I've Never Been So Alone, and I've Never Been So Alive

I'm pretty sure that people from the North (some might call them Yankees), probably laugh at Texans when we get all worked up over weather that they consider a wintertime staple. As I drove to school today, everyone was driving very cautiously and had this look on their faces as if driving in these "terrible conditions" was more difficult than selling their first child (not that I would know what that face looks like).

Citizens of Waco, I know that it was 75 degrees less than two days ago, but let's all agree to take this weather system in stride. Agreed? Agreed.

As I've been reading through Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World, I've become quite interested in his candid descriptions of soccer hooliganism in other parts of the world. I guess the closest thing that we have to hooligans in the U.S. are college students who go into full-scale riot mode when their team wins the National Title.

The second chapter of Foer's book describes the age-old rivalry that exists between the Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. On the surface, the matchup that they call "The Old Firm" might just look like a crosstown grudge match between Glasgow's two most famous soccer clubs, but it runs much deeper than that.
In the Celtic v. Rangers series, soccer is only another vignette detailing the battle between Protestantism and Catholicism in Western Scotland. Being caught in the wrong part of town wearing the wrong colors is more than just a sporting faux pas, it may be the last mistake that you ever make.

In the United States, we love to talk about the "hatred" between the Yankees and the Red Sox, Ohio State and Michigan, and the Cowboys and Redskins (hereafter known as the Indigenous Peoples of the Greater Potomac Basin), but these fan bases simply dislike each other because of what happens on the field. In "The Old Firm", the hatred arises from where you place your eternal hope of salvation. I think that makes the stakes a bit higher.