sbukophile

A dog named Rooney

One of these days, we are going to get a dog (or two). After years of disagreement on what kind of dog we want, we saw a Rhodesian Ridgeback on the beach a few years ago and we both fell in love with the breed.

Over the years, we have been coming up with names for our future dogs. The top contender for what would be my dog whether male or female has been 'Rooney'.

Wayne Rooney is my favorite football player. He has been my favorite since early in his professional career when he was at Everton. I was thrilled when he was chosen as the youngest player ever to play on the England team. And just imagine my delight and relief when he was purchased by my husband's favorite team*, Manchester United! I no longer had to worry about discord in our marriage when Man Utd played against Everton!

During the 2006 World Cup, I was so disappointed when Rooney apparently stamped on a Portuguese player's nuts...

...he was not supposed to be that type of player. He's a good clean player with a lot of guts and can't be easily intimidated! And oh, can he read the game! He's just so intuitive. I love watching opposing players unsuccessfully try to intimidate or knock him down.

After seeing a lot of the replays and listening to the commentary though (as in the YouTube clip above), I now firmly believe that the ref let the Portuguese players double-team and foul Rooney for too long, he was frustrated, so he was kicking out to stay up, but he did not mean to stamp on the guy's nuts! I also blame Sven for putting him up front all by himself. Which he wouldn't have had to do if he had brought more strikers who would actually be good enough to play to THE. FUCKING. WORLD. CUP! I still don't excuse Rooney for what he did, but I do think it was unintentional. But I also HATE HATED Cristiano Ronaldo, a Man Utd teammate of Rooney's, for running to the ref and trying to get Rooney booked. And the wink (again, see the end of the YouTube video for that gem)! Ooooh, do did I hate Ronaldo (even though he's playing phenomenally well this season with Man U, he fucked with my boy)!

So, back to the point of my post. The other day we went down to the Press Room, which is the only English pub/bar in Santa Barbara. The owner, Raff, is from Manchester (from only a few villages away from the village my husband grew up in) and is of course a die-hard Man Utd fan too. Since we still refuse to subscribe to hundreds of crap channels/commercials (i.e. cable TV) just to be able to watch the football, this is where we have to go to watch any of the football live on TV Sometimes we go to our friend's house where we can watch it on the Spanish speaking channel though, but Raff subscribes to all the channels that have it, including the ones that have English commentators (there is nothing worse than listening to an American commentating on soccer--in fact, I can't stand listening to American sports commentators for ANY sport!)

So again, back to the story I really started... we walked in to watch Man Utd against Middlesborough, and there was a gorgeous dog, looked like a pit bull mixed with something else big. He was white with big ginger/brownish spots and coloring and he was so sweet and well-behaved. And then someone said his name to him, and I turned to my husband and with a pout, whispered, "I think his name is Rooney!" And there was no denying it, he really looked like Rooney.

A couple minutes later, as I was scratching around the cute dog's ears and chin, I surreptitiously looked at his ID tags, and to my utter dismay, it said 'ROONEY'.

My disappointment was huge! My husband tried to reassure me that we could still name our future dog Rooney. I was not convinced. My disappointment was almost as great as it was on that fateful day in 2006 when Rooney got sent off in the World Cup. Although we didn't know these particular people who owned this Rooney just yet, it was clear that he was a well-liked and regular visitor to the Press Room. Possibly a lot more regular than we have been. They would all think we were copying them if we named our future dog Rooney, and I would know there was another dog named Rooney before our Rooney.

It's like when George wants to name his first child Seven.

This left me disappointed the rest of the day, while my husband was upset that the score was 1-1 with fucking Middlesborough.

 

---------------------

* My husband grew up outside of the city of Manchester, and has been a Man U supporter since he was little, even having season tickets. He is NOT one of those fair weather supporters who jumps on the band wagon only after the team are successful and so well known all over the world.

The Naughties

This is one of those times where I wish that British English and American English matched. We were watching a UK TV show the other night on DVD, called My Family. One of the actors in it is Kris Marshall who is quite funny--and if you haven't seen the movie Love Actually, you really must see it (he's in it) (Love Actually and Princess Bride are my 2 all-time favorite movies).

In England, they use the word naught  or nought for zero in some situations (and sometimes nil is used for zero as well). But in one of the My Family episodes, the character Nick (played by Marshall) says something along the lines of, "after all, we are living in the Naughties". And oh, how I wished that would work here in this country. I mean, come on, it's just so much better than saying the "Two Thousands" or the "Double 0s" and other stupid, tongue twisting terms for the current decade.

So from now on, please refer to our decade as The Naughties.

Thank you.

Attention Netflix subscribers!

Dec. 5-21st you can get free rentals from Blockbuster by going into participating Blockbusters with the Netflix tear off flap that has your name and address on it! That's cool!

I'll still stick with Netflix, but it's handy because we have lots of people visiting over Christmas and I was thinking of upping our Netflix DVDs out at a time number... now I don't have to!

Now I have to go dig out all the flaps that I've thrown into recycling recently...

No cable tv for you!

The Ruggedly Handsome Husband and I do not have cable TV.  Nor do we even get any TV channels at all.  Of course we have the actual appliance, we just don't have it hooked up to anything but the DVD player.  I think a lot of people find this weird, except of course our friends who do the same thing.

We do however instead do Netflix. We found that having 5 DVDs out at a time is the right number for us.  When we first started with 3-at-a-time, we were quite often finding ourselves having none on the weekends, the time when we had the most free time to watch them!

We get to watch all kinds of TV shows still, just not right when they first come out.  We don't have to sit through commercials or anything though!  Also, there's the internet now for news and even entertainment, National Public Radio for news and interesting stories, and of course YouTube for interesting viewing.  Then there are my current favorites for local news and tidbits.

Quite honestly, it's very rare that we miss having cable.  The times that we miss it most are for the footie (soccer) games, and when two of my nephews stayed for a week for Surf Camp (we had to plan very carefully to select DVDs that would arrive in time for the age-appropriate viewing by two 11-year old boys with very different interests from each other--at least Surf Camp wore them out, so it didn't end up being a problem).

I have to admit, the other channels besides good soccer channels I would love to get would be HBO, BBC America, and the Animal Planet.  Of course those are all in different tiers so would cost us an arm and a leg to get--and we'd get all the other crap channels too.

The problem with all the other crap channels is, I can't help but turn on the TV and sit and watch the crap!  Even though I'm not interested in it!  So, at this point, it's better to miss some of those other things that we can see in other ways.