Your "To Everything, A Season" Quizo Update

I watched the final of Euro 2008 yesterday, and as the day wore on and it became increasingly obvious that Ze Germans not only had no intention of winning but apparently didn't seem all that interested in actually PLAYING, I began to worry about what would happen if Spain actually won something.

Spain's failure to win a major tournament in the last 44 years transcends legendary. It's tough to make an analogy to some other sport that you non-football lot would understand; I cannot think of a single other team anywhere that has been so consistently talented and yet consistently managed to fuck everything up as badly as the Spanish have.

Well, okay, I can, kindasorta: take the last, say, 15 years of college basketball where Kansas has been a top 10 team every year and a decent favorite to win the national championship. Now make them even better - say one of the top 2 or 3 teams - and instead of the Jayhawks' standard second-round self-immolation, imagine they get to the Final Four every time and THEN try to set themselves on fire like they normally do but they even fuck THAT up and instead burn down the arena and all their fans. Oh, and take that 15 years and triple it. Kansas' now-broken string of underachievement is the only thing that's really close to the kind of cock-up-ery that has plagued Spanish football for FORTY FOUR YEARS, and in actually isn't really that close.

The beauty of Spain is that they don't just go out with a whimper. They come in as heavy favorites, perform well early, and then choke so spectacularly that even Phil Mickelson trembles in the face of their mighty chokage (or would, were he intelligent enough to comprehend the on/off switch on his television, never mind knowing that a country called "Spain" actually exists). The Mets' 7-game collapse at the end of last season? Imagine that level of choketacity, bottled up into a single game, and that your team did it EVERY TIME THEY PLAYED FOR YOUR ENTIRE LIFETIME. That is Spanish football.

So you get an idea of what we're up against with Spain when they're winning 1-0 with several minutes left. The texts started flying: "Does Spain have a choke left?" "Can they still lose this?" "Always be wary of the Germans." And so forth. The Germans had to come up with a miracle equalizer in the last few minutes, because to not do so meant Spain would win and, Christ, that obviously can't happen.

Then the final whistle blew, and I sat there watching the celebrations on the pitch.

But... but... Spain didn't lose. Spain won. That can't be right. Spain didn't lose, so ERROR ERROR ERROR! DOES NOT COMPUTE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!

Sorry, went a little Dalek there for a second... moving on...

A little while back I was walking past a bar in a casino after a mildly disappointing round of Texas-style Hold'em when a cocktail waitress I knew from another casino came by. We headed in, I bought some drinks, we got to talking, and at one point she looked at me like I had three heads.

"Are you actually enjoying this song?" she asked. Apparently I had been lightly bopping my head to the techno song that was playing over the bar speakers.

It is important to note that I cannot discern the words of this song, merely that I can hear the backing tracks and that I am aware of vocals which I cannot make out.

"Yeah, it's not bad," I said. "It's well-put-together."

She gave me an indulgent smile. "Are you sure?"

"Yes I'm sure," I said, and I began to launch into an exegesis on how to construct a good techno track.

She interrupted me about halfway into my second sentence and said, still smiling, "this is Miley Cyrus."

I said, "it's wha?"

"Miley Cyrus," she said. "You know, from Hannah Montana? On the Disney Channel? My niece loves it. She's eight."

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, trying to say something. What eventually came out was: "Yes. I see. Well." (pause) "Yes." (longer pause) "It's still put together pretty well." (pause) "Yes." (pause) "Fucking hell."

Flash forward a couple weeks after that. I'm on vacation at Disney World, it's our last day, and my family and I are at Epcot. They tell me repeatedly that I should do the Test Track ride while they go get lunch - there's no FastPasses left, but the wait for a single person is only 30 minutes (as opposed to 130 minutes for a group), and that gives them time to go eat in the restaurant in Mexico (which I do not want to go to) while I wait.

"It's worth half an hour," my father says. When we used to go when I was a kid I thought my Dad was something of a wuss when it came to rides, but after a) aging 15 years since my last trip, and b) riding Mission Space a few days before that and wishing afterwards that Poseidon would impale me on his trident and end my misery, my views on rides have gotten a lot closer to his. So on his advice I get in line for Test Track. This is actually going to be the only line I will have waited in the entire trip, so before they go to lunch I fish my iPod out of my bag.

Apparently the volume on my iPod is far too loud, since a few minutes later while I'm standing in line, a little girl in front of me who might have been 10 or 11 pokes me in the arm. I reach into my pocket to pause the iPod and say, "yes?"

She says, "are you listening to Miley Cyrus?"

"No," I say, far too quickly to fool anyone over the age of 13.

She actually looks at me with suspicion - her brow furrows and she squints at me - and says, "it sure SOUNDS like Miley Cyrus."

"No, no, no," I again say way too quickly, giving a laugh that, again, only a child of this age wouldn't recognize as pathetically fake. I reach into my pocket to pull out the iPod and surreptitiously hit the "Track Forward" button as many times as I can before pulling it out. "It's..." I look at the screen to see what's come up. "Motorhead."

Fuck.

"What's Motorhead?" the little girl asks.

Oh, FUCK!

"It's, er..." How to explain this to a ten-year-old girl? "Well, they're a band."

"Oh," she says. She pauses for a moment. "Do they listen to Miley Cyrus? They sound a lot like her."

I say, "I doubt very much that they do."

"Are you SURE you weren't listening to Miley Cyrus?" she asks me again, clearly not sold on the idea.

"Nope," I say. "Motorhead, baby!"

I put up the horns, albeit weakly.

The doors to the ride mercifully open at this point - the wait ended up being more like three minutes, though the longest three minutes of my life - and a voice in the back of my brain screams, "YOU HAVE SUNK TO A NEW LOW!"

JLK