I spent all of yesterday flexing my home economics skills. Went to the Super Stop and Shop to pick up some things I needed (for those of you keeping track, I've been there everyday for a week with the exception of a single day I went to Long Island). Some tomato, some basil and garlic. You know, the basics. Then I plugged my iPod into my stereo, and started to do some serious cooking. A nice red sauce, and some brownies (for some reason I've been really single-minded about making some brownies. Usually when I hype something up really big in my head, it never turns out as well as I think it should. Except this time, 'cuz these brownies are really good).

In between stirring the sauce and mixing the batter I was going back and forth through the apartment trying to decide on my wardrobe for the night. I was going bare chested for while; that had to stop because (and this isn't for the faint-hearted) I remembered that I have a really hairy chest (comes from being of both Italian and Jewish heritages. As far as I know, the only swarthier combination involves a Persian father, and a mother who's a polar bear). Now, there's nothing wrong with being a little furry in the chest area, but I have a strict No Hair In My Sauce policy. It's inconvenient at times, but hygenic, and it saves me from embarrassing conversations with guests.

I was walking through the neighborhood the other day, and I noticed that there was an inverse linear relationship between my distance to the Broadway N stop and the number of Greco-centric stores I was seeing. I had trouble noticing at first, thinking that the strange alphabet I was seeing was due to my being high on methamphetamine. Then I remembered that I don't take methamphetamine, and even if I did that wouldn't cause me to hear Bouzouki music blare out of the club I was passing.

Now, I'm a big fan of Greece; it is the source of some of some great contributions to the world: Aristotle, Plato, pastitsio, feta, Eratosthenes, the column. It has downpoints (the aforementioned Bouzouki, the earliest recorded incident of a son booping his mom, etc), but so does every culture (I believe that it was the Italians who gave us mondel bread, which has to be the biggest waste of dessert calories since fresh fruit. And don't even get me started on the spreading of cricket throughout the British Empire). But the real problem that Greeks, like the rest of their European counterparts, love the soccer football.

I'm not saying I don't like watching a game of soccer football now and then (I don't, but that's not the point). What I'm saying is that basketball worth watching is only played in one nation in the world, and it's played for only a relatively short period of time. Soccer Football, on the other hand, is played around the world by every country and, what with the advent of digital cable, there is a game on at any given point of any given day. Which means that in a neighborhood full of (fine, upstanding) people of Greek heritage, every game in every bar within a 20 minute walk of my apartment has an average score of 0.4 (summed over both teams) instead of 180.

I bring it up here because, frankly, I'm far too terrified of soccer football fans to talk about it in a venue that isn't anonymous (to talk about it to someone that isn't an American, anyway). This isn't some baseless fear of mine, either. You don't see any computer games based on the rioting of curling fans, do you? As far as I can tell, soccer European football has caused more riots than the American civil rights movement. By at least an order of magnitude. Which isn't to say that all the fans are crazy, but as a general rule they feel about their team of choice only slightly more strongly than, say, your average Special Forces commando feels about his unit.

Which reminds me (although this is getting a little long) of a time I had when backpacking across Europe with Ben and Jeremy a few years back. We stopped in Budapest for a few days (so Jeremy could learn to say "You have beautiful eyes. What are you doing after work?" in Hungarian), during EuroCup 2000 (or something like that. Like I said, the probability that there is a major game occuring in Europe at any given time approaches 1), and were watching one of the games on a huge screen TV in a tent (set up by Phillips Corp). We were sitting in the aisle (as were hundreds of other people, all of the seats being filled with Hungarians and the tables filled with beer), and as such people were walking over and around all through the game. At one point during the game, a fellow walked past us, both hands taken up by large cups of what I assume was very good tasting beer. Unfortunately, he stumbled right in front of me, and wouldn't you know it, it got on my pants.

No, no. Not the beer. The handgun he had been carrying in the inside pocket of his jacket. I think we both handled it relatively well. He put the beer down, I gave him back the revolver, and everyone was happy. Him especially, because me and the people I was with decided it was probably a good idea to root for the team which the guy with the gun wanted to win. It's definitely unfair to assume all soccer football fans are concealed-weapon-carrying beer-swilling hooligans. But to be honest, I think if we assumed that about everyone we saw in the streets, the world would be a safer place all around (albeit one that had less of Kobe Bryant on bar TVs).