Paris, FR - (June 10) - Officials at Air France claimed, today, that they'd reached an agreement with their striking pilots which would end the current walkout and enable the so-called World "Cup Soccer" Championships, being held in Paris, to "proceed as scheduled, rather than being, like, all Exterminating Angel fucked up -- like, 'nobody-enters / nobody-leaves,' l'enfer c'est les autres, kinda thing."

The Air France pilots had gone out on strike just in time to totally fuck up attendance at the games, because, apparently, they were just plain sick and tired of having people always walking up and telling them about how "Air France is to 'France' as air guitar is to 'guitar,'" then laughing uproariously and walking off and boarding an old TWA clunker on the next runway.

"Zut, alors! Ve are sick of zis merde!" a striking Air France pilot said, in a statement written across the sky in Gaulois smoke.

"To make up for any inconvenience this strike may have caused our loyal customers," an Air France spokesman said, in a statement, "we are immediately merging with Air Viagra, the placebo's placebo of airlines, and our new company will be carrying the entire World 'Cup Soccer' championship match entirely IN THE AIR."

According to the spokesman's statement, in order to remove the stigma of the word "Air" created by all those assholes out there playing air guitar, the new merged airline will take advantage of economies of scale to provide the equipment and "lift" needed to keep both the soccer field and all several hundred thousand fans aloft in the sky for the 2 or 3 hours it takes a Soccer game to have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FUCKING HAPPEN (till, finally, time's up and there's a sudden-death penalty kick and somebody accidentally wins by a score of 1-0, and the fans of the losers can now try to kill the fans of the winners cause they didn't fucking deserve to win, and the fans of the winners can self-righteously try to kill them back, out of, of course, righteous self-defense).

"The fans will be carried aloft," said the spokesman, "in thousands of special all-glass Boeing 747s which will constantly circle the playing field -- and the playing field will, in turn, be housed in a huge all-glass C-150 transport.

"Occasionally, small doors will be opened briefly on the game plane and, simultaneously, on all the fan planes -- to accommodate the fans' understandable desires to throw bottles, cans, and other deadly projectiles at the players, officials, and each other," the spokesman added.

Soccer is apparently a game or sport or something and apparently its purpose is just like religion, to give people an excuse to be self-righteous assholes with impunity.

The World Cup is apparently a form of protection for use when playing Cup Soccer with the World's Balls, and/or is the kind of primal soup the world will always be forced to eat and emerge from, like it or not, and regardless of how many transistors and discrete functions its fabrication plants can cram into a nanometer of, you know, silicon real estate.