Content-Type: text/shitpost

I've mentioned before that it can be fun to dig into Twitter's list of trending hashtags of the moment, to get glimpses of new corners of this very large world, corners that I never suspected that thousands of other people consider extremely important.

(Did you know that former Chilean President Alberto Fujimori, who was serving a 25-year prison term for his role in several massacres, was pardoned last December? I did not see anything about it in the news, and would have missed it completely, but I noticed the hashtag #IndultoEsInsulto (“The pardon is an insult”) and looked into what it was about.)

Anyway, today's random hashtag was #لاجلالهلالكلنا_نواف. These Arabic script hashtags are harder for me to follow up than the Latin script ones, because I can't yet read Arabic script. (Maybe later this year, wouldn't that be nice?) I can't get any nuance, but this one is about the Al-Hilal Saudi Football Club, which I gather is doing well in an important championship match. The tweets often depict this jolly fellow:

This turns out to be His Highness Prince Nawaf Bin Saad, current president of the club.[1] The tweets seem to include messages of support and well-wishing from fans (“we trust you”, “go ahead”), and are often punctuated with 💙 or 💙💙. I don't know why the hearts are blue, but it seems to be a Thing. Oh, I bet it's because the club color is blue, just like the Dodgers’. Okay, that wasn't so hard.

That's as far as I got with this one. It's fun puzzle, like doing a sudoku, but the result is more interesting than sudoku, and I get to decide for myself whether it's time to stop.

[ Addendum: I had it backwards. Al-Hilal was not doing well. The tweets were because they had just been eliminated, unexpectedly early, from the AFC “Champions League” series. Better luck next year! ]

[1] I hope I got that right. The club's web site styles him “H.H.” and not “H.R.H.”, but I found news articles that went the other way. The genealogy of the Saudi princes is incredibly confusing, but I think H.H. Nawaf is a grandson of Ibn Saud's younger brother Abdallah, so “H.H.” is correct.