Martin Schneider writes:

The New Republic, as it did in 2006, is running an eclectic World Cup blog by a large group of admitted enthusiasts, non-experts. Most of the posts are personal, idiosyncratic, confessional. It's been a fun read.

After today's 2-1 defeat of North Korea by Brazil, Luke Dempsey posted a poem "written" by Martin Tyler and Ally McCoist, the commentators who called the game on ESPN, featuring exclusively phrases uttered during the broadcast, in chronological order.

I'm no expert in poetry, but I just adore this work of structured whimsy. My favorite line is "A voracious appetite for silverware," a line that struck me at the time as being bizarre and kind of great (it was a reference to the Brazilians' habit of winning a lot of trophies).

It also reminds me that I should pick up a used copy of O Holy Cow, a similar project involving the delirious ramblings of Phil Rizzuto, whose Yankee broadcasts I grew up on. My memory is hazy, but I believe Hart Seely and Tom Peyer's project of curating Rizzuto's "poems" started in The Village Voice about twenty years ago.