Miss me? And rugby

France just lost to England in the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup, which has been filling Paris with rugby fans for the last few weeks. It's too bad the Scots were ousted earlier; I appreciated seeing St. Paul overrun with large men in kilts. The Scots, of course, will be disappointed that France lost, or rather, that England won. The Auld Alliance, a Scottish bar near St. Paul, had a French flag up today. 

But I digress. The funny thing after this loss is that there were commercials that mentioned the French loss: one by Société Géniale showing a stylized rooster made out of a rugby ball, shedding several cartoon tears, and one by Nike showing the French team upset, saying "We have all fallen together... we will rise again together." Of course there were two versions of each of these, one for the win and one for the loss. I suppose they played the winning ones after the previous games. But I wonder how the French team felt filming the losing Nike commercial. Kind of a jinx, I would think!

Anyway, this was only the second rugby game I've ever watched. The first was last week's surprise upset of the Maori-dance-imitating New Zealand team by les Bleus. It's like (American) football, except that tackles don't really seem to mean much. And it's played by Europeans.