The Emperor's New Cleats

Women take a lot of flak for their love of expensive shoes. Some of it's justified – every third store on Robson Street in Vancouver is now a shoe store and their products can definitely be a little unusual and expensive. Just look at these crazy double heeled things from Alexander McQueen:


But here’s a little secret ladies....men’s soccer cleats are almost as bad.

Check out these men's offerings from Nike (sometimes favoured by Cristiano Ronaldo) and Adidas (who claim these shoes are worn by Lionel Messi):










I know the stars get free shoes, but how do regular guys decide which ones to get? It would be hard for me to choose between cleats whose colours are described on their website as 'anodized purple and electricity’ and ‘cherry, dark obsidian and metallic’, but it’s mostly because I don’t know what some of those words mean.

What’s worse, the ads for these cleats imply that you will actually play better if you buy them. Apparently the lace cover on the pink ones creates a ‘large inviting strike zone’, while its ‘dual density injected studs allow effortless cutting and instant acceleration’. The purple ones have a ‘new stud configuration that improves your balance at top speeds’. Gosh, why bother training? The shoes can do it all for you. And am I the only one who's giggling at all the dual-injected-stud talk?

The websites for men’s cleats also offer this weird looking thing called a ‘comfort chasis’:What does it do? I can only assume it is meant to go inside the shoe and lift you up so that your body can physically match the size of your ego.

At least the Alexander McQueen shoes ads do not exaggerate their life altering qualities or provide over the top descriptions. Black is black, and not 'obsidian'. A search though the shoe details on his website offers only the basics, saying things like ‘black velvet embellished wedge sandal’ or ‘suede pump with rubber platform’. Should I be proud, as a woman, that do they do not pander to us and say ‘buying this embellished shoe means you will never gain another ounce as long as you live, while it’s rubber platform gives you the oomph to throw spectacular birthday parties for your kids, making you the envy of all the other mothers’? I don’t know.

Because if it did do all those things, I would so totally buy them.

The Internet is Scary, or, Cristiano Ronaldo calls Soccer Mom ‘Douchebag’ after Sideboob Incident

I want to talk about my blog. I realize that technologically, I’ve always been a late adapter and that blogs are considered passé. It’s all about ‘the Twitter’ now. But blogs might not be dead yet: in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, in a review of a book that grew out of a popular mom blog, columnist Leah McLaren said she felt ‘wistful for the (blog’s) cyber verbiage of yesteryear’ when writers posted entries of more than 200 words. Then Sunday’s New York Times Magazine mentioned that the most prominent sportswriter in America is Bill Simmons, a blogger who sometimes posts up to 6000 words on some topics, and that his blogs are downloaded an average of 600,000 times each. Of course, these are actual writers writing about relevant things, not just navel gazing in soccer cleats, as I have been known to do— but reading about these popular bloggers made me curious about my stats. Who reads me? And then I discovered a button on my blog that can tell me just that.

Don’t worry. I can’t see individual people and I don’t know if you are ignoring me. But I do have a button called Stats that tells me which countries people are viewing my blog from. It’s totally addictive. Why? The other day I checked it to see who was reading me and it turns out my blog had already been looked at 19 times in the Ukraine since that morning . That’s more than the 12 Canadian readers I had in the same time period. The Ukraine? (Oh dear. Given my dodgy grasp of geography, I’m ashamed to admit that if I was handed a blank map of the world and forced to pinpoint the location of the Ukraine, I would kinda wave my hand over one general area, hesitantly, and I might be wrongish.) I’m also inexplicably read by a fair number of readers in the BRIC countries (other than China, who doesn’t give a damn about me.) I even have 1 reader in Zimbabwe.

Naturally, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Luckily it can be easily explained by another kind of statistics my blog gathers for me: the keywords people google which help them find my blog. Of course, there are the expected ones—people who know me and google me by name. But yesterday someone found my blog by googling ‘garbage cans that go up stairs’, because of a piece I wrote about my physiotherapist that mentioned both stairs and garbage cans.

