Ten ways to avoid the World Cup
1. Go on holiday. Most of Europe is out, but America seems pretty much like a land of opportunity for the World Cup skeptics.
2. Unplug your television. Not only can you then not see the football, but not watching television has numerous social and psychological benefits. The social benefits are somewhat undermined by the fact that everyone is watching the bloody football.
3. Unsubscribe from any RSS feeds which talk about football. If you really can’t go without them, you can always filter them. If you’re a Bloglines user, there is a Greasemonkey script to ignore stories that match a regular expression. It’s called Mental Health Through Ignorance. I’m in the process of writing a script for OPML/Frontier/Radio which I’ll call Unfluffer which will, as the name suggests, remove the fluff from your aggregator with one click.
4. Patronise “gastropubs” and other pubs which focus on the important things a pub should be about - drinks, and food as an extension - rather than football. There’s a list of London pubs here which claim to be “football-free” (and some in the Docklands), and here’s an article which does the same thing for Wandsworth, and Norwich has a handful of pubs not showing the footie (down at the bottom of the article).
5. Podcasts. Subscribe to some podcasts of interest (both video and audio), and they’ll tide you over while the television is boring you to tears. Radio 4 also tends to be football-free most of the time (although they occasionally do the one thing that’s worse than even football - bloody cricket).
6. Develop an MMORPG addiction. It’s not a bad thing, you know. I’d avoid World of Warcraft though. Eve is good, and I particularly like Final Fantasy XI.
7. Dig out your old video games. RPG’s especially, as they’ll give you a big escape from the outside world.
8. Start a blog. You can then get involved in pointless and endless discussions about anything you like. I make it sound far worse than it really is. “;->”
9. Take public transport. Yes, it’s slow and expensive, but you won’t see any “Ingerland” flags. You may find it rather easy to do the shopping while the games are on, although avoid Dixons and other shops with TVs in the window.
10. Sunbathe. Get some lotion, though. Skin cancer really sucks. Take something interesting to read.
