Jeux Sans Frontieres

For days I had been planning on a comprehensive multi-part Definitive Viewpoint Olympic Preview.   My preparation was extensive.  It consisted primarily of flipping through the Sports Illustrated Olympic preview and typing in all the event names, see?

Archery	Equestrian	Rowing	Taekwondo
Badminton	Fencing	Sailing	Team Handball
Basketball	Field Hockey	Shooting	Tennis
Boxing	Artistic Gymnastics	Soccer	Track and Field
Canoe/Kayak (Flatwater)	Rhythmic Gymnastics	Swimming	Triathlon
Canoe/Kayak (Whitewater)	Trampoline	Open Water Swimming	Volleyball
Cycling	Judo	Synchronized Swimming	Water Polo
Diving	Modern Pentathlon	Table Tennis	Weightlifting
			Wrestling

I also read about how touchy the IOC is about their logos and whatnot so I came up with my own:

Pretty sweet, no?  And trademark violation free.

I figured the rest would be pretty easy.   The first installment would have made a convincing and irrefutable case that any “sports” that are decided solely by judges should be relegated to America’s Got Talent and therefore removed from the Olympics.  It would have done so with wit and authority.  You know that Trampoline would have really shots so scathing it would have trouble bouncing back.

Sports eliminated would be boxing, diving, equestrian, artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, trampoline, and synchronized swimming.  Yes, boxing could theoretically end with a knockout, but who are you trying to kid?   I would really miss rhythmic gymnastics, though.  Seriously.

Next up I would preview sports where there is an already a better competition.  Sadly, these should also be removed.  So you can kiss cycling, sailing, soccer, tennis, and triathlon goodbye.  Why do I care about these events when I could watch Le Tour de France, the America’s Cup, the World Cup (or the Euro Championship), any of the tennis grand slams except the Australian Open, or the Iron Man world championship?  Some of these may have made sense if the Olympics were limited to amateurs, but not any more.  It is kind of ridiculous that some sports – I’m looking at you soccer – invent rules so you get a slight difference.

The DVOP would then tackle events I could play in my backyard (badminton, dressage, volleyball), basement (ping pong table tennis, shooting, wrestling), or ones I have used a Groupon for (archery).  We could probably keep badminton because I love to say “shuttlecock”.  Volleyball is okay, too, I guess, but I’m not sold on beach volleyball. Especially now that the women don’t have to dress like they are at a sand-filled slumber party.   

Look at that crowd!
img

I once won an office table tennis tournament.  Surprisingly that company went out of business.  You don’t see offices having a decathlon party, though, do you?  That’s why table tennis has to go. Wrestling is real sport, but we have to stop MRSA somehow.  These Olympians have enough diseases to worry about.  As for shooting and archery, they are only sports in the Hunger Games.  Out!

Any Olympic preview worth its bits would devote at least one installment to sports that are weird like team handball and modern pentathlon.  Team handball is actually a pretty awesome sport.  The US would dominate it if anyone cared and top athletes like LeBron played.  Modern pentathlon should be safe since it has laser guns.  Unfortunately it is more than outweighed by the show jumping.  That’s right, show jumping. Mitt Romney joke. 

Now would probably be a time to throw in the sports dominated by rich people (fencing and rowing), non US Americans (Judo, Taekwondo), and canoes (canoe/kayak),  No one cares about these sports except NBC. And that is only because they have to fill 4 zillion hours of programming.

Water polo star
or Lando lackey?

At this point the epic Definitive Viewpoint Olympic Preview would we wrapping up.  After all the games somehow started yesterday even though the opening ceremony isn’t until tomorrow.  We would start with swimming.   I’m a little torn by this one.  The US kicks some serious butt in swimming so that is a positive.  On the other hand, swimming is dreadfully boring to watch.  And they have 712 variations on the same thing.  I’m not sure I care if Ryan Lochte wins the 50, 55, 60, 65, and 70 meter races.  What is that in yards, anyway?  I will confess I didn’t know open water swimming was even a sport.  I wish I still didn’t.

Water polo is okay but it is kind of confusing.  There are hundreds of whistles and fouls and I never know what is going on.  Plus those hats make them look like lobots.  For those of you unfamiliar with basketball, it is kind of like water polo on wood.  I enjoy basketball since it is one area where the US can impose its will on an international stage.  Field hockey is like ice hockey in the summer, only slower paced with more duchesses. 

Track and Field is worthy of a separate preview but I am out of energy and time. Oh yeah, there’s also weightlifting. I guess those will have to wait until 2016.

