World Cup Statistics

Source: Finanz und Wirtschaft

Roland: I totally love useless statistics, and right now I am really having a lot of fun: the 2014 World Cup in Brazil is a few days old now, but we can already find many entirely fascinating and utterly useless statistics out there in the intersphere. So here is a collection of my favorites!

1. If you want to win a game you better concede the first goal. At the time of writing this nine games were finished, and five of them were won by the team that went behind 0:1.

2. Within the people of the 32 countries that play the World Cup there are two obvious correlations:
a) the less religious the people are the richer they are!
b) the more beer they drink the more uniformly distributed their income is!
Undeniable proof can be found here (sorry it's in German).

3. Brazil is the country where the most butt lifting jobs are executed, while in no other country more people are killed by their lawnmowers than in the United States (proof here: sorry, German again).

4. Brazil will win the World Cup: using a complex statistical forecasting method the website FiveThirtyEight predicts that Brazil will win the World Cup with a probability of 43% (followed by Argentina 13%, Germany 11%, Netherlands 7%). At the moment of writing this Holland already beat Spain 5:1, and now Spain's chance of winning the Cup is at 0%. I would not bet my fortune on that!

5. Brazil will win the World Cup: YouGov provides an analysis of polls in 19 World Cup countries asking who will win the cup. The result: 16 countries believe in Brazil, the Gauchos believe in Argentina, the Spanish in Spain and the Americans... in the United States! Unfortunately there was no poll done where the most clueless fans can be found...

6. Germany will win the World Cup: The most convincing of all statistics has been developed by a highly regarded scientific company called Electronic Arts. They found an extremely difficult, but unbeatable algorithm under the name of "Fifa World Cup Soccer 2014" that undeniably predicts Germany to win the final against Brazil with 2:1 after conceding the first goal (reference to statistics 1). Miroslav Klose will score the match winner with his 16th WC goal and becomes the player with most scores in the history of World Cup. Now this is proof that cannot be argued with!

Postcards from Italy

Nobody writes postcards any more... Too bad, because with today's photo processing programs there would be so many nice ones. So, here are our postcards. Please consider them as signed, stamped, sealed and delivered right to your door!

What makes Italy so great...

Their food

Their scenery

How they find parking space everywhere

The window shopping...

...that never ends

Their wildlife

Their scooter parking

Their parking skills

How they create beauty even in the tiniest spots

How they mourn their deceased ones

The beauty of their vehicles

The beauty of their women (and the fact that they know about it)

Their capability to turn a giant Oops into a giant attraction

That there is always time for a chat

The millions of beautiful cafés

The millions of beautiful turns

Their invention of Vespas...

...and the hospitality of their Vespa-Clubs (© Vespa-Club Pordenone)

... and did we mention the food (and the wine, and the ice cream)?

Italian (and other) Landscapes

We had planned it for quite a while, and now we finally were ready for our Vespa-Tour to the land of sun and good food, and of course the birthplace of our two donkeys, Bella and Alonzo. Obviously this was quite some undertaking, not so much for us, but for our scooters who dutifully moved us through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia and Austria for a total distance of 3.300 kilometers without even complaining once (okay, there was the occasional slight hint of a grumbling, but that was soon forgotten).

The 13 days went by much too fast, and we could easily start the whole tour again right away, but I guess the sorrow at the end of a fantastic trip is as much part of it as the joy of planning the next one.

As Sonja will tell all the stories in detail on her motorcycle blog, here are some of the less scooter-related pictures (although they will make their appearances, of course). This time we will focus on the landscapes we rode through…

Switzerland: Lake Lucerne

 Cannero Riviera at Lago Maggiore

Lago Maggiore at Sunset

 In the rice fields of the Novara area

 Lucca

 Northern Tuscany

 Colle di Val d'Elsa

 Southern Tuscany

 More Southern Tuscany

 Volterra (with David and Sonja on the right)

 View from San Gimignano

 Pisa (quite obviously...)

 A typical Italian cemetery (in the Po Valley)

 Po Valley

 San Benedetto

 Concordia Sagittaria (Venetia)

 Pordenone

 Slovenia: Triglav National Park

 Slovenia: Vršič-Pass

Austria: Attersee

Germany: Neuburg an der Donau