That's obvious, no European calls it "soccer".

You mixed up fetishes, I rarely visit tentacle porn sites. Most of them only have animated clips, which don't do much for me. Also, they often have a strong non-consensual vibe, which is a massive turn-off for me.

I didn't want to stereotype you. We all know what kind of porn Germany is famous for.

That's what I get for trying to make myself clear to Americans as well. ;) I'd actually prefer to call football football, and the American abomination by the properly descriptive term "handegg", but experience tells me that Americans tend to misunderstand proper terminology in this case. ;)

Actually some of us Americans refer to it (disparagingly) as "the national religion". Same deal with Canada and hockey, which is the Viking Paganism (ice, blood, crazed tribal members) to our Roman Catholicism (ritual, proscription, holy days).

Here its cricket which most people follow religiously and its not even the national sport, go figure. :)

I stand corrected. :P

Well even I find it boring now because all our national team does is lose the big matches. Even a 20 over match takes 5 hours to finish while a 50 over match takes the whole day and the less we talk about test matches the better. There are better ways to waste my time. ;)

I doesn't matter. Baseball is boring and yet I am a freak for the game. As I type this I'm watching two baseball games at once and later tonight I plan to catch three more all while watching a hockey game. Multitasking man! :O

I used to work for a Paki exchange student who ran a cleaning business on the side with the intent of making enough money to become a cricket star back home. No joke. My salary was, however.

Honestly? Get a distro of Linux or pirate a copy of XP in a little bit when it's fully . I'd take the opportunity to bite the bullet and learn Linux (it's *so easy* these days compared to 20 years ago). If you don't have any games you need to play on Windows, it's really simple. If you do, then you're either going to need to go with a copy of WIn, again, or learn you some [url=http://www.winehq.org/]WINE.

I've played cricket with some of our international workers over here. It seems quite popular in the countries that still have the most British Colonial cultural residue left (not surprisingly). This includes India and Sri Lanka.

I actually enjoy playing it, but it's not much fun to watch. Same deal with croquet, which I only just this second realised sounds like a French word for "cricket" and probably shares a common origin. Anyway, cricket is mostly about spending the day outside with food and drink. The game is largely the excuse to do so. :)

Lol, handegg. I am going to start using that.

But seriously, I only call soccer "football" when I am not in the US; it makes convos easier when you're in the States to just say soccer.

Oh definitely, playing cricket is incrementally better infact whenever we were watching our team play and it would become clear they were gonna lose we just went outside to play ourselves. There are actually quite a lot of versions where you can play in the street, on the roof or indoors and you can even play using books. ;)

I used to play a lot in my teens but haven't played a lot recently. Playing cricket is all we did on our family picnics and we also played a lot of football as well probably because I was born and raised in the Middle East. It is really fun when you're bowling or batting not so much when your fielding, which I guess it the case with most sports. I think the worst to watch is golf though I can't imagine how people can enjoy watching it, I find it mind numbingly boring.
It it kinda similar to cricket in some aspects, I still don't get the game though haven't really tried to learn. All I know is from the movies I have seen.
That is not really hard to believe because a lot of players in the national team come from humble beginnings and poor families.