Today was game day in the city. There was a football game (NFL), a hockey game (NHL) and a college football game (NCAA-SEC) all happening at the same time, more or less. People are camped out in parks with massive barbecue set ups. For the first time since I've been in America the pavements are full - full! - of people walking. Granted they're walking from their cars to sit for three hours in a stadium, but to the untrained eye they look just like pedestrians. How I miss pedestrians.
Walked through a gen-u-ine American campus. It was like a village of fraternity houses - full of nubile, young 'mericans done up all pretty-like for homecoming. By the way when young Americans do have to dress up all pretty-like the girls really get a bum deal. They get their hair done, apply all the lipgloss they can get their hands on and wear their littlest high heels. The boys just dress like Mormons. Mormon hair, Mormon shirts tucked into Mormon trousers, all rounded off by a nice Mormon tie.
American youths also need pointers on how to drink. The basic technique seems to be "the chug". Standing in a circle the boys (and the odd girl with low self-esteem), will shotgun whole cans of revolting American beer while the others whoop and high-five. They hurtle towards drunkeness with great speed, shrieking and saying "bro!" all the way. We, the British (or I), enjoy alcohol as a useful social lubricant, liberally spreading it around and sharing it until - whoops! - everyone's drunk. Americans drink how they eat - in a frenzy, apparantly terrified of hunger or sobriety's onset.
Fantastic news. I can now hold a convincing conversation about American football. I get it. I get the rules (most of them). So check this out:
That was impressive, you're saying right now I'll bet. What's more it almost all makes sense too. My friend and I went to a college football game and I was lucky enough to sit next to a guy called Steve Wade - a former NFL pro who played for the Colts in the 80s. Mr Steve Wade was very helpful in explaining what was going on on the field, providing a kind of relentless, droning commentary the whole game.
So I saw the 'Dores/Duke game last night. Those Tennessee boys need to change it up on offense. They'd be on third with ten to go in the fourth quarter and they'd still be scared to throw bombs. But that Evans kid can punt, am I right?
By the way people in England might not understand what college football is all about. If you want an approximation of what it's like imagine a university soccer match between Exceter and Leeds. Make it really sunny. Then add between 40-100,000 screaming fans, packed into a specially built stadium on the Exceter campus with the teams' names displayed in 30-foot lettering up and down the pitch. Then add national television crews and huge amounts of merchandise. Mix in an enormous half-time show. Most importantly imagine almost-guaranteed multi-million pound Premier League contracts for the best players on each time. So no, not much like a university soccer game back home. A lot of people actually prefer college football to the pros because a) they love their college and b) it's a little more raw.
It's funny that for such a vehemently heterosexual country American men do enjoy talking about other men's bodies, albeit in a gruff, businesslike way. Wade kept stopping his running commentary to remark on the players. "Check out number 86," he'd say. "He's gotta be 6'2, 6'3 and about 300 lbs. These are big dudes."
That evening my friend and I visited a Hooters. For those of you unfamiliar with the brand, Hooters is a Floridian fast-food chain that specialises in buckets of fried chicken. Not in any way interesting or different. But wait! Did I mention Hooters are serviced entirely by waitresses wearing cleavage-inducing spray-on vests and skin-tight hotpants that ride so far up their asses they're forced to pause every five minutes to adjust their underwear in the middle of the restaurant? I didn't mention that did I? The waitresses can also use the company's pension scheme to pay for boob jobs. The girls working there all have a strange, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers glazed-over facial expression. Sure, they smile if you make eye-contact but it's an horrific smile. It's the smile given by North Korean workers to a UN Weapons Inspectors touring a nuclear facility. If I hadn't been with a friend - a female with a working brain and everything - I would have felt very much the scumbag.
That night we dropped in on the quite famous Blue Bird Cafe. It's a singer-songwritery folk bar and that night we saw a four-piece "folk supergroup" whose songs and onstage banter were exactly - and I mean exactly - like these guys from A Mighty Wind. One of them must have been 6'1, 250 lbs.
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