the most dead-on part of the latter is when the main character is feeling a bit out of place at some meeting/hunting retreat in south Georgia and suddenly he remembers the cheat code: just talk about college football!
My dad taught me this at an early age and it was 100% correct. If you pay attention to enough college football to hold a conversation, you can talk to just about any man in the southeast US.
My guess is people in mainland China don't care either, but in normal countries people are crazy about soccer. It was on my mind because I was in a hackathon [1] last weekend and before I started a bunch of international students were watching the highlight reel for the last world cup.
Soccer is picking up in interest in the US, slowly but surely. MLS games are worth going to and I enjoy a lot of soccer games.
(My own soccer story was that I had a terrible fight with a recommendation engine I built to convince it that I liked the NFL but didn't like the Premier League. I started thinking about feature engineering for sports and that got me reading soccer articles closely and I'd just read incredible things like games that went 7-0 or 1-0 and it was an own goal and such and next thing I know I am one of those people who wakes up at 9am on Saturday to watch soccer...)
[1] we won! (not because of my strength as a coder but because of my mvp obsession and demo/presentation skills from startup land)
so what percentage of these men can be talked to because, while not liking football, they pay enough attention to college football in order to be able to hold a conversation with just about any man in the southeast US?
