Nowhere To Run To, Nowhere To Hide

The World Cup is held in a different international location every four years. This time around, South Africa is our host, which is bad for Americans, because they are about 7-10 hours ahead of our timezone. So games are happening very early in the morning. It's better than 8 years ago when the cup was held in Japan and Korea (now those were some early morning games), but it's still a bit of a problem.

Recently, what with the advent of DVRs, that time difference has pretty much ceased to be a problem. I don't have to get up at 5am to watch the soccer game. I let the DVR get up early for me.

Now, the problem is avoiding the sources of news that would spoil the results of the games for you before you can see them.

Friday, the USA was playing Slovenia. I asked my friend to record the game on his DVR. We planned to get together Saturday to watch the game together. I just had to make it one day without discovering the result, and I could have an entertaining few hours watching the game happen as though it were live.

At work on Friday, I informed everyone I thought might ruin it for me that I hadn't seen the game so they wouldn't blab what happened. That worked pretty well, since one co-worker when out and made sure that everyone else knew.

Then I got on Twitter to see if there was anything there I needed to see. I don't follow ESPN or NBC Sports or Sky Sports or any of those types of places. In fact, I only use Twitter for the podcast, so the people that I follow are book nerd kind of people. It's not a place that I expected to find scores spoiled for me. But I was really wrong there. I had to quickly unfollow a few people, while squinting at the screen to block out what people were saying. But I was safe, emerging still ignorant of any actual score. I did know, however, that it had been a closely fought contest, which I guess is good to know. Now I knew the game would be worth watching, right?

That evening, I was about to go to bed. I had navigated through the day without having anything spoiled for me. Before hitting the sack, I checked Rish's blog, to see what he might be up to. He had a post on there about his road trip to Vegas.

Now, if you don't think that we've done the joke to death, then you must not be a listener of the show. While most of us were having sex in high school, Rish was reading The Lord Of The Rings. He's not the guy who likes sports. He's the guy that was in the stands staring at the cheerleaders. When the game was over, he could tell you how many times each cheerleader's skirt flipped up revealing those little school-colored underpants they wear, but he couldn't tell you the final score, even though it was still on the scoreboard. So, I had no fears whatsoever visiting his blog while trying to avoid spoilers.

Yet, there it was. Spoiled as completely as possible. The final score, the controversy over the disallowed goal, everything. The last place I expected to have things spoiled, but it's always where you least expect it, isn't it?

I still watched the game, but it wasn't quite as fun as it could have been. I guess that just goes to show you how utterly omnipresent the World Cup has become.