Game 7: ¡FUTURISMOS! 2 — Some-other-team 1

Your ¡FUTURISMOS! won.  I’m told we played well.  That's all I know.

Game 3: ¡¡FUTURISMOS! ! 5 — Chino FC 2

By Brian “Elliot” Litzinger

The soccer and wrestling worlds are a buzz over the recent announcement that the Colle + McVoy ¡FUTURISMOS! are reportedly in negotiation with Vince McMahan about the purchase of the ¡FUTURISMOS! by the WWC, which leaves soccer and wrestling fans scratching their heads. When asked about the seemingly odd purchase in a recent interview McMahan grunted and said, "Why not!? The entertainment value and potential revenue is amazing. Bloody noses and cracked heads is what we're all about! The only thing that was missing from last weeks head bashing of Kristine Hoffman was an aluminum chair, and the week before the field just needed a cage around it to complete the bloody scene of Brian Litzinger's nose. The WWC is the only entity that can bring that to the table. We have also been looking for new ventures, and this seems like a logical fit, and besides, our fans are looking for something new. I mean, for the last 18 years we've used the same 4 story lines and twisted them every way we can, but we can't put anything past those trailer park kids these days. They are bored with the current state of wrestling."

In another interview with Colle + McVoy CFO Lisa Miller we learned that C+M is interested in selling because "there is simply no fan support. How can we financially support a rising and competitive soccer team without attendance revenue?"

Although the deal is still in negotiation, Mr. McMahan is wasting no time and working hard to prepare for his possible ownership. Sources have confirmed that former athlete, wrestler, and actor, The Rock has tentatively signed on to join the ¡FUTURISMOS! . His trainer reports that The Rock has been working hard on his soccer skills, and has even juggled the ball a personal best, 2 consecutive times. Even more surprisingly is the rumors of Mr. McMahan trying to coax former wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin out of retirement, but when we went to his Dallas, Texas estate he greeted us at his with a 12 gauge shot gun in his right hand, and a Coors in his left. No questions were asked, but we did notice what looked like a red corner flag and Bermuda grass in his back yard.

The future of the ¡FUTURISMOS! is still uncertain. Whether it be a televised $50 pay per view event, or the same old same old, the team is excited about it's progress and are ready to see what happens next.

Having expended all my creative writing energy, I leave you with a very succinct wrap up of the game itself:

• Andrew Charon had a hat trick.
• Tim scored.
• Sarah took a rocket to the face.
• Lia scored.
• Sawyer missed the most immaculate, pristine, and perfect pass across the front of the goal. Not only did he miss it, but he swung his right leg, then the ball rolled between his legs while he fell to the ground only to humiliate himself more. The moment was truly a blur to Mr. Blur.
• Kristy almost broke her skull.
• We won.

Game 2: ¡FUTURISMOS! 1 — Owen Ate FC 2

By I.Madnle

We work in communications so it’s no surprise that we all have our favorite campaigns, past and present. Some of us rave about how select 7-11s were turned into Kwick-E-Marts to help promote The Simpsons Movie. Others still talk about how much harder the folks at Avis try since they were only #2 in their industry. Me? I’ve always been intrigued with how some obscure brewer used the tagline “It’s five-o’clock somewhere,” to help drive sales of his wares.

The folks at CSC apparently had that tagline in mind when they scheduled our game this past week for 9:45 PM and then decided to start our game even later—as in 10 PM. The time I’m usually shutting off lights and heading for bed. But no matter: “It’s a decent hour somewhere, let’s get this game started.”

The problem is that sleep deprivation has serious consequences. Consider the Challenger incident. Or the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Or the time I poured orange juice into my bowl of cereal at breakfast. Yup. There’s something to be said for Circadian rhythms. And for heeding the biological requirements of sleep.

Which is why I’m so surprised about the score. The opposing team, “owen ate fc,” was a band of rag-tag foreigners hailing from the English isle. They’re a full six hours ahead of us!

Nevertheless, your ¡FUTURISMOS! lost 1:2 after a fifty-minute game back under the roof of the indoor football facility on the University of Minnesota campus.

