{"id":633,"date":"2012-06-04T15:32:09","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T20:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=633"},"modified":"2012-06-06T06:18:46","modified_gmt":"2012-06-06T11:18:46","slug":"brek-shea-alex-morgan-and-tiny-horses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=633","title":{"rendered":"Brek Shea, Alex Morgan, and tiny horses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve never liked My Little Pony. Even when it first came out and I was a six year old girl, I wasn&#8217;t interested. I lived on a farm&#8211;if I wanted to play with a pony, there was a real one in the front yard! Thirty years later, they&#8217;ve retooled the series several times, with a new version aimed at the six year old daughters and sons of parents my age. It&#8217;s cute and all, but I&#8217;m still not a fan; I get the appeal but it ain&#8217;t for me.<\/p>\n<p>Except, of course, <a href=\"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=45\">stupid<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=42\">banners<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=154\">appropriating<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/gallery\/main.php?g2_itemId=2051&#038;g2_navId=xc683d943\">pop<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=4\">culture<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=307\">themes<\/a> <em>are<\/em> for me, and, well&#8230;Alex Morgan&#8217;s nickname is &#8220;Baby Horse.&#8221; Then there&#8217;s Brek Shea, with his famous hurrdoo and this weird photoshoot he did with a toy donkey. At least I hope that&#8217;s not a real donkey; it&#8217;s hard to tell what in <a href=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/VEHnR.jpg\">this photo<\/a> is real. And then US Soccer finally got it together that the men&#8217;s and women&#8217;s teams should wear the same jersey (give or take a couple of stars).<\/p>\n<p>All of this&#8211;plus the promise of a WCQ cycle starting with an easy driving distance friendly in Toronto&#8211;added up to one thing: The silliest banner idea I&#8217;ve done yet. I thought about having a contest to see what would pay more: people who would pay me to do it, or people who would pay me NOT to do it. (I may actually sell this after it&#8217;s been to a couple more games.) The more I thought about it, the more I just had to run with this for shits and giggles. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/gallery\/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&#038;g2_itemId=6174&#038;g2_serialNumber=2\"\/><br \/>\n<em><small>I&#8217;m goin&#8217; straight to hell, just like my mama said<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Finished size is about 5&#8242; high by 10&#8242; wide, and it was a real bear to do in the available space in my house. Lots of metallic colors used, especially in Morgan&#8217;s hair and Shea&#8217;s hooves. There&#8217;s even a little gold highlighting in the road to the World Cup. Shea is in red, with the Nike snakeball on his flank; Morgan is in white, with the USSF crest (plus two stars for two Women&#8217;s World Cup titles, of course) on her flank and a pink headband just like real life. (I saw some people inferring the red pony must be Canada, which, no, of course not! The teamwork here is the men&#8217;s and women&#8217;s US teams, not two opponents). <\/p>\n<p>At the stadium, the banner got a lot of laughs; postgame, I saw a few complaints about how ponies have no place in football or whatever, based on the occasionally creepy aspects of grown-up pony viewers. That&#8217;s your hangup, not mine, as the banner&#8217;s not meant to be anything besides a fun pop culture riff. I got a compliment on it from an actual (retired) player who has an actual five year old daughter, and that&#8217;s good enough for me. The right people always get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve never liked My Little Pony. Even when it first came out and I was a six year old girl, I wasn&#8217;t interested. I lived on a farm&#8211;if I wanted to play with a pony, there was a real one &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/?p=633\">tell me more <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,6,10,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643,"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tifosi.hooverdam.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}