Five things I’ve concluded regarding the Olympics based on hours of viewing and much scholarly research

1.  If there was a a medal awarded for “epic amounts of ass” at the Olympics, it would surely go to the women’s volleyball team from The Dominican Republic

Because… damn.  I don’t really even care how terrible those girls are at volleyball, somebody needs to give them a medal.  As a matter of fact, whoever the hero was at the International Olympic Committee Volleyball uniform symposium who, when it was his turn to offer a suggestion said, “Let’s go with hot pants and spandex tank tops”… that guy deserves a medal, too.  A gigantic, perfectly shaped, supple yet firm, gold medal.  Are you listening, WNBA?  If you can’t figure out why your ratings are so low it’s because dudes don’t want to watch extras from “The Hills Have Eyes” run up and down a court while they’re not dunking basketballs.  And to think that I was once so ignorant to have though that indoor Olympic volleyball was just twelve dudes with Kleinfelter’s syndrome smacking a ball hither and thither.  Indeed, I have seen the light.  My gender bias in sports has been washed away in a flood of congratulatory touchy-feeliness and a Golden Globe worthy performance by whoever the cameraman is for Olympic Volleyball.  That guy definitely deserves a medal.  Come to think of it, as long as we’re handing out medals like clean syringes in Central Park, let’s be sure to give one to the guy who decided NOT to field an Irish or Scottish indoor women’s volleyball team.  I think I’d rather watch Bob Costas pretend like he gives a shit about the heptathlon for an hour and a half.

 

2.  For 99.9% percent of the population, swimming only exists for two weeks every four years

 That’s why Michael Phelps smokes so much weed… Modern Warfare 3 isn’t going to play itself for three and a half years straight.  Hey Michael, it’s like three weeks before the Olympics, don’t you think that you should start stretching out or something?  Shouldn’t you get into a pool or, at least, a hot tub before you get to London?  If a guy with damn-near two dozen medals in swimming doesn’t give a shit about swimming, what hope is there for the rest of us?  I’ve watched several dozen swimming events this past week and so far not a single person has drowned!  It’s like watching the worst episode of “Deadliest Catch” over and over.  Crab fishing can be a cruel mistress and Olympic swimming can be equally as fickle.  Soak it up, Ryan Lochte… nobody’s going to care how fast you can swim when you’re holding up the line at American Eagle because you still can’t figure out how to change the register tape after a year and a half.  I’m sure Michael Phelps could do it much faster.  If his Olympic success and world-wide notoriety have taught me anything, it’s that if you’re not the greatest swimmer of all time, then nobody has any idea who you are.  My apologies to Rowdy Gaines, Darrah Torres, and Mark Spitz… it was really nice meeting you all at the momentarily famous and currently unrecognizable Olympians support group the other night.  I passed myself off as a bronze medalist in the 100m butterfly from the Atlanta games to get in, but nobody gave a shit enough to bother calling me on it… and the sign in sheet didn’t even have a spot for your name, just two boxes labeled “Michael Phelps” and “Not Michael Phelps.”  The finger sandwiches were delicious but the bitterness was thick as the London fog.

 

3.  The easiest way to get an Olympic medal is probably to buy one

 The good news is that, if you really, really want an olympic medal… all you might have to do is check your local pawn shop.  Former olympians need cocaine, too.  The landscape for an athlete past their prime is a bleak one, especially if we’re talking water polo instead of baseball.  And with the price of bronze these days, who can really afford NOT to sell their third place triple-jump medal from the ’88 games?  The climb to the ranks of elite athlete is a steep one fraught with peril, but at the top is a few blinding moments of bliss…. followed, almost immediately, by an endless and unfathomably dark chasm where you should get used to hearing the phrase, “So, you don’t have any sales experience?”  After all, being the guy that yells at the real athletes to row from the front of the boat doesn’t have the same kind of clout on a resume that it used to.  And with the commission rates being what they are right now at Sears, it’s a long, bumpy trip to the bottom.  Just ask Kerry Strug, the architect of one of the most courageous moments in sporting history…. when you officially peak at nineteen, the gold on that medal starts to tarnish pretty quickly.  She’ll be okay, though… she’s got assistant manager material written all over her.  I heard that once, she sold seven extended warranties in a single shift while stuck in a bear trap… that sort of courage is as inspiring as it is rare.

