For whom the bell tolls.

I fear that with that cryptic title, I may scare some of my readers. Well, BE AFRAID! BE VERY AFRAID! Because I am about to speak the truth, nothing wavering, for he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea... You see, as a self-titled Benfica fanatic, I have traditionally been willing to put up with almost anything from my team. For example, I suffered through a 10-year trophy-less drought. I just laughed when Benfica fired their coach after they tied Leixões the first game of the season. Now, if you're not familiar with Leixões, you're not alone. There are a lot of people in Portugal who had followed professional soccer for years and never heard of this team until the beginning of this season. Follow along with me for a moment (Brewer fans will be able to relate to this better than most--Reds fans too!):
Game 1: Leixões 1-1 Benfica
Game 2: Benfica 0-0 Guimarães
Game 3: Nacional 0-3 Benfica
Game 4: Benfica 3-0 Naval
Game 5: Braga 0-0 Benfica
Game 6: Benfica 0-0 Sporting
Game 7: Leiria 1-2 Benfica
Game 8: Benfica 2-1 Maritimo

In the Carlsberg Cup:
Game 1: Amadora 5-6 Benfica (win on penalties!)
Game 2: Benfica 1-1 Setubal
Game 3: Setubal 2-1 Benfica: Benfica's eliminated from this tournament.

Champions' League:
Game 1: Milan 2-1 Benfica
Game 2: Benfica 0-1 Shaktior Donetsk
Game 3: Benfica 1-0 Celtic

The mere fact that Benfica made it into the group stages of the Champions League is pretty impressive, if you think about it--they're horrible. But rather than simply accept failure in Europe and maybe try for some domestic success, what have they done? They got eliminated from the League Cup by Setubal. Ok, so maybe Setubal's good this year? Nope. So now we're down to one competition, surely we can compete in the Portuguese League, right? Four ties and four wins net you 16 points out of a possible 24. Porto has 24 points. So it would take 3 losses from Porto, and 3 wins at the same time from Benfica, to put "us" on top. Unlikely. Why is Porto so good? Basically, it's because they believe they can be good, they work hard to be good, and they don't have 14 years of mediocre form to remind them just how bad they can consistently be.

So let's make it official: I will not be cheering for Benfica for a few months. I cannot say how long this will last, but I can say that I won't be cheering for anyone else in the Portuguese league either--unless I start bleeding some other color in the meantime.

There, that is the state-of-the-union. Oh, and fyi, Sporting is even worse this year, so keep your green mouths shut (you know who you are!).

Over the Sea and Across the Continent

Yes, we're back in the midwest, and indeed it has been an insanely long summer. It seems as though every time we settled down somewhere, we had a plane to catch, a highway to drive, or some fish to fry. And so we did. June saw us in Portugal, and to a lesser extent, Spain, whereas July saw us primarily in Spain, with a short stint in Portugal. By the time the latter half of July arrived, we were back in the US, but only long enough to say hi to a friend or so, before hopping into the '04 en route to northern Minnesota, via Chicago and Grant. I can't post pictures, because nobody has that kind of time just now, but my foot did an excellent job all summer, both on the excavation and on the trails in Oregon. Oh, those trails were in September, after we had spent a while in Wisconsin on the fishing boats, and then back in Cincinnati, where we still feel quite at home. We had some unexpected visitors for a while, then offered ourselves up as unexpected visitors in due course, but it all seems to eventually bring us right back to where we started, at the laptop, writing something academic to convince The Man to broaden my horizons. Hopefully That Guy isn't reading this right now, but if so, in my defense I really did grow up speaking Portuguese, and it's a completely different language from Castellano, especially the Extremeduran variety. In closing, I would like to include this photograph, commemorating the mid-90s, a time when no gravel pit this side of Loures was safe from jumpers! Oh, and everyone needs to check out the band that is Horse Feathers for a pleasant surprise.