Wildflowers© Jinyoung Lee | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Let me be honest: I am not a contact sports fan.  American football makes me think of brain injury, and hockey makes me think of ice blades slashing faces.  To be even more honest, I do not really think of contact sports.  Ann Coulter’s recent statements, baffling as always, about how the good sportsmanship displayed by soccer teams upends the spirit of competitive sports made me especially happy to watch a few games this weekend.  Brazil vs Columbia and Netherlands vs Costa Rico.

I watched with family who were more interested than me, but the enthusiasm is infectious. It is hard not to root for the small soccer ball driven towards the goal. The first game brought the heartbreak of smashed ribs, and Brazil’s loss of a star player. The second was a firm stalemate until the penalty kicks.

That was how I meant to start the post this week, but my ideas fizzled out. That was all I watched of the World Cup, proportionately hardly worth many more paragraphs. I did though finish all of the second Robert Galbraith ( who the world knows as JK Rowling. Does everyone know that as RG she sold about 1500 copies of her book until her identity was revealed? Doesn’t quite seem fair, but then after reading most of a borrowed copy, I found myself downloading a copy to finish. The upshot was that it was a not really very good read, but strangely compelling.

World Cup, Quidditch; Quidditch, World Cup.