Salma Hayak has nothing to do with the World Cup, but here she is posing with an unknown actress.




















The cool thing about watching the World Cup is you can put together a table and a chair while watching and do all sorts of multitasking.

Meal of Links

Keeping with my habit of not noticing commercials when they've been on for a while. It's the iTunes ad with one of my favorite current songs, "Love Train" by Wolfmother. Now I don't have to sing it.

This surprised me. September 12 is when the latest Bob Seger album drops. I'm sensing a John Fogerty-type comeback. However, he's 61.

Billy Bragg removes his music from MySpace. Didn't know old folks were on MySpace.

Exercise Yard

It's only Day 2 of the World Cup and Dave O'Brien has already succeeded in driving me away from an HD broadcast to the Spanish channel. The clincher, some guy on Paraguay called David Beckham "a coward" back in May. So, Dave tries his damnedest to get this story in, at, oh, about the 38th minute. But he would start it, a replay would come up, and his partner Marcelo Balboa would completely ignore the story and do what he's supposed to do...talk about the match. Dave was so determined to get this in, at about the 50-minute mark, he brought it up again to finally finish it. It's laughable. Every year, they try to Americanize these broadcasts and it ruins it. The only time casual fans watch is if the USA is on. So, keep the backstory stuff for pregame coverage.

Univision does it right. You get the national anthems with the tradition of showing each starter on both teams, many of them singing. I actually like that. In person, it's incredible. I mean England is loaded with stars and most of them sang "God Save the Queen". And, Paraguay's anthem was cool. Plus, the Spanish commercials are pretty much all soccer-related. Hell, Lite Beer had one with Valderrama and Baggio in it.

England won, 1-0. Somehow, Becks bent it off some Paraguayan's head for an own goal in the first three minutes.

Other games, Argentina looked about 99 and 44/100ths good in defeating the war-torn Ivory Coast.

And, in the Match of the Day, Trinidad & Tobago beat Sweden 0-0 in the biggest upset, thus far. That's a win, because T&T is about a zillion-to-one to win this thing.

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21 Across: Natty Bumppo's creator (6 letters) Answer: Cooper