So if I had written an Olympic preview it would have gone something like that

Quitters Never Win

A little over a month ago I quit Facebook. Since then I’ve updated my profile picture twice, posted three videos, and updated my status twice.  So it probably doesn’t count as “quitting”, but as Confucius said, “quitting Facebook can be harder than it seems”.

It is often stated that people on Facebook have no life.  As a formerly frequent Facebooker, I can say with 100% authority that that is not true.  As I am sitting here typing this right now, I clearly have a life.  It is just a largely unfulfilling one with a huge crevasse where my soul should be.  My main Facebook activity used to be making joke status updates and hoping for “Likes”.  For a while getting little 1’s in my notification bar filled my soul hole. 

Strangely Satisfying

Sadly, the negatives to the ‘book started to outweigh the positives.  The primary negative is that most of my friends who had interesting and/or fun status updates stopped posting and returned to raising their kids and focusing on work or whatever they hell they do.  This left only a handful of worthwhile updates and boatloads of useless ones.

A Google search for “top 10 most annoying facebook users” returns 26,900,000 results. That should tell you something. And that something is that people write lots of blog posts about Facebook hoping it will drive up their readership.  It also tells you that most people don’t like their friends.  Or at least their friends’ curated versions of themselves.

Dream come true

I won’t bore with yet another one of these lists even though that was what I planned to do until I saw it would be the 26,900,001 post about it.  Or the 267,000,001 on Bing.  Who knew Bing was still around?   Anyway, maybe the people complaining about their friends should find new friends.  Or “quit” like I did and switch to Twitter where you can send messages to random celebrities and hope they acknowledge you.

They other reason I quit was Facebook’s repeated abuse of user data.  Any page with a Like button essentially has a built-in tracking device. They have shown again and again that they can’t be trusted with your data. The most recent transgression is their Like recycling where they make it look like you are endorsing things you aren’t.  You would think they might have learned their lesson after the sponsored stories settlement or Beacon brouhaha, but they clearly hold user privacy in low regard.  Almost as low as investors hold FB.

Also, Timeline sucks.

Just for Men's Eyebrows

The other day I was doing some research on politicians eating hot dogs.  During this research I came across a picture of Mitt Romney eating some delicious soft serve ice cream.

What really struck me about the photo was this: Mitt's fluffy white eyebrows.  Then I saw another photo from a a few days later and they were boring and brown.

This made me wonder what happened. Were they plucked, dyed, or is it an artifact of lighting? (click for larger version)

Photos:
Charles Dharapak/AP Photo
thinkprogress.org

Full of Fit

I recently read that 100% of Americans are out of shape.  I know this can’t be true for a number of reasons. 

1.  I have seen the trailer for Magic Mike.  Those guys look pretty fit to me.  My wife may have mentioned their “fitness” a few times since she returned from seeing it with some of her lady friends.  Apparently those guys spend a lot of time on their glutes.

2. The number of obstacle course races that have popped up over the last few years. Between the Tough Mudder, the Warrior Dash, the USMC Mud Run, the Spartan Race, and the Rugged Maniac there must be at least a couple hundred fit folks racing in these things. I think we may be entering an obstacle course bubble.  I hope when the bubble bursts it doesn’t cause a double-dip recession.  A burst is inevitable.  There can’t possibly be enough of a market to support all these races.  It is now at the point where they have to come up with gimmicks to get people to race in them.  Zombies? Really?  I am looking forward to the logical conclusion: A real-life version of The Running Man.  According to the trailer is less than 5 years away. Start working on your snappy retorts now.

3. I happen to know the author of the study and he is full of crap.  And Skittles.

Legalise it!

You may have heard that Google recently announced they are starting a world wide gay human rights campaign called Legalise Love.  Who do they think they are?  Don’t they know that we US Americans spell it “legalize”?  I suppose to celebrate the launch they will all hop in a lorry and drive down the motorway to buy a bag of Girl Scout biscuits and celebrate the absence of zeds.  I hope they get a flat tyre! Arses!

As you probably guessed, some others are also mad at Google, but for an entirely more obvious reason: They are idiots.  Earlier this week one of the American Family Association’s radio hosts brought up the campaign and discussed how the AFA has boycotted other companies who support LGBT rights and that it would be tough to add Google to the list.  He wasn’t kidding about the boycotts.  According to the must reliable source in the world, Wikipedia, they have already boycotted 7-Eleven, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Airlines, American Girl, Blockbuster Video, Burger King, Calvin Klein, Carl's Jr., Clorox, Comcast, Crest, Ford, Hallmark Cards, Kmart, Kraft Foods, S. C. Johnson & Son, Movie Gallery, Microsoft, MTV, Mary Kay, NutriSystem, Old Navy, IKEA, Sears, Pampers, Procter & Gamble, Target, Tide, Walt Disney Company, and PepsiCo.