A surprising number of people also google Cristiano Ronaldo and end up on my page. Why? Because a year ago I posted a fake interview I pretended that I had done with Ronaldo. Also, people that googled the word ‘sideboob’ found my blog because of a piece I wrote back in March. ‘Soccer Mom’, and another popular key word, ‘douchebag’, have also landed people on my page in reference to posts I wrote or a friend guest wrote, in the past. Does the title of this post make sense to you now? Cristiano Ronaldo is probably perfectly nice and did not do anything wrong; but, rather, my title might just be the tiniest shameless attempt to increase traffic to my blog. (It’s pathetic, I know. The New York Times Magazine article I referenced earlier has Simmons quoted on others sports blogs as saying “The worst thing that’s happening now is that people are writing things just to drive traffic and get attention.” Oh yeah? Suck it, Simmons, with your 600,000 readers and your ESPN masthead.)

Now I almost wish I didn’t know these statistics at all because it makes me wonder what to write about. In a ridiculous attempt to appeal to my newfound Ukranian readers I actually googled ‘soccer pierogies’ to look for a picture I could use- because pierogies are one of the only Ukranian things I can think of- but sadly, Google Images came up with nothing. (I did find a race where men dress up like pierogi mascots and run on a field {see above}, but there was no soccer ball, so that’s out. I also found a Jesus pierogy that a woman discovered one Easter in her frying pan and sold for $1775 to Golden Palace, the same people that bought the Virgin Mary grilled cheese a few years ago for a much higher price.)

The last stat I discovered is the hardest one to face: my most popular blog ever, by a wide margin, is the only one I did not have a hand in writing. Yup, my friend Frank’s An Open Letter to Soccer Douchebags is my (his) most popular blog ever, having been looked at hundreds of times. Dang.

To console myself I’m going to try to scrape the pentagram shapes of a soccer ball into an uncooked perogy so I can hopefully sell it and make millions. I clearly won’t be making any dough (pun intended) from my writing. Except, perhaps, in the Ukraine. (Wherever that is.)

Blogging is Easy!

A few of you have asked me how I have kept writing a blog all this time, and I always say blogging is easy! Mostly I say this because I want you to guest-blog for me, so I can have a week off and sit around eating chocolates. But it is true. Here are my tips for blogging, with apologies to Steve Martin, from whom I stole the idea.

You have to start somewhere, so I suggest starting with a person. People like reading about people, especially if it is gossip about a person they know. So how about this:

You know, there was this guy.

The’ you know’ part is just folksy fluff, but it hints to the reader that they might actually know the guy, even if they don’t. They might think that perhaps they can learn something secret about someone. But it isn’t quite enough. We need to use an adjective. Writers use adjectives all the time. So, let’s insert one here. A fancy one.

You know, there was this fancy guy.

Now, you might be getting bored already. I get it. Even if a guy is fancy, most readers have an absurdly short attention span, so now it might be time to insert a picture. Real writers would describe how the guy was fancy, but not bloggers. We don’t have the skills. Instead, go to Google images and find a picture of a fancy guy. Because it is a soccer blog, let’s make it a picture of a fancy soccer guy. Probably it will give you a picture of Cristiano Ronaldo or David Beckham, which is fine, since they are indeed fancy, and you can sit back and enjoy the picture along with your readers. An example:


Now it is probably time for some lunch.

Okay, after lunch, it is time to really get working on this blog thing. We already have a person, and an adjective and an image of our fancy guy. Let’s have him take some action, so we can also use a verb:

You know, there was this fancy guy who scored a goal on Saturday.

See what we did there? Our fancy guy isn’t just sitting around. He is doing stuff. And you know what people doing stuff does to bloggers-- it pisses them off. Why? Because bloggers usually never do anything themselves. They just complain about stuff that other people do. But don’t worry, it’s all good, because we can use this. Here’s our opportunity to complain:

You know, there was this fancy guy who scored a goal on Saturday. Can you believe it? What a jerk.

Why is he a jerk? Who cares? It is only important that bloggers have opinions, not reasons to back them up. Now since the blog should probably be a little longer, we can then write a few more sentences. Perhaps some vague complaining stuff, some rhetorical questions, and finally, for emphasis: when we really want to make a point, we can create a paragraph out of a sentence that probably shouldn’t have its own paragraph.

Like this.

See how important that makes it seem, when it is all on its own? Italics help too. Although don’t overuse them, like me, because then when you emphasize everything, you really don’t end up emphasizing anything at all.

Okay, I think we’re ready to add a video now. Videos from youtube are a bloggers best friend because they do all the work. Good god, why read something when you can watch it, right? I’m fairly certain there’s video somewhere of our fancy guy, the jerk, scoring that goal. Post it and you’re done.

See, blogging is easy! Besides, no one is reading it anyway.