Subject: First Day's Results

Date: 27-Apr-96 at 13:36

From: Uncle Terry, 73060,2661

Welcome to Worlds. We are most excited, as today is Freedom Day. We're not sure exactly what that means, but we're happy to celebrate any holiday, as long as the liquor stores are open (and they were). OK, everyone knows I don't like to get into the silly details of actual game scores. But Lisa is finally discovering that no one wants to spend their time calling her with information when they could have much more fun actually participating in whatever chaos develops (perhaps that explains why UPI & Reuters actually send reporters to breaking news events rather than relying on the local dictators to inform the world of the local coup d'etat, but that's another subject). So I'll make an exception and report today's scores (well, some games are still going on, and it's 20:44 and I'm hungry and thirsty, so I'm not hanging around the pool to wait for the rest).

In the men's division, scores were as follows-- Men's Division: 3-1, 8-0, 8-0, 19-0, 8-0, 10-2, 13-0, 1-0, 15-0, 13-0; Women's Division: 21-0, 19-0, 3-2, 2-2, 3-2; Masters Division: 11-0, 10-1. South Africa, Australia won all of their games, the South Americans and Zimbabwe lost all of theirs, and every other country had some of each.

In the game against Holland, Mojo performed her best Racco imitation, scoring a goal for each minute she spent in the penalty box. Fortunately that was enough to avoid losing to the megafauna Dutch femmes.

As Lisa has already reported, some interesting upsets took place in the practice games (yeah, I know they don't count, but it's early in the tournament). She seems to have forgotten the US Masters team beat a South African Masters team, but what do you expect from yellow journalism.

The US Masters held their opponents to half as many goals as in the first day at the last Worlds. Enthusiasm was not dampened by the fact that they only played half as many games.

But back to important matters. The opening ceremonies were a vast improvement over 1994. The speeches were short, no mimes re-enacting French history were involved, and, most importantly, the whole thing lasted just over an hour (80% of which was taken up by the Argentinean national anthem). For some reason, it seemed the South Africans had 2 national anthems, but that could just be our misinterpretation, and we're not going into politics here. The festivities featured Zulu dancers, tap dancers wearing rubber boots, and the shortest speech ever given by a French-speaking official: "Let the games begin!" (followed by several Blonderbrau openers going intoaction). And later followed by Woody doing his imitation of the Zulu dancers to a Freddie Mercury tune (apparently he's not dead yet here). As always the Colombians have been quite entertaining, especially when the women were warming up in their white suits. And the Argentineans banged their drums.

The fan support of teams has been interesting, as always. The French are still doing their "Allez, allez" thing (led, of course, by the Eveready bitch), but it doesn't have the same effect without the local home fans joining in. The Argentineans exhibited incredible spontaneous enthusiasm, even after losing (and they wear great warpaint for games). They seem to be a serious threat to the Medillin crowd for party attitude. I'm not sure what they'll do when they win, but for now, that doesn't seem to be a serious concern. But the best performance so far has been the New Zealanders. At halftime of the NZ-Frog Women's game, when the Kiwis were behind 3-0, the NZ men ran onto the deck and performed a Maori fertility dance, with the results that the women scored 2 quick goals. You should see what they can do with sheep!

The US Masters did some exploration, and provided the opportunity to eat local wildlife, but we don't want to tell Pat Partington tales out of school.

The currency here is of great interest. Every day, our dollars seem to convert into more and more Randys. If we stay here long enough, we think they'll pay us to leave. The pictures on the money are a source of great confusion. We're not sure if they follow the American tradition of past presidents on their bills, or the practice of many former Brit colonies of picturing the queen, but suffice to say that these are some ugly dudes!

This may seem like a lot of information in a short time, but I'm scrambling. The 19th century electrical system in our hotel (more on this home-away-from-home in a later issue) has fried my power supply/battery charger, so if I can't get a solution from Chairman Mau's local electrical contact, we may be restricted to how many AA batteries we can keep buying to keep these reports coming. Tomorrow's events include more games, more beer, and the planting of the Chia Head (thanks Molly).

On a more serious note (the first and last one, I promise) the American team mourns the passing of the most famous person ever to have played hockey-- Erma Bombeck. It is a little known, but important, fact that the noted humorist (from Dayton, OH, I might add), while a member of the Good Morning America crew, participated in the media blitz of the 1984 World

Championships, enthusiastically playing in a practice with the Chicago team. As National Director Kimball Banks said, "I'll always remember, she said we gave her the ride of her life".

So, till next time, if there is a next time.