Insanity

I am not a soccer fan. I grew up in a soccer town--though they called it football, there--but it didn't seem to take. Locally soccer is a sometime thing, an attraction only to a few diehards who hold out against the pressure of football (in its Canadian and American variants), hockey (Hit Somebody!), and baseball. However, sometime is now, in the middle of the World Cup, or rather, now, immediately after the final game of the World Cup.

There is a very large Italian-origin community here. It's not that most of them were born in Italy, but their parents were, and the success/failure of Canada's immigration and cultural heritage policies means that most of them consider themselves Italians rather than Canadians. So the Italian win was a very big deal here. Driving on the local roads was hazardous, with people leaning out of car windows waving Italian flags, driving open trucks with twenty people on the truck bed all waving flags (and screaming "Azzuuuuuri! Italia!" at the top of their lungs). Downtown in Little Italy was worse, as the party apparently went on until 4 am, with the litter ankle deep or worse--the morning news claims it took 50 trucks to remove it, as much in a few hours as is normally generated in a week.

The Toronto Grand Prix was also running this weekend. Nobody noticed.