Men around the world (some women too I’m sure) were gathering in small groups, in large groups, at homes and in pubs, with beer or hard liquor, watching game after game.  Rooting for their national teams, their favorite players.  Cussing and making fun of the others, the enemies.

In Israel it was short lived.  After a few press conferences in which the head coach made statements like “we have never been more prepared”, and “this year with the current line up of players, we are on our way to the World Cup for the first time since 1966″, followed by a few games in which Israel lost to countries that can’t even spell “Soccer”, we were out of the competition, the head coach our of a job, and countless Israeli men short of money and big on beer bellies.  For Israel, this scenario has been spelling the World Cup for years.  Big statements, small games.  Big mouths, small results.

Not for me.  I expected nothing and that’s precisely what I got.  I haven’t watched a single game.  I barely read the score on the news a couple of days later.  Overhearing the big shots on the train, and their deep analysis of the game, the players, and the “disgraceful errors” made by the coach, the “amazing mistakes” ruled by the referee, I had all the information I needed.

And then, suddenly, June arrived.  It was a surprise really.  May hardly ended, and there it was, June, and the South African World Cup of 2010 was on its way.  Israel wasn’t there.  But in our defense I would state that many other countries didn’t make it to the World Cup.  (Later I would learn that making it to the World Cup and actually showing up to the games are two different things.  See the French team for example.  They made their way to the World Cup, but never showed up to the games).

And there I was.  Anticipating the whistle.  The signal for the games to begin.  The World Cup.  What an amazing event.  Only once every four years.  What a wonderful show of human sportsmanship, teamwork, solidarity, strategy and tactics.  I felt lucky to be alive, and to be the owner of a large screen LCD TV with full HD capabilities.  Really large.

I sat on my American Comfort brown soft leather armchair, put my feet up in the air, took a handful of sunflower seeds, and made sure that the Heineken is within the reach of my hand.  I was all set to be excited, to be entertained, to be in the game.  And then I remembered.  It hit me like a lightning in the middle of the summer.  Like Mozart playing in the middle of a baseball game in the heart of Minnesota.  In the winter.  It’s boring.

I almost fell off the chair.  What the hell was I thinking?  Twenty millionaires, each ten wearing expensive colorful uniform, with two other wearing ski clothes standing in the goals.  Another black and yellow guy standing in the middle of the huge grass court, pointing fingers like a senior manager in some hitech company and whistling all the time, and rain.  The millionaires keep running around, chasing a ball, kicking each other particularly in the feet and then immediately denying the kick (which by the way they repeat, slowly, one time after the other almost every time), spitting and sweating, holding each other’s shirts, pants, feet and hair.  Sometimes, not very often, one of them actually makes it all the way to the other side, and successfully enters the ball in to the other team’s goal.  In which case the yellow guy usually comes close, and says something like “offside” or even simpler, just reaches to his invisible pocket and flashes a yellow or red card, followed by a big fight not only on the courts, but also by some older men wearing suits on both sides of the court.

The players run around and as soon as someone comes close they twist their faces and fall on the grass holding one organ or another.  At first you think the game is over for the guy, and that the murderer will be indicted shortly.  Then he runs again, slowly, and you see clearly that the other guy had nothing to do with it.  Strange.

Ninety minutes later I realized that I wasted another two hours on watching a bunch of sweaty men running around a grass court.  The funny thing is, that an hour later there’s another game, and I watch that one too.  And another one.

Amazing this Soccer game.  And then it hit me again.  Soccer develops tolerance for boredom.  If you are strong enough to watch the World Cup, you are probably strong enough to sustain almost anything.  Long Live the Mondial.  And may we live to see and sleep through many more.

But here’s the twist.  We both know that at a certain point, usually five or ten minutes after we leave the house, I will turn around and go home.  We both know that leaving smelly surprises around the house are not an acceptable gift for our family.  The last piece of information, by the way, works both ways.  She knows that I would find it difficult to come home and report to the boss (my wife that is) that the dog came back leaving absolutely nothing in the street.  She concludes therefore, that I will keep going until she does something.  And she’s not completely wrong, unless of course some show is about to start in a few minutes (she has no access to this confidential information).

