yes, that’s right. Your tax dollars have paid federal employees to violate the Bill of Rights AND relieve me of my underwear.

I recently had the privilege to see Penn and Teller in Las Vegas. They do a great bit with a metal detector, demonstrating how utterly useless it is in making us safe. All of our so-called flight safety restrictions are reactionary, time consuming, costly, and can’t be demonstrated to have made anybody safer in the skies. The illusionists displayed a small metal copy of the Bill of Rights (available for purchase at their gift shop), and used the copy to set off the alarm in a great object lesson about the violations of personal liberty that we’ve come to accept in the name of political correctness. Everyone — US citizen and foreigner alike — is now subject to being searched without a warrant. No common sense is applied, and everyone, from a bottle-sucking baby to a grandma with an oxygen tank, is subjected to the same search procedures as terrorists. How did we come to believe this was OK?

I’ve seen mothers have baby formula taken away from them, leaving toddlers screaming. I’ve seen ladies have expensive bottles of smelly lotion tossed from their bags. The regulations we have in place use no common sense; objects and people are not evaluated for their threat; they merely need to be the right shape and size, and in a clear baggie. And that, somehow, makes us safe.

I’ve been subject to search and seizure that seems pretty damn contrary to the Fourth Amendment. What probable cause justifies digging into a non-suspicious black bag? What right does the government have to lay their hands on my things without a warrant? If my underwear is what they consider a threat to the United States, then I can safely say we are all doomed.

• Xbox may suffer from Red Circle of death, but at least they repair it promptly and for free, unlike Sony: http://is.gd/cG4AE #
• Hey Lucas, Snoop Dogg looks a lot better handling a light saber than Mace "Boring" Windu. http://is.gd/cG5Tm #
• @CM57 Three years is pretty good for any piece of hardware! in reply to CM57 #
• New track from @djearworm http://djearworm.com/like-omg-baby-capital-fm-summertime-ball-mashup.htm #
• @EnglishMossop Fair enough. I'll still take that over having to file a class action lawsuit, though. in reply to EnglishMossop #
• @taojunky That's my cousin. He's all strung out on transmission fluid. I keep telling get a good job validating HTML, but he won't listen. in reply to taojunky #
• I picked my Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate based on whether or not they knew what the Internet was: http://is.gd/cHyBw #
• @CM57 dood. srsly. in reply to CM57 #
• Kid plays Grand Theft Auto and makes good choices: http://is.gd/cJefe #
• Reggie Bush, I hate you with the heat of a million white hot suns. #usc #trojans #ihatereggiebush #
• If you ever make the cover of Rolling Stone, do everything in your power not to look like Russell Brand does on today's issue. #
• Yup, Chase's customer service is still Teh Worst. Oh, WaMu, how I miss your cheesy yet friendly service. #
• Thor flick looks like it will be cool, except for the Natalie Portman part. http://is.gd/cKGhI #