It's TOUR time!

You know it's summer when the Tour de France starts! Here are three web pages that will help keep you up to date on what's happening:

Bicycling Magazine - BICYCLING used to be the best source of information about anything and everything that had to do with Lance Armstrong (which meant that if you wanted to read about any other American rider, you had to look elsewhere.) Recently, however, it's become a lot more diverse, and provides tons of information about training, nutrition and people who enjoy cycling. It's diverse, but it's not too hard to understand.

NY Velocity was originally set up as an information website for amateur and professional bike racers in New York City. Most people, however, read the page for its very sarcastic (and very funny!) comic strip, "As the Toto Turns", which imitates a soap opera (=telenovela) and has some very funny insights into life in the pro pelotón.

CyclingNews is one of the most diverse websites that talks about cycling (road, mountain, and cyclocross). Its coverage of Spanish cycling isn't so great (it looks like most of the articles were taken directly from AS and MARCA) but it's a great place to get results and statistics, and it's also one of the few websites that covers women's cycling.

...and why do Americans call it soccer?

I confess: I had to look this one up.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/), the word soccer is a shorter form of "association", from the name of the Football Association. Speakers took "assoc", turned it into "soc", and added the informal "-er" suffix (you can also hear this in the way some people will call rubgy "rugger").

Football (which dates back to the early 15th century) is fairly obvious: you have a foot, you have a ball. Games like these date back to the Roman times; I like how the Online Etymology Dictionary points out that "[b]all-kicking games date back to the Roman legions, at least, but the sport seems to have risen to a national obsession in England, c.1630." (Some things never change.)

Hooligan dates back more than one hundred years:

...of unknown origin, first found in British newspaper police-court reports in the summer of 1898, almost certainly from the surname "Houlihan", supposedly from a lively family of that name in London (who figured in music hall songs of the decade). Internationalized 20c. in communist rhetoric as Rusian khuligan, opprobrium [=criticism] for "scofflaws, political dissenters, etc."

For more information on word origins connection with football/soccer/whatever you call it, look here: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=soccer&searchmode=none.