 

4.  Gymnastics is stupid, but rhythmic gymnastics is beautiful and extremely entertaining… actually, that shit is pretty stupid, too

 Here’s the deal, Gymnasts… I understand that you spend a lifetime training for your moment to shine at the Olympics and I don’t mean to belittle that accomplishment with my wry commentary… but it’s probably gonna happen anyway.  This may sound callous, but I’m not really that impressed that you can do lots of flippies really fast.  I’m not impressed that you can do flippies on the floor, I’m not impressed that you can do flippies on the bars, and I’m not impressed that you can do flippies on the big, springy thing.  You’ve successfully spent the entirety of your time on this planet perfecting an athletic endeavor so useless that it’s literally only applicable while on top of a balance beam… congratulations?  I sure hope that bronze medal was worth the compressed spine and underdeveloped social skills.  But, as we all know, the true measure of someone’s usefulness as a human being is how effective they would prove to be during the impending zombie apocalypse.  And, I’m sorry gymnasts, but if the apocalypse actually happened while I was at the Olympics, you guys would be at the very bottom of my list… way after the archers, riflemen, weightlifters, and anybody whose sport involves a boat.  The last person that I need hanging around during a cataclysmic event is a borderline midget with a serious napoleon complex and a nagging, on-again-off-again roid-rage.  Now, stop putting chalk all over your hands, quit worrying about your form, and put some shoes on, for the love of God, because we’re all about to die.  But it’s okay, gymnasts, death is a fate far more palatable than working at Subway, which is what you’d be doing after the Olympics, anyway

 

5.    The Olympics are a magical fortnight every four years where countries around the world unite in competition… and China gets to extend their giant middle finger to all of them

Consider yourselves warned, rest of the world… if China put half as much effort into invading your lazy-ass country as they do into Winning the Olympics year after year, you’d be eating a lot more rice and a lot less of whatever it is that you people eat in your backwards, non-synchronized diving nation.  I get the feeling that even the Chinese doubles ping-ping team could throw a triple gainer in your face in near-perfect unison.  And let it be known that any country that takes badminton as seriously as it takes human rights is a country that you should fear no matter how you slice it.  China’s potential for Olympic dominance, however, is largely woven into the fabric of it’s culture.  What I mean is, the guy from the nation of one and a half billion who’s better at the pommel horse than anybody else is probably going to wipe the floor with you, guy from not-China.  And as to women’s events in particular, when you’re only allowed one daughter, you’re gonna want to make it count.  And by “make it count,” I mean have her feet bound and ship her off to some desolate athlete factory as soon as she can say “uneven parallel bars.”  Having developed a healthy respect for China’s homegrown brand of athletic sticktoitiveness, I hereby propose a bi-national, unilateral Olympic event proliferation treaty.  You can have the summer Olympics, except for basketball, of course… and you just stay the fuck out of the winter Olympics.  As a matter of fact, you can have that whole hemisphere over there if you just promise to leave hockey alone.  Oh, and good luck with that whole Middle East situation, although I’m sure that you’ll find a much more expeditious and ruthless solution to that problem.

Five Things That Make Me Weep Like A Fishwife For Society At Large…

1.  The upcoming “Judge Dredd” re-make

Yeah, I said it.   They’re actually remaking “Judge Dredd” (insert woeful sigh or bewildered gasp here).   Indeed, the barrel that Hollywood has been scraping the bottom of recently in order to deliver us such seminal cinematic masterpieces as “Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star” and  “Wrath of the Titans” seems to have developed the supernatural ability to keep producing films long after the actual bottom has been worn through.  In fact, it seems that we are being forced to subsist on the mildewey sludge that collects on the bottom of the bottom of the barrel in order to satisfy our opiate-like addiction to terrible movies.  It is one thing to re-make a film for the sake of introducing a loveable character or an interesting premise to a new generation of lemmings… it’s another thing entirely to re-boot a movie because you couldn’t possibly fuck it up any worse than the original.  Somewhere, in a dark basement cluttered with empty Hot Pocket packagings and sugar-free Redbull cans, a writer is swinging from his chandelier because he couldn’t sell his screenplay to the guy who was busy remaking the worst Stallone movie of all time.  Come on, worse that Cliffhanger?  Worse than Rocky V?  Oh yeah…  degrees of the opposite of genius maybe, but yes.  And the bleakest tragedy in this latest Hollywood holocaust is that in some posh house in L.A., a producer is preparing his money silo for a Scrooge McDuck-like swim amongst his stacks of cash… all because he threw a dart at his DVD collection and it happened to stick in the unopened packaging of the worst movie of 1995.  Bravo, people.  If you could make a few million dollars repainting five dogs playing poker in crayon and magic marker, I’m sure you would.

 

2.  People that aren’t me who drive a car… anywhere

I was rear-ended by a tow truck driver last week.  Now, the convenience of said collision not withstanding… are you fucking kidding me?  Not only was the irony of the situation searing my brain like a George Forman grill as I realized exactly who hit me, but I swear that I looked into my rear view moments before impact and saw this human mullet rack on his cell phone.  My internal monologue in those two to three seconds was as follows: “That’s an awfully big truck.  I wonder if he’s calling his buddy to ask if he should slow down when approaching another car stopped at a red light in front of him.  No, no… he’s ordering tickets the Eddie money show this weekend.  This is not going to end well.”  So, while Lenny (that’s a reference, read some Steinbeck, will you?) was busy securing two tickets to paradise, I was already getting my insurance info out of my glove box and wondering how I was going to get a ride to work tomorrow.  Eddie money is a guilty pleasure to many, yes… but never would I have thought that he would ruin my weekend without me actually attending one of his concerts.  The sad fact is, when society at large gets behind the wheel, I feel like a deer in the crosshairs of the highest powered asshole rifle available for public consumption.  Come to think of it, you fucking deer aren’t helping matters much, either.  Several weeks ago, I actually saw a deer run into a parked car in the middle of northern Philadelphia.  I’m sure the poor thing was confused, but that was no excuse for him to be talking on his cell phone the whole time.

