The British Crown is a useless anachronism.

Izzy: I think we (the USA) dodged a bullet on winning the Olympics to take place here in New York City. As I was sitting on a stuck Number Seven Train yesterday evening with about one hundred and fifty of my fellow New Yorkers in the car, I said to myself, "Yeah, that's what we needed, an additional two million people packed onto the Island of Manhattan."

Have you guys sold out all the football tickets yet?? I heard there were acres of places left for all the matches except the finals. (Please note that I called it football and said the contests would be matches instead of games. I also know football is played on a pitch. I have been edumakated.)

People are buying tickets for the Opening Ceremonies which, (this won't surprise you) I think is the most meaningless set of moments of the whole ten days or two weeks or whatever.
I do like seeing the athletes walk in and parade around the stadium.
This is their moment. If I had it my way, no athlete would be identified by his or her country, but that's another thread.

All the rest of the caterwauling, fireworks, waves of undulating fabric which look just like waves of undulating fabric~~~pphhhfffftt.!

It's ten in the morning here. I wish I was over there with living under the oppressive Royal thumb, but at least it would be the right time for a couple tall drinks.

Cheers,

Joe(wait... Greenwich time minus a fistful is....)Nation

well I was awake, Set wasn't, and I was tired of Foofie and its idiocies

deal with it

I no longer read or respond to Miller's sock puppet--so there was not going to be any response from me.

Football is a touchy subject. This is the Olympics and it's team GB. That does not fit in with how football is played, we play as individual nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. When you then factor in the fact that Team GB does not contain any Scotland or Northern Ireland players, you've got another reason not to be too botherned. Not to mention that none of the players who were in the Euro finals are in Team GB.

So, we're a footballing nation(s) with a team that doesn't reflect the brightest and best of any nation (Except Jack Cork obviously), at a time when our clubs are playing pre-season friendlies.

Given the choice of watching Southampton play Ajax on 28th July at home, or travelling to London on 29th July to see Team GB play the United Arab Emirates, it's Saints/Ajax every time.

Very interesting, do you mean to say there are four national teams which combine to form one (Team GB)? And it is puzzling that no Euro Finals players are on the roster. (Other than the fact that they all played like mugs.)

I have reassessed the time difference: It's only four PM there now. So, tea and something to nosh. Same time between here and LA, four hours. They are having breakfast. My employers (Hangzhou, China) are exactly twelve hours ahead of us. I come in to work as my engineer is putting his little girl to bed.

I am going to go annoy some customers now.

Joe(HEY!)Nation

The only time Team GB plays is at the Olympics. There's also some pretty weird rules about age entitlement as well.

Basically nobody supports Team GB. I support Southampton and England, mostly Southampton. On the 19th August we're playing Man City as the premiership kicks off its season.

The premiership is the most popular sporting league in the world. Olympic football can't hold a candle to that.

Football at the Olympics is a bit different to other international football events: there's an age limit (23), with three players over the age of 23.

How arbitrary! Am I to understand that it's true of other Olympic events or is it only soccer?

Only men's football.

Holy Mackerel, you mean if you had about six 30 year old tough-as-beaten-leather mid-fielders and fullbacks, you wouldn't be able to use them to tromp the insteps of the sweet young 22 year old blond boys from Darmstadt?
Where's the fun in that?

Years ago, we had a bunch of grizzled veterans from England play on the Tulsa Roughnecks NASL team. ( I think Alan Woodward was about 45 years old.) They did not play dirty (I was joking above) but those boyos could take a knock and gave a few as well to some of the younger upstarts.

Joe(That was fun to watch)Nation

I've used 'football' here short for "association football", Fédération Internationale de Football Association (English: International Federation of Association Football) ....

Exactly.

... and that's actually no-one really bothers about football at the Summer Olympics. (I only now found out/looked up, who's playing there )

Not after the British took over Manhattan. The New York culture is sort of British, in that they turned the borough into a British culture, beyond the English language, in my opinion. It was New Amsterdam when the Dutch were here. However, while Manhattan became British, Brooklyn was still Dutch farms. And, The Bronx was named after a family that owned a big portion of the borough (the Bronxes, or something like that).

People do say that NYC is like London, in that there is so much diversity here. Except in Manhattan there are many tall buildings.

Since you made reference to me in the first part of your post, I am responding to the above latter part of your post.

Yes, in my opinion, one should be greateful for the American GI's that married English girls, and gave them a life of veritable leisure, compared to the life they would have had in the England that was rebuilding after the war. These girls were smart, in my opinion, since with the one life they had to live, they chose a life in the US, and their children and future descendants never would have to worry about a foreign power threatening them.

... but if they had stayed in Britain they wouldn't have had to worry about that either, or at any rate not any more than in the USA of the Cold War. As it was they had to put up with living in a country full of hokey dick heads wearing cowboy hats and saying "yee-haw" all the time, when they weren't busy getting obese on Hostess Twinkies and chawing on 97 ounce steaks.

The diversity, such as it was, was brought to these shores by the Dutch. The English colonies were abject failures, they starved to death in Virginia and barely held on to sanity in Massachusetts Bay. The Dutch knew what they were doing, building a commercial enterprise and the rule is "A customer is a customer."
Despite the British efforts to denigrate the Dutch after taking over, putting into the language such putdowns as :
"You'll be in dutch if you do that." Trouble.
"Going dutch on a deal (or a date) " Everybody pays for their own
"I'm going to treat you like a dutch uncle." Severe discipline.
and others, they weren't able to wrest from the citizens of New York the idea that had been brewing in the city since earlier days~good commerce means not only free trade but free men. (Well, white men anyway.)

If Yonker Adriaen van der Donck had just had a few more years on this earth, we would see him as the true Father of American freedom.

And the Dutch are still here, look at a Mets cap~ those are the colors of the Dutch flag.

Joe(and yes, Yonkers is where Adriaen had his farm)Nation

It's interesting that shortly after 'The Grand Old Duke of York' marched his ten thousand men to the top of the hill and took New York, the Dutch king became the English head of state in a bloodless coup. The idea of the stock exchange was taken on board, and was a far less risky investment than lending money to despots like the French king, who had a habit of wiping his debts clean.

... as well are the uniforms of the New York Mets baseball club, New York Knicks basketball club, and New York Islanders hockey club. And the colors of the flags of the City of New York (and of Nassau County) are those of the old Dutch Flag.

Like I said.

Foofie is Dutch ... which is only a whisper from being Deutsch.