Despite the score, there were a number of highlights in the game:

• A beautiful score by Tim Blevins in the opening minutes of the second half.
  
• The debut of Boba Fettrow—on both Defense and Offense.
  
• The second breakdown of a goal in mid-game.
  

Breakdown can be taken completely literally, as the crossbar folded and fell to the pitch, bringing the verticals right down with them. What caused this? Gravity. What goes up must eventually come down. But was there an instigation? Yes, in the form of a broken nose on the face of our very own goalie Elliot.*

*This bears more description. To watch Elliot play keep (aka play goalie) is absolutely amazing. The man always risks his own longevity just to keep the opposing team from putting the black-and-white sphere behind him in the net. So it was bound to happen that, on one of his face-first-dives some part of his body would meet some part of the body of an opposing player. After three major plays the odds played themselves out and Elliot’s face met the foot or knee of an “owen” player. Now, I’m not a doctor. And I don’t play one on TV. But I do have Clients who are doctors, so I think it’s fair to say that when you see blood coming out of a person’s nose, and when parts of that nose seem to move in opposing directions, said nose is probably broken.

Game 1: ¡FUTURISMOS! 2 — Snowball’s Chance 4

Editor’s Note: This season the recaps will be written by an assortment of your beloved ¡FUTURISMOS! rather than solely by me. How many of we happy few will lend our words to the noble service of extolling our exploits remains to be seen. Fittingly enough Season 4 begins both with a new Captain and a new chronicler.

By SKYWALKER

I will begin this recap by stating that I am a bit foggy on the details, I blame Andrew Charon’s darling baby girl, Quinn, who was crawling around the sideline dressed up like a pumpkin.

The first game of the season supplied the ¡FUTURISMOS! with plenty of optimistic fuel. Admittedly (me) or not (everyone else), “The Final Countdown” was playing in our heads while we walked onto the field anticipating some truly inspired soccer playing. Unfortunately, that song totally sucks. It sucks and we lost.

It isn’t that we played as unfortunately as we have in season’s past, it’s just that we didn’t play up to the level that we needed to in order to beat Snowball’s Chance. Their team tapped into two people for the vast majority of their talent; we will call them boy who posed a serious threat and boy who posed an imminent threat.

We kept up with these boys and their team quite well in the 1st half. Our first goal was scored by Caguin who was assisted by team newcomer Andrew Charon. Blevins scored our second goal after carrying the ball up field and practically walking into the net.
Emily Kaiden stepped up to the defensive plate and shut down numerous plays, while Hassle brought out her signature hustle. Things were left standing evenly at half time with a score of 2-2.

The second half, however, was not so balanced. The short of it is that the serious and imminent threats scored two more goals on us and we scored zero on them, which left the game’s final score at 4-2.

Obviously we weren’t happy with the loss, but sometimes you don’t have to win in order to walk away smiling. Case in point: A nasty tempered little thing on their team freaked out and called me a name that rhymes with itch when she thought I was being too aggressive. Then she received a yellow card as punishment for her fowl behavior, which forced her to sit out the rest of the game. Ah, the splendid satisfaction received when watching your opponent get shamefully sent to the time-out corner.

Perhaps next game will lend the opportunity for us to shine like the glorious bits of stardust that we are…and perhaps we will also see more of your dapper faces on the sideline.

Season 4

Our fourth season will commence Wednesday, October 10th. I may or may not write a season preview in advance depending on, basically, whether I feel like it or not. Zidane knows I probably will.

¡UNTIL THEN!

The Captain is Dead, Long Live the Captain

Professor Paul Davies is a physicist cosmologist. One of his books is about ways the universe might end called The Last Three Minutes. In it there’s a chapter dealing with human beings adapting to a universe very different from the one we currently inhabit. Humans of the distant future (like billions or even trillions of years hence) won’t be anything like what we currently consider human. In essence they could be living thoughts free of any form, or at least anything we’d currently consider “form.”

