Habla Olympian?
As the Winter Olympics come to a close I ask you this question..do you speak Olympian?It’s more than Greek to me–it’s like a cross between Mesopotamian and Klingon. When I hear the announcers describe what’s going on I wanna call 911 because I think they’re having apoplexies. What do I mean? ok…you flip on the snowboard half-pipe event. the announcer starts getting cranked up, just ready to scream out things that make no sense at all.. ok..here we go, there goes schleppy callaghan, whoa! just did a quadruple grab his ass backwards opposite front reverse rolling in the shit switch fake back side flip us off 1080 canadian bacon mindy method mulekick! That was awesome but the judges may take some points off for the shaky roast beef rusty trombone. 
Right. I can’t tell the method from the madness but i can pretty easily figure out some insane person that’s only 4 feet tall wearing baggy clothes just shot themselves into the air then did a bunch of contortions that made it look like the poor kid just got tased. Then, if they’re lucky, they land on their feet and shoot up the other side of the half-pipe and do something even more crazy that will once again set off the announcer who cries…..ohmygod! that’s the first anyone’s done a quintuple kiss your ass goodbye stiffy stuffy pickpocket …while eating a breakfast sandwich! Uh..yeah..whatever. None of the announcer’s gibberish helps me understand what just happened aside from watching a young person do things that, for most people, would prevent them from becoming an old person. With no hope of emulating what I’ve just seen, I attempt a soft sofa dismount, but lose 3 points for a two-footed landing..and spilling beer and chips on the carpet. I settle for a bronze..just beating an in-law who fell on a Frito. 
Then there’s figure skating. 
I’ve been watching it for decades and to this day, I don’t know the difference between a flip, loop, lutz, salchow or axle. It’s all just skinny people lofting themselves above the ice, twirling, smiling, crying, falling in different ways. 
When I heard Tara and Johnny kvell that some skater landed a triple lutz, all I could think of was what my father would often ask when someone went crazy about something that didn’t impress him. he’d say, “yeah…but is it good or bad for the jews?” Lutz sounds German, so it probably isn’t. In fact, it’s named after Austrian skater Alois Lutz, but Austria’s just next door to Germany so I’m not budging. i suppose in this age of double, triple, quadruple screen viewing I could have webpages open that define all these terms but if my eyes are averted for even a second when i hear the announcer scream, “holy crap..they just landed a 1600pennsylvaniaavenuetrumpiancombover….and i miss it…well that would pretty much send me into a 1280snuffmytorch.
I went to the boat show today. I have no intention of buying a boat, but yet I go to the boat show every other year. I don’t fantasize about buying a boat and I can think of only one time in our lives my wife and I almost seriously considered buying one, but then I got laid off from my job and we decided to buy food instead.
So why do I insist on coughing up the price of a ticket and parking to attend boat shows? Several reasons. Some boats just look pretty cool and they let you climb aboard to look around, sit in nice, cushy seats, plop your butt behind the captain’s wheel and basically enjoy the feeling of being on a vessel you couldn’t possibly afford, care to maintain, have to schlep to and from the water, or put up with people hoping to wangle an invitation.
The other reason I attend boat shows is I enjoy watching the salesmen who wield clipboards ready to write up that big sale. In most cases, they never raise their clipboards past their belt lines since there are so many people at the boat show like me, who just wanna walk on boats but are smart enough not to sink their finances by buying one. I actually heard this conversation between a big-gutted lookie-lou and a clipboard-wielding sales guy.
The only sport in which athletes do not wear gloves is curling, although SOME of the curlers do..others wear just one. Every other sport involves almost every ounce of flesh protected from cold, snow, ice, sun, concussions, being sliced by razor sharp blades or edges, being mistaken for a souvenir when a well-meaning, but seriously drunk spectator seeing the Olympic logos emblazoned on an athlete’s outfit, mistakes him or her for a souvenir and attempts to whack the poor guy or gal’s noggin’ like a bobblehead.
While watching figure skating I often imagine one of them landing the first quintuple lutz, then falling right through the ice and disappearing, resulting in a two-tenths of a point deduction for rousting the fossilized judges from their stupor. The spectacle would spark commentator Johnny Weir and Tara Lapinsky to exclaim, “don’t you love our outfits!”
I really enjoy the insane sports of skeleton and luge, but I think slathering those little sleds in Crisco before the riders lay down on them might make them even more challenging and entertaining.
This is the first Olympics that I’ve found myself watching cross-country skiing. It’s a great sport and I admire the unbelievable strength and conditioning it takes to succeed. But that’s not why I’m watching it. When one skier runs into another, a whole bunch fall like dominoes and you just don’t see that in many other sports. Worth waiting four years to see.
Love, love, love the snowboarding. Those crazy riders keep pushing the envelope in terms of height, difficulty and danger. I look forward to one of them launching themselves up the side of the half-pipe, into the air, and flying off with a flock of pigeons to Pyongyang, defiling every statue of Kim Jong Un.
I think they should replace guns in the biathlon with pea shooters. They’re a lot lighter and it would be fun to see athletes with frozen faces attempt to pucker up enough to blow a pea. I would think that would make the sport even more challenging and less noisy.
Finally, it’s about that torch. The current one doesn’t look at all like the traditional cauldron, