Olympic-Sized Lunacy

It takes a special class of mental retardation to justify spending millions of dollars on a sporting event that, arguably, could be spent on more important things like, you know, feeding people or something. Leave it to the Olympics to super-size this idiocy to unparalleled paranoid heights.

Taking a page from Fight Club, the IOC decreed the First Rule of the Olympics is: you can’t talk about the Olympics. Yeah, nothing builds up the buzz on the street like a complete dearth of unscripted commentary by the actual people involved in an event. Perhaps the IOC is attempting a subversive attempt to corrupt our youths by having them imagine what’s going on in the minds of athletes during scenes like this?

Moving briskly from that decree to Biblical references, the IOC declared: thou shalt not wear, drink, or think anything not approved by our sponsors. I think I remember this tactic from somewhere, but where? Hmmm….oh, that’s right – that kid who got thrown out of school on “Coke in Education Day” for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt. I mean, what’s next?

Security Guard: “I’m sorry sir, we can’t allow you to enter this event.”
Attendee: “Why? I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on a ticket. I traveled thousands of miles to get here. I’ve already changed into my IOC-sanctioned silver unitard and placed my clothing, camera, phone, outside food, and the part of my brain responsible for forming long-term memories in the incinerator! I even submitted to a urine test, which is bizarre because I’m not even competing! What else could you possibly need from me?”
Security Guard: “Well it says here that you once worked at Niketown, and as you know from the mandatory six-hour orientation session, Reebok is the official shoe of the Olympics…”

Laugh it up – I’m sure Teddy Kennedy never thought he’d end up on a terrorist watch list, but hey, things happen.

In keeping with the belief that deaths must come in threes, the final death came with the censoring of American broadcasts of the games. It started with the censoring of the opening of the games, when some minor percentage of the population was denied the right to see fake plastic penii. And then it continued right on until the networks blocked out the image of a tutu-clad Canuck performing the worst dive entry ever.

Actually, come to think of it, I’m kind of glad they censored that image – nothing’s so harmful to the cachet of being Canadian than some guy in a dress hawking an online gambling web site. Unless he was drunk on Molson Canadian, because then he was just being ironic.

We seem to be trapped in a logic maze constructed by advertising goons, focus groups, and psychopaths working hard towards their Major in Annoyance but slacking on their Minor in Selling Things People They Want. An advertising exec in a room somewhere gets lazy and rather than actually thinking about what a customer cares about, they try to forge artificial relationship by blasting audiences with messages everyone ignores. And then when that fails, they send the Gap Gestapo to hunt you down for wearing a flannel shirt.

Not just any flannel shirt, mind you – last season’s flannel shirt. And they can’t permit that, now can they?