Courtesy of Deadspin, here’s all you really need to know about how soccer went in England this past weekend.
Millwall’s motto is “No One Likes Us,” so news of their fans at the FA Cup semi-finals fighting in the stands isn’t surprising. But fighting with each other, allegedly while coked-up, is pretty much next-level.
Still, though, that last video. A Newcastle fan, after a horrible loss to rivals Sunderland, in what’s been a really frustrating season, punching a horse. PUNCHING A HORSE.
Ah, cultural literacy. Margaret Thatcher’s passing has been attracting plenty of social media traffic today, much of it marked with the Twitter hashtag #nowthatchersdead. As the Dallas Morning News notes, some read the hashtag completely differently — thinking that the five-decade reign of pop songstress Cher had come to an untimely end. Thankfully, every sailor’s favorite singer is still with us. Maybe #nowthatthatchersdead would have made it clearer?
So, rough night for the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday, losing their hold on the #1 seed in the West, losing to the Oklahoma City Thunder 100-88. The game featured Kevin Durant absolutely annihilating Los Spurs (as they’re called during NBA’s mystifying Noche Latino) on a dunk. Yardbarker noticed what we noticed — namely, Reggie Miller’s replay call, in which he intones, “Mommy’s got some things for Daddy TO DO!” (Which is, of course, the punchline to the hilarious Kevin Durant commercial for Sprint that’s been playing on a loop during NBA games since Christmas. This is perhaps the worst announcer call of the year, yet also our favorite.
So, the Super Bowl’s over, the NBA’s heading toward the always-entertaining All-Star Weekend (but the admittedly lackluster All-Star midseason caesura), baseball’s not quite yet in preseason, and hockey’s made itself irrelevant — taking care of the Big Four sports. So ESPN The Magazine decided to make the latest issue “The Music Issue,” which means photo shoots in which willing athletes try to help you shake off the winter doldrums by posing in costumes made to look like album covers. So, Alex Morgan dresses up like Katy Perry (giggity), MLB stars dress up like Devo on the Freedom of Choice cover (why?), Ryan Lochte undresses up like the baby on the Nirvana Nevermind cover (double why), and Josh Freeman dons the white suit (and a stuffed baby tiger) to replicate Michael Jackson’s Thriller, forever making him “the guy who posed as Michael Jackson for ESPN the Magazine that one time.” And NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson as Bob Dylan? Imagined staff meeting at ESPN the Magazine this week: “Okay, the costumes were fun — NFL DRAFT IN TWO MONTHS! GET ON THAT NOW!”
Pop Culture Diary 
Amanda Palmer Writes A Poem, And The Internet Explodes
In what is apparently the Making It All About You Department, the not-always-social-media-savvy Amanda Palmer has written a poem titled “A Poem For Dzhokhar” on her blog over the weekend. Although the work does venture into what Suspect #2 (and his brother, Suspect #1, aka the Tsarnaev Brothers of last week’s horrific Boston marathon bombings) might be thinking, the references to iPhone battery life, Vietnamese soft rolls, and the Oh-my-Godiest line of all: “you don’t know how to tell the girl in the chair next to you that you’ve been peeking at her dissertation draft and there’s a grammatical typo in the actual file name” indicates that this poem is more about Amanda calling attention to Amanda. (We’ll let the crime of all lower-casing rest for now.)
So, the Internets noticed. Spin called it “a new low” (and paired it with an engineered-to-scare photo of Amanda enjoying a ball pit more maniacally than she might have intended), Gawker called it “the worst poem ever written,” and one blogger wrote biting parodies. And, predictably, the greatest handwringing on the Internets was of the “Neil Gaiman has to stay married to her?” variety.
It’s really not, to be fair, the worst poem ever written — it has all the hallmarks of being quickly dashed off, in an attempt to enter the dialogue in a way that’s clearly marked with her own voice and her own worldview. She has adoring fans, to be sure, and when you raise over a million dollars on Kickstarter and create a fantastic album in response, it maybe makes you feel like you can do no wrong, even after last year’s Unpaidmusiciangate — a pretty definitive indication that the Internets will not always love you.
Here’s the problem — we’re all watching from a distance right now as the FBI, CIA, and whoever else is questioning Dzhokhar right now trying to get into his head. We’re pretty sure that he wasn’t bleeding to death hiding in a boat thinking about Vietnamese soft rolls, and if he was, we’re not concerned about that. We want to know more important things, like why did they try to kill people, was he and his brother working with other terrorists to kill people, and are there plans to kill anymore people, including any additional bombs hidden in Boston. Right now, getting into the mind of the bomber isn’t a journey to the land of aesthetic ennui and artists-who-made-it problems for those of us who feel compelled together. We want to see the blueprint imprinted in that mind — namely, a plan to hurt and kill innocents, a plan that worked, a plan that took an eight-year-old boy and two young women from the world. We collectively want to know the extent of the plan so we can begin to heal and fight the fear and bewilderment that terrorism means. There’s a time and place for navel-gazing art. The galvanic response to Amanda’s thoughts on Amanda as filtered through Dzhokhar is the audience saying that this is not quite the time and place.
(Update: The title was arbitrary, and it only took her nine minutes to write the poem. We suspected as much.)