Professor Davies believes most current people would consider these future humans to be something other than human and addresses the issue thusly, “… we have to ask precisely what it is about human beings that we would wish to preserve.” He then dismisses form as a key element of humanity and continues. “When pressed, I suspect most of us would set more store by what might be called the human spirit—our culture, set of values, our distinctive mental makeup, as exemplified in our artistic, scientific, and intellectual achievements.”

When I read that passage it sent my mind spinning. Note how limited his set encapsulating the Human Spirit is: Arts, Sciences and Intellectual Achievements.

I won’t get into my detailed personal Human Spirit accounting, but let it suffice to say that I’m sitting on a big fat null. That’s a cold realization: I’m currently contributing exactly nothing to the future Human Spirit.

Yikes.

This realization came to me around 1:30 in the morning. ¿And what was my response? ¿Make good on my threat to go to graduate school? ¿Dive back into the kid’s story I’ve been working on since shortly after I decided to change my name? ¿Finish the white paper I started on the ramifications of applying quantum entanglement to human actions and how that effects Hegel’s dialectical progression of history?

Oh, no. Of course not. I immediately got to work on a ¡FUTURISMOS! blog entry.

Alas, try as I might I can’t fit futbol (or worse, writing about futbol, or worse still writing about futbol when none has been played) into one of the Human Spirit categories. This stands to reason because in the distant future we won’t be playing futbol because we won’t have bodies anymore. Be it Professor Davies’ disembodied intellect or simple extinction there’s no way around that. In this way futbol is much like everything else in our world (and ultimately, our universe): doomed.

Mercifully, therein lies the rub.

Everything is doomed in the sense that it will end. If there were someway for something to exist in perpetuity then there would be path of sorts that everything either is or is not on. We can extend our duration to the end of the Universe and no further. And one way or another the Universe it going to end. So there are no winners, so to speak.

That means there is no ULTIMATE criteria by which everything will be judged. The non-corporeal preservation of the Human Spirit in the distant future will be just another phase in the existence of the human race. No “better” or “worse” than at any other point.

Taking that into account contemplating Professor Davies’ question—¿what is it that we want to preserve about the human existence?—I found my mind in the same state I had in the first place: spinning.

Of course, ¡SPINNING!

¿Why does a child spin until she can’t stand anymore and then collapse a giddy mess? To answer because it’s “fun” doesn’t capture the totality of the truth. She doesn’t spin because at some point she thinks, “spinning is fun, I’ll do that.” She just starts spinning.

Kids spin. Dolphins frolic. Gorillas roughhouse. Whales sing. Dogs chase. What I’ll mourn when human beings become one with the Human Spirit is loosing our connection to the parts that aren’t strictly “human.”

So while futbolers futboling may not be included when we eventually become the Final Human Spirit it still counts. ¿So what if it counts like Dinosaurs count? We wouldn’t be here without them and the Final Human Spirit wouldn’t be quite the same without futbol. If you know but one Einstein quip (shame on you) make it this one:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

I wasn’t a Captain captaining like a kid spinning in my ¡FUTURISMOS! tenure under that moniker. I was more like a Manger managing off the pitch and then a Roll Player roll playing on it. I have the proper attitude to captain but am deficient when it comes to my skills and grasp of the game. But there has been a ¡FUTURISMO! all along who did meet all criteria.

One ¡FUTURISMO! who from our inaugural game distinguished herself through superlative (Dynamo worthy) play, clear and steady direction for teammates, and magnanimity of spirit. I’ve said it before and I say it again: I was the captain in title, she was the captain in deed.

Now she’s both.

The ¡FUTURISMOS! will soar into Season 4 riding the brisk wind of 4-1-1 Season 3 finish and under the wing of a new and most deserving Captain.

Sarah Pollpeter

If Professor Davies happens to make his way to Minneapolis at some point in the not distant future I’ll send him an invitation to a ¡FUTURISMOS! game. I’d like him to consider the inclusion of another Human Spirit category. I’ll leave it up to the good Professor to come up with his own title for it but I will have a suggestion:

Cap’n Pete