Points, points, points

I will state this outright: all sports that Americans seem to care about are shite:

NBA: a game for very tall people with incessant scoring, because that's what makes people cheer. Spurious rules to make it seem like a real sport.

Baseball: a slightly more interesting variant of cricket, which as someone of British upbringing I'll have to take blame for. Still shit.

Gridiron (what they call football): Lumps of meat in armour charging at each other with a break every half-minute at best for commercials. No continuity, but there are lots of points because apparently that's all you want.

Ice hockey: actually a proper sport, bar the silly fighting that you can't do at international level. Maybe that's why they have less interest in it.

'Soccer': in America, apparently only for kids and women. Every American man I've ever come across here who's been press-ganged into playing it by the English/Scots etc. doesn't know what to do at all. I'm shite at ball control, and yet I feel like Pele in comparison.

You're 5 % of the world's population. And you're not the richest country per capita either, by a long chalk, despite having enjoyed over a hundred years of undisturbed opportunity (no invasions, continuous immigration of cheap young labour, very, very large natural resources) to become so. Being the biggest economy means nothing when there are 325 million of you, or when you reassure yourself with having the biggest military. The land of the free, with all the politically-driven censorship? The Pilgrim Fathers were religious fundamentalists who left because they weren't allowed to practise their brand of intolerance any more; and that's what you celebrate at Thanksgiving.

In short, elect Trump and see how then Muslims you upset will get even worse, and I'd like to say that you deserve it all, but then everything you do these days hurts all of us. I like lots of things individual Americans do, even if that doesn't seem credible from the rest of this post, but as a whole nation you are mentally ill.