Call me a geek, but when I saw the draw for the Quarter-Finals of the Champions League my eye was instantly drawn to the one, key, glaring fact: that the long-named teams were drawn to play each other, and ditto for the short-named teams. So, Manchester United (16 letters) are playing Bayern Munich (12 letters). [What's that? You say teams have different names in different languages, and that there are often other bits, like "United", that can be dropped or included almost at whim? STFU, dude.] Deeper analysis proved that the conspiracy was even more serious than this: the teams in the top section of each half are playing their equivalents from the bottom section, so 1-3, 2-4, 5-7 and 6-8. Those fixtures in full, plus the number of letters:
Manchester United (16) v Bayern Munich (12)
Internazionale (14) v CSKA Moscow (10)
Barcelona (9) v Arsenal (7)
Bordeaux (8) v Lyon (4)
Notice how the average number of letters in each fixture is 14, 12, 8, 6. [What is the significance of the missing 10? Could it possibly be a coded insult to David Beckham, a reference to the Number 10 shirt he wore before gaining the number 7 shirt in which he would win the Champions League, a number which therefore signifies his symmetrical return down the other side of the mountain of success and fame? No, it couldn't, but it was fun Googling around trying to find some possible meaning to shoehorn in - notice that I could as easily have ascribed significance to the numbers 5 or 20.]
And as if to rub our faces in their corruption, they then decided to arrange for the winner of the longest name fixture to play the winner of the shortest name fixture. What nefarious plans they are hatching with this deviousness can only be speculated at, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it involves contamination of our precious bodily fluids and a Communist conspiracy to destroy the United States of America.
Anyway, now that I've got your attention, can I sell you some books about
Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELSs) in the Bible (or Moby Dick), and
patterns of prehistoric British monuments (or Woolworths stores)?