So there we are, out in the cold street.  I want to go back home, she wants to stay out.  We look at each other and the game starts.  She walks around, and in front of my hopeful eyes gets to position.  She smells the hope and decides to go sniff something new.  Disappointment.  A few more steps, and she starts to go around as if to find the exact hole in the ground which will serve as tonight’s toilet.  She sits in the strange way dogs sit when they’re about to introduce a new smelly surprise to the world, she even looks at me with reassurance as if to say: “don’t worry, you’ll get to watch your stupid show in a minute”.  But then that bastard neighbor’s dog shows up and they’re at each other’s behind sniffing as if Chanel number 5 is a thing of the past.  The last phenomenon probably explains why our dog Linda smells the same on both ends.  Disappointment.

That’s the point that I really give up, go home, and take the risk that what happened the other night would happen again.  What happened was that I woke up at 4:00 AM thinking that in my absence, my wife had accepted a homeless horse with some serious bowel issues as a house guest.  Instead, as it turned out, our dog, who had won the game that night, chose to leave a hefty pile of warm crap in the entrance to my youngest son’s room.  And there I was, 4:00 AM, in front of a busy work day, collecting warm and stinking pieces of fresh dung, cleaning and washing the floor, opening the windows to the cold night air.  What really struck me that night was that my expectation was for a 12 lbs dog to leave behind a few ounces of poop.  Instead, I saw a pile that resembles only large zoo animals production, or alternatively, large farm animals.  How the hell could this outstanding amount come out of such little dog.  Truthfully, I started thinking about accomplices, but then dismissed it as a crazy thought of a tired person at 4:00 AM.

We’re negotiating a truce.  I do hope that we can compromise.  Forget the TV and the dosing off.  Walk me all you want, just leave my house crap free.

The supermarket is another game I play with my wife.  She prepares a list of groceries for me, and I go get it every Friday morning after I drop the kids off at school.  I know the supermarket’s pretty well.  I know where almost everything is.  When I get in, I park the cart right inside the store, and I get the list out.  I study the list,  trying to memorize it.  My objective is to make a single pass of the store, getting everything the first time.  Never returning to the same aisle.  Dorit, who’s playing the game remotely, has a completely opposite objective.  Her objective is to to have me walk around the huge store, grabbing one product at the time, moving on to the other side of the store as the cart gets heavier and heavier and its front left wheel gets nastier and nastier with each turn.  The best is at the meats section.  One must take a number and wait the long line.  Once you use your turn to get whatever kind of meat you need, the turn is over forever, and realizing that somewhere down the list another kind was somewhere else on the list (why????), I must take another number and wait the line again.

I end up at the check out line behind the only old lady in the Middle East who still uses checks for grocery shopping.  Did I mention already that the definition of game is to determine a winner?  In my dog and supermarket game theory, the objective is to determine a loser.  Me.

1. If one wanted to surround the earth with rope, he will need roughly 40,000 km of rope.  What if he wanted to have the rope 1 meter away from the ground, how much additional rope is needed?

2. A father of three was on his deathbed.  He was the owner of seventeen camels.  He wrote a will: “please give half my camels to my older son, a third to the middle son, and two ninths to the youngest”.  The brothers were utterly and totally confused.  They didn’t know how to execute the will.  Finally they went to a wise lady who lived close by.  She solved the problem for them.  Can you guess what her solution was?

As I said, solutions and insights next week.

Riddle number 1.  If one wanted to surround the earth with rope, he will need roughly 40,000 km of rope.  What if he wanted to have the rope 1 meter away from the ground, how much rope will he need?  Amazingly, the answer is with 2*pi rope which is roughly 6.28 meters, you can get the rope to be 1 meter away from the ground.  So with even less than 10 meters, you could easily get a donkey to crawl under…

The circumference of the earth is roughly 40,000 km.  This makes the radius roughly 6,366 km.  Your question is basically to increase the radius by 1 meter or to make it 6366001 meters.

6366000*2*pi = 39998757.665505247

6366001*2*pi = 39998763.948690554

763.9486 – 757.6655 = 6.2831 (roughly 2*pi)

Increase the radius by 1 meter will yield an additional 6.28 in the circumference.  (Easy for a donkey, harder for an elephant…

Riddle number 2.  This one has some insights.  The old lady suggested that they take her only camel – as a gift.  They did, and suddenly everything worked out.  The older son received nine camels, the middle son six, and the younger one – two.  But when they came to actually split the inheritance, they couldn’t help noticing that there was one camel extra.  Naturally, they returned it to the old wise lady…

Insights? don’t rush to conclusions before you understand the problem and have a chance to work it.  Another one: sometimes you need a physical help to solve a problem, when virtual help is perfectly sufficient.