 

3.  The Entire City of Detroit

Wow, what a city.  The embers of productive industry having been long extinguished in Michigan’s deepest hole, I’m afraid my professional diagnosis is that the entire metropolis of Detroit, as a singular entity, has a severe case of borderline personality disorder.  “Oh, you’re from Detroit.  That must be nice.  What?  Well, fuck you and your mother, too!”  Now, as a lifetime resident of Philadelphia, I understand what it is to wear the city that you’re from as a badge of honor on your sleeve.  What I don’t understand is how you can still do that with no sleeves on.  Seriously, Detroit… get a real fucking shirt.  I suppose you’re well within your rights as residents to be bitter about the declining state of affairs in your community, but that doesn’t make it okay to rev the engine of your Charger like an asshole and try to run me off Eight Mile Road just because I have a Pennsylvania license plate.  Just keep your hands on the wheel and don’t make eye contact.  I’m sure that Robocop will have this city cleaned up in no time.  And if he can’t, here’s some advice for anyone planning on visiting this emotional time bomb of a commonwealth:  Slap a Lions bumper sticker on your car, grab a toothpick to chew on, start practicing referring to almost anything as “some bullshit,” and hold on for dear life.  If you’re not from Detroit, you’re clearly against Detroit… and you should be punished accordingly.  After all, that’s what you get for being some uppity yuppie from somewhere else; and if you continue to insist on speaking in complete sentences and having an opinion other than “fuck that,” we’re gonna have a problem.

 

4.  Lance Armstrong and Associated Parties            

First of all, let’s just roll with the assumption that there’s some sort of chemical imbalance involved in making the choice to be what can only be described as “decked out” in pro cycling gear at any point in one’s life.  Even if you’re a pro cyclist, that’s no excuse for looking like a tightly cased sausage in public.  That said, my gripe with Lance Armstrong lies not in his alleged use of performance enhancing drugs, but in the fact that his alleged use of performance enhancing drugs has made me pay attention to anything related to pro cycling.  Seven Tour De France wins… don’t really care.  A courageous comeback from testicular cancer to rise to the top of his profession… meh.  Starting a charity that has helped thousands of people to deal with life-altering afflictions… yawn.  The fact that he almost certainly used chemical enhancements to accomplish all f these things… Goddamn it, I sort of care.  I can’t help it.  Blowing out someone’s candle to let yours shine brighter is no noble thing, but a candle that big being blown out in such a public spectacle… makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy inside, I have to admit.  Somehow, I think, him being outed as a cheat and a liar makes me a better person… or at least, significantly more confident in my cynicism and ability to loathe anybody more successful than I am.  The fact is, I don’t have the motivation or the gumption to cheat my way to even one Tour De France victory, let alone seven.  If you think about it, that’s a feat worthy of acclaim all by itself.

 

5.  Workplace Reality Shows

Okay, I get it… crab fishing is really dangerous, baking cakes is harder than you might think, and running a pawnshop is… glamorous?  Let’s clear that up right away, just go to ANY pawn shop.  Working in one of those places has to be the professional equivalent of working the lost luggage counter at the Detroit airport… or any other job in Detroit, for that matter.  Whatever happened to the good old days of watching twelve barely sentient, morally reprehensible sacks of meat run around an Island together pretending to have an ambition other than being on Television?  Now I have to watch people getting their cars repossessed while having one of the lowest points in their lives filmed without their permission?  It’s a good thing that legally, nobody can be filmed without their permission and ALL of those people are actors and NONE of it is real.  So, what’s the deal reality TV?  Did you really peak with “The Simple Life?”  And why hasn’t there been anybody on “The Real World” in fifteen seasons that I don’t immediately want to drown in my bathtub that I’ve filled with the tears that I shed when Paula Abdul was fired from “American Idol?”  She didn’t know where she was, anyway… what’s the harm in keeping her around for my entertainment?  Now I find myself rooting for some thrift store owner to win a storage locker auction in the hopes that, inside that locker, there might be a far more interesting subject for a reality show.   Next on “Non-Ice Road Truckers,” Curly drives in the same direction for what seems like an impossible amount of time.  Tune in next week when he cries alone in the cab of his truck, trying to convince himself that he’s moved past getting blown by some skeevy dude hanging around some shady truck stop.  Don’t worry, I’m warming up the DVR right now.