• Thanks to Ray Butler and the Banshee in Dorchester for treating brother Ryan and I to a fine afternoon of Uruguay-Netherlands futbol viewing. The crowd was fairly evenly divided between partisans of both sides, which is not to say that there was anyone there who actually came from either country. I am going to miss live daytime sports.
• The Dutch look incredibly solid and balanced right now -- three goals from three different players yesterday, including the cannonade from the redoubtably monickered Giovanni von Brunckhorst -- and their only real bobble was the half-step that 'keeper Maarten Stekelenberg took to his right, which left just enough of the net into which the luminous Diego Forlan could bury the equalizer.
• Ian Darke continues to be the best thing about the broadcasts. (John Harkes is a close second, and they're a great team, Harkes's crowing yesterday about being the only pundit to pick Uruguay to get this far before the tournament began.) Yesterday, Darke called one player's touch -- it might have been Forlan's -- "instant and velvet." Hubba-hubba, as the poet said. Harkes may have to turn a fire hose on him before this is done.
• I don't see how Germany survives the loss of Thomas Muller against Spain but, hey, Eric Patterson went 'yard twice against the Rays. Anything's possible, I guess.
• And, finally, the world's dumbest test of manhood has joined up on the anti-vuvuzela side of the argument. Yeah, we wouldn't want to break the concentration of dumb brutes on a stampede, or of the bulls, either. Hemingway owes posterity big time for popularizing this idiocy
• UPDATE -- I completely forgot the moment in which Darke explained how struggling Dutch star Robin van Persie had been treated for a leg injury this season by a woman whose speciality is applying "horse placenta" to the injured area. "Horse placenta" is one of those phrases we don't hear enough on American sports broadcasts and, apparently, isn't just for breakfast any more.
  

Instant and velvet

(Horse placenta optional at extra cost.)