August 21, 2008 Issue
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Classified Chestnut Hill Local Don't Miss an Issue, Tell us what you see or Winner of Two |
Olympic news you won’t read anywhere else
I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Olympics for the past two weeks. I think I may have set a few new world records for TV-watching. It’s time to reflect and report. The opening ceremonies featured 15,000 Chinese men (and about three women) performing amazing feats of precise synchronization. President Bush, who was in the stands looking through the wrong end of his binoculars, was heard to remark, “Them Chinese is real tiny.” Like bees, they swarmed around in beautiful, undulating patterns. Then, as with one mind, they spelled out “Hello, World” in 14 languages. It was all very impressive, and when they spelled out “Meet your new boss,” I immediately phoned the Chinese embassy, trying to defect. I figured I better get on board before all the good positions are taken. No one was there, but a recording came on saying, “We are not accepting defectors at this time, and we already have more than enough people to take over the world. If someone drops out and there is an opening, however, we will let you know. Thank you for your interest.” I left them a message telling them how easy I thought it would have been for those performers in the opening ceremony to have swarmed right up into the stands and run off with President Bush. I guess that makes me a bit of a front runner, but can you blame me? China has over 1.3 billion people in a country the size of the U.S., and it’s still growing. In fact, one in every four babies born in the world is Chinese, and in China, four out of four babies are Chinese. Their government has a plan to put three men on the moon by 2016 and 30 million more by 2017. All the U.S. has on the moon is a couple of 40-year-old golf balls. Getting back to the Olympics, the most fun parts for me have been seeing the sights of Beijing and hearing sportscasters test their powers of pronunciation on names like Zhao Xiexia, Trondenvoorg Moenbæk, and Euzebiusz Szymkowiak. Most of the sports represented in the games are of little interest to my middle-American tastes. I mean, fencing, dressage, water polo? Come on, who likes that stuff, Prince Charles? Certainly not any red-blooded American man. (If your blood is green, that’s another story.) And then there’s soccer — a mob of people kicking a ball around. This sport was obviously invented before humans developed hands. Beach volleyball is about as interesting as televised poker. It’s pretty obvious that its only purpose is to show off women in bikinis. I’m guessing there’s no women’s volleyball team from Saudi Arabia. I always considered tennis kind of boring. It’s just a giant game of ping pong. And now, as if to make it seem more exciting, the players grunt and squeal as they hit the ball. When did that become a part of the game? I find it disturbing. Those types of sounds should only be made in the privacy of one’s bedroom — and only when you’re watching Jay Leno. There actually was an exciting tennis match once. Someone jumped out of the stands and stabbed one of the players. Maybe they should make that a part of every tennis match to increase viewership. At least the Winter Olympics have ice dancing, which is always exciting. It’s just like ballet except that, at any second, the dancer might slam headfirst into the ice, suffering life-threatening injuries. And then there are the “just downright weird” events, like the one where the athletes are required to ride a bike, swim, shoot a gun, make a cell phone call, run a mile, then shoot another gun, then make another phone call, then eat a tuna sandwich. What’s that all about? So swimming, gun-toting bicyclists with cell phones are perfectly acceptable, but baseball can’t make it as an Olympic sport. Huh? I can’t talk about the Olympics without addressing the issue of performance-enhancing drugs. I believe that all the athletes should take them. That way no one would have an unfair advantage. In fact, I believe that everyone in the world should take them. Couldn’t we all use a little performance enhancement? In fact, a drug-powered Olympics could have some interesting new events: the really-high high-jump, cross-country bowling, the hundred-mile dash and projectile vomiting. I’m looking forward to the the closing ceremonies, which will be featuring my favorite kind of music, i.e., not rap. The performers will reportedly include South Korean singer, dancer, model, and actor “Rain,” whose movie credits include Speed Racer and I’m a Flesh-Eating Freak, and You’re Not, and Taiwanese pop star Wang Lee Hom, who, according to his website, is “very busy like two burning candles” preparing for the gig. President Bush will be back home at the White House watching the performance on his radio. Uh-oh, gotta go. Women’s volleyball is on. Ed. Note: Despite all of his investigative reporting and Emmy nominations, there is a lot that Jim Harris does not know about the Olympics. For example, my highly confidential and unreliable sources tell me that it almost came out that Chinese child slaves were being used to make the medals that were won by Chinese child gymnasts. But when the Chinese government suspected that foreign journalists were going to reveal this information, they quickly sent all of their child slaves to Disneyland and replaced them with adult slaves — who make better medals, anyway. Chinese officials continued to insist that their female gymnasts were all over 16 years old — the Olympic minimum — although their best gymnast, Xiang Hung Fung, is only three feet tall and weighs only 56 pounds. Just because she was carried into the gymnasium in a crib does not necessarily mean she is too young. “Fung has an amazing metabolism,” said a Chinese Olympic official. “In fact, we are going to study her metabolism exhaustively and try to come up with a pill that would make women smaller and thinner, just like Fung. If we succeed, we can sell the pill to almost every woman in the United States and Europe. We can take all of our slave laborers out of the factories making dollar store junk and have them make the thinning pill instead. This will put an end to all of our economic problems.”
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