Man, those folks spend a lot of time boycotting.  They must be effective.  Look what happened to Blockbuster and Movie Gallery. Right out of business. They did acknowledge that it will probably be a little harder to avoid Google, though.  Between search, Gmail, Android phones, YouTube, Kindle (powered by Android), and orkut.com, Google is hard to avoid.  I recommend the AFA start their boycott with Google+ and immediately claim victory.

I wonder when they will realize they are on the wrong side of history?  It won’t be too many years down the road when we all look back at this time and wonder why anyone would try to deny people their rights.  If these people channeled their energy into something positive instead of pointlessly boycotting everything we would all be better off.  Until then I wish them bad luck on finding anything online.

The Politics of Blogging

This is not a politics blog.  I just want to make that clear since so far all of the posts have been political. I have plenty of other topics on which to expound.  In fact, I have been keeping a list of potential blog topics. Here is the list direct from the iCloud:

 

• Nugent
• True Blood
• VH 1
• Food star

 

See?  Not a political topic in the bunch, unless you count some upcoming words on the Sanguinistas and their anti-mainstreaming propaganda.  The point is that if you disagree with my politics, you are wrong you can just sit tight because odds are the next post will be about TV.  

 

Why so much TV?  Because I live a meaningless and self-indulgent existence. Here is a typical day:

 

1. Work
2. Clean cat poops
3. Drink
4. Watch TV
5. Sleep fitfully

 

Weekends are pretty wild, too:

 

1. Pay bills
2. Go to Target
3. Rent/return movie at Redbox
4. Nap
5. Clean cat poops
6. Drink
7. Watch TV/Redbox
8. Pass out

 

Once in a while I might go out to eat if I have a Groupon. Whee!

 

I’m not complaining, though.  It is the life I have chosen and it could certainly be a lot worse.  For example, it could be the same life, but take place in Mississippi.

 

The best part about my so-called life is that I have ample free time to blog and you are reaping all the benefits.  This doesn’t mean there will never be another post on my other blog, TBIAW.  They may slow down in frequency, though. Don’t go expecting the crazy pace of almost one post per month. For fans of TBIAW just remember this: I am probably drinking right now.

You Can't Handle The Nuge

Constitutional scholar Ted Nugent said in an op-ed last week that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court erred when he voted that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was, in fact, constitutional.  We should all pay close attention to Mr. Nugent’s nuanced interpretation of the ruling.   After all, the mind behind Wango Tango surely knows more about jurisprudence than the majority of the highest court in our land.  Who am I to argue if Mr. Nugent says that Harvard graduate and Bush appointee Roberts is a "traitor" and a "turncoat"?  His poetic wizardry would leave my words wanting. 

If you study these lyrics you will see exactly what I mean:

Wango Tango

Wango Tango

It's a Wango Tango

Ooooh yeah! (oooooh..)

Baby!

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  There is another clue in Wango Tango that The Motor City Madman has a deep understanding of our health care system:

Is my baby alive? (Is my baby alive?)

Is my baby alive? (Is my baby alive?)

Is my baby alive?

She Wango'd to death

His baby's untimely death was sad but inevitable.  It is unclear, however, if her death-by-Wango could have been prevented with universal health insurance.  Maybe the death panel got her.  We’ll never know.  Luckily for the uninsured Cat Scratch Fever was eradicated in 1979.

In his op-ed, The Nuge offers a potential solution to our nation’s health care conundrum: slavery increased states’ rights:

I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War.

I support this idea 100%.  Actually I support it 117% because I am over-leveraged with love for this idea.   Who among us doesn't long for the days when there were tons of states' rights and hardly any of those pesky civil ones.  Heck, the states have been doing a bang-up job of governing themselves lately. To wit:

• North Carolina recently added a constitutional amendment to make same-sex marriage illegal, even though it was already illegal. Never mind that the amendment also removed a lot of other rights at the same time.  Take that, gays! 
• Arizona has been trying to take away same-sex benefits for 3 years now even though the efforts have been repeatedly rebuffed.  I hope their attorneys consult with Mr. Nugent before they argue before the Supreme Court otherwise they will surely lose again.
• Michigan temporarily barred a state representative because she said the word “vagina” during a debate on abortion.  We certainly can’t have anyone using medical terms when legislating the body.  It is unseemly and makes politicians uncomfortable.  No one wants that.

I could go on but you probably get the idea.  There is really nothing more to say or do except to wait for Mr. Nugent’s next political nugget.   Until then we can always turn to his music for comfort.