03.07.18 - Show de bola #2

Halloooo,

Hope you're having a fab time in Italy or what-have-you.  We've been seizing on some down-time at work, hitting the road on Wednesday to see Ridaut give his inaugural motivational speech/TED Talk for the company of one of the guys we play football with (and who turns out to be something of a low-key Brazilian Sean Parker, fingers in lots of digital pies etc), followed by a free lunch and a mad dash to Fabio & Bruna's to watch Brazil brush Serbia aside and qualify for the knock-outs.

(An aside: Now seems as good a time as any to highlight the weird, spinning “Bonecos de Olinda” (Olinda dolls) of Recife, in northeast Brazil.  They are a regional fixture during Carnaval and have been updated for the World Cup to resemble past and current stars of the national team. Globo TV has taken to cutting away to a live feed of them at half-time during Brazil matches, so the organisers made more dolls in the image of the commentary team, including Ronaldo and Galvão Bueno.  The result is about thirty seconds of pure nightmare fuel per fixture, as Neymar’s dead-eyed effigy silently spins round in circles to the increasingly nervous laughter of the commentary team.  Larger-than-life Michael Jackson and Donald Trump are there too for some reason.)

At the weekend we went back to Fabio's for his building's Festa Junina, which involved lots of convoluted line-dancing, musical chairs and churros and was most fun indeed. The next day, Michelle's boyfriend Vinicius invited us to a sports-car summit, basically an excuse for owners of fast cars to take to the motorway en masse and stretch their legs/tyres. We met at the JK shopping centre, which was closed to the public and whose parking garage soon filled up with all sorts of amazing-looking cars and people, hit the complimentary breakfast buffet, and went barreling off down the highway to a country club out of town (a Club Med, no less!) for lunch, free massages and a go on the F1 Interlagos simulator, before heading back for a burger.  Most enjoyable, if a little heart-in-mouth when we were ducking and diving through the traffic in town.

In other news I've made another compilation and today's phrase, while once used exclusively to refer to great footballing displays ("the ball show", indeed), is now used for anything remotely positive or awesome. Some extra blog-only content this week too, covering Gaby's theory about the World Cup and who's going to win it - you heard it here first.

Speak soon!

Fredder at the Far Post