Football

A Game Without Logic

by Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl)
written 17 Feb 1997

This article is classified "Partly real, partly fictional"


Football is a strange Terran game with a number of people, dressed in two 
different kinds of shirts, who run around on a green field trying to kick
and head-butt a defenceless round object.  Half of them become very happy
when they've managed to deposit the object into one of the two very drafty
storage places, at the head and foot of the field.  Two oddly dressed people
frantically try to prevent this storage by using brightly coloured devices
to increase their hand-size manifold, to scare the cleaners off.

One person has been hired to make music.  This man is very popular, as a
tremendous crowd has come to listen to him especially, judging by the noise
they make just before and after his short performances, and by how they all
sing along with him.  From out of nowhere an excited voice interrupts this
musical extravaganza continuously.  Especially during storage the voice
loudly drowns out the music maker, shouting "gooooooaaaaaaaal!!!", so that 
is what we will call storage from now on.  Actually, the happy half of the
players at this moment take their time to dance to the music.

It has proved impossible to find any logic to the game, as no rules seem
to exist.  The game sometimes lasts for seconds, and sometimes for hours.
People who were first at one side of the field, suddenly pop up somewhere
completely different, without seeming to be bothered about it at all.  This
presumably takes a lot of training.  Object touching changes in a similar
fashion.

Strangely enough, every match, regardless of its length, seems to have the 
same average amount of gooooooaaaaaaaals.  Many of them look remarkably
similar, and take place in sequence.  Whenever such a sequence takes place,
time is distorted, which seems to put the players off so much that they
repeat their mistakes again and again.  Time distortion therefore must
affect the memory.  

Averaged over the time of the match, the number of participants rolling
around on the field clutching their ankles increases when the match is
shorter, as do the number of yellow and red pictures the music man shows,
although it is never possible to distinguish what is on those pictures.

This football is a very popular activity, as we have deduced from the
time it covers on Earth broadcasts; even more popular than chasing cars
and sex!  (But not as popular as continuously making one anothers lives
miserable in the settings of house interiors, dressed in fancy clothes,
and sipping coloured water). 

Do not mistake this game for another game called Football.  This game is 
just as illogical as the one I mentioned before, but it isn't exactly 
the same; for instance, only deformed people with wild growths on their 
shoulders and fancy hats play it, and they need a grid on the field to 
find their way about.

See also:
  • Football, Association
  • Earth
  • Rules Of Car Chasing
  • Westerbork Array, Westerbork, Drenthe, Netherlands, Earth
  • Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa, Earth
  • Arguments, Infinitely Prolonging
  • Kudu Dung Spitting

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