Now Showing: Our Flat World...in HDTV
After a politely threatening email to my friends and family, 12 hours of avoiding the Internet, and a glib comment about the outcome from the last person I would have expected at church to even care about the World Cup final, I sat down with my brothers to watch the match on tape-delay. As further evidence of what Thomas Friedman writes about in his book, The World is Flat, more than a billion people around the world were able to watch the match. I suppose it was due to globalization, then, that just when we thought we'd seen it all (a World Cup final decided by a yo' mamma joke, Italy win a penalty shootout, etc.) the single most incredible moment in World Cup history occurred as those billion people around the world saw Gennaro Gattusso celebrating on the pitch in his underpants...in HDTV.