I kept seeing headlines yesterday like “Harry Reid Moves Massive Health Care Bill to the Senate Floor.” For crying out loud, the guy’s gotta be in his sixties–can’t they get him a Congressional page or at least a hand-truck or a wheelbarrow or something? Lift with the legs, Harry!

I don’t really have anything to write about today. Maybe I should keep mining the headlines, like a hack Jay Leno writer about to be fired because his show is in fifth place!

For example, here are two sports stories I saw yesterday that I didn’t understand.

Apparently Ireland isn’t going to the World Cup because Thierry Henry is a big cheater. See, this is a huge difference between American and international sports culture that I don’t understand. I gather that Henry used two surreptitious hand-touches to score some crucial French “goal” (they have “goals” in soccer, right?) against Ireland the other day.

Now, granted, if something similar had happened in a big U.S. game–baseball, football, basketball, whatever–it would also make headlines. But the headlines would all be something like “Questionable call dooms Ireland!” (Assume for a moment that Ireland has an NFL team. The Pink Hearts or the Orange Stars or the Yellow Moons or something.) But this is soccer. And so every postmortem of the controversy seems to focus not on the refs missing the infraction, but on why Henry would do something so shockingly illegal. Even the defenses of Henry seem to confess his moral bankruptcy. From WorldCupBlog:

If you were fighting to get your team to World Cup 2010, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to make it happen? Even if it meant bending or breaking the rules? I’m not excusing what Henry did, and he’s definitely (to quote Kevin Keegan) gone down in my estimation tonight. But I can definitely understand why he did it.

This is crazy talk. Can you imagine this kind of navel-gazing in U.S. sports coverage? “Wow, Kobe just laid a shoulder into that guy to clear the lane and grab the rebound! Doesn’t he know the rules! I can’t believe he would break the rules!” Or “Look at that replay–Pujols didn’t touch the plate! But he just headed for the dugout like he had! Doesn’t he love the game?!?” There seems to be some understanding among American athletes and fans that (a) players are going to try to win, (b) it’s the officials’ job, not the players’, to sort out infractions they make along the way, and (c) not every broken rule in sports is a result of deviousness of malice–sometimes games just move pretty fast.

Is there something special about soccer that I’m not getting here? Or is it all non-U.S. sport that works this way? I’ve never seen anyone call their own fouls at the Olympics. “Oops, my bad, I totally got your arm as you were shooting. Here, take it from the top of the key.”

In other sports news: Tony Gwynn is no longer the whitest guy in baseball! A weirdly pale Sammy Sosa finally copped to using skin-lightening technology, after people starting asking if he’d been cast in a Tim Burton movie or something.

When Mindy and I were in Thailand, we saw ads for skin-lightening creams everywhere. Some of them had before-and-after color strips, like teeth-whitening toothpaste does in the States. Coming from an American background of finding colorism distasteful (the “brown paper bag test” et. al.) it was a little uncomfortable.

I don’t need to be the privileged white guy tsk-tsking over other cultures valuing that same privilege. That’s a little uncomfortable too, from my sheltered never-had-to-be-the-darkest-guy-in-India viewpoint. But look: I’ve always cheered on lots and lots of interracial gettin’-it-on on the theory that racism won’t die until everyone is the same beautiful cafe con leche color, right? Well, for every Thai or Indian or Brazilian skin-bleaching cream, there’s probably a Caucasian-aimed cream with additives to darken/”tan” the skin. So skin creams like Sammy’s (and their faux-tanning “opposites”) are just bringing on the post-racial utopia a little faster, right? I guess some marketing genius could mix the U.S. and Thai products together to get a skin cream that doesn’t change the color of your skin at all! Think of all the money there is to be made there.