Overtime

Team Trivia at the Sports Cafe has been a Friday night tradition for us here in State College for quite some time. In fact, I think I’ve made it there just about every Friday since last September when I started grad school out here at Penn State. It was something I looked forward to every week, and we really kind of adopted the Sports Cafe as our own, even though it was a bit of a dump. So you can imagine my shock a couple weeks ago when Jeff let me know that Friday night trivia, at least at the Sports Cafe, had ceased to exist, with virtually no warning. So after a couple Fridays of no trivia on Friday nights (for which I was mercifully out of town), this week Team Trivia was resurrected at a new location, the G-Man. While it doesn’t have quite as many video screens on which to watch various sporting events while we have a beer and ponder the answer to various and sundry trivia questions, the Gingerbread Man has several advantages over the Sports Cafe. Let me list just a few: 1) it’s not a dump, 2) there are actually paper towels in the bathrooms, 3) there’s more than one food option (wings) that’s actually good, and 4) there are actually quite a few food/drink specials (including a 16″ pizza for $5 after 8pm!), as opposed to only one at Sports Cafe. Oh yeah, and Friday night trivia at the G-Man is also at a much better starting time (7pm) than it was at Sports Cafe (8pm). At least we continued our winning ways, taking first place this week with the team name “Kim Jong-Il Can’t Get His Missiles Up,” which we thought was rather clever. And Vic has some pretty sweet sunglasses that sure made the rounds; they were so cool that everyone wanted to try them on! Now is trivia really this big a deal that I needed to write this big long exposition about it? Well, perhaps, but I pretty much just wanted a good excuse to get a few of these sunglasses pictures posted. 😉
This afternoon I went down to Champs with Jeff, Vic & Robert to watch the World Cup Final, between perennial powerhouses Italy and France. Now, I was a bit torn on who to cheer for. Typically on principle I don’t ever cheer for France in anything, mainly because I like to make fun of their cheese-eating surrender monkey ways, but I was chatting online this morning with my Aussie friend Simon, who studied abroad in Lyon, France last year, and he was lobbying for me to barrack for France. And that, when added with cool player names like Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry, and I decided to become a marginal France fan for the day. And it was a great game, up until Zidane decided to freak out and viciously head butt an Italian player in the chest, earning him a direct red card. And this was mere minutes after he very nearly won the game in storybook fashion (to wrap up a stellar career) with a spectacular header that was acrobatically saved in an equally spectacular manner by the Italian keeper. Zidane, what were you thinking?!? I mean, seriously, how could anyone be so STUPID to do that, especially in the FINAL of the WORLD CUP?? Argh. As most of you probably already know, Italy wound up winning in a penalty kick shootout, after the thirty minutes of overtime ended scoreless. And it’s not like I’m sad that Italy won or anything, I really don’t mind. Well, at least the rest of the world can go back to being sane, and ordinary Americans like myself can go back to mostly ignoring soccer, until 2010 in South Africa. Bold prediction: a European team will NOT be crowned World Cup Champion in 2010.
Church this morning was really cool. I didn’t think it would be initially, as the youth pastor and teens from the youth group were sharing some of their experiences from a conference they were at in Indiana last week. I thought it would be just another group of kids getting up front and saying “yeah, we had lots of fun last week, it was a cool trip” and whatnot. When I got there they were basically carrying straight over from the first service, and after listening for a little while it became clear that the Holy Spirit was really working in these youths, they were genuinely on fire for Christ. It really was amazing and so encouraging to hear how God was working in their hearts this last week at the conference, with the light bulbs finally turning on for so many of them, and their Christian faith becoming real to them in their hearts for the first time. The congregation was so captivated by the revival taking place amongst the youth group that pretty much everyone who came to the first service at 9am stayed right on through most of the second service, which “started” at 10:30. Pretty much the whole way through the second service Daryl, the youth pastor, was letting people know they were free to leave whenever if need be, but basically nobody left! Normally the second service ends around 11:45 or so, but all the youths (and when was the last time you heard of *everyone* from a group of middle and high schoolers taking their turn getting up in front of a church and speaking??) had so much to share that the worship set was still going after 12:30 when people finally started trickling out! Church definitely went overtime today, but nobody cared — the Spirit really was at work during the entire service today! Hopefully the entire congregation will catch the fire of revival that these youths came back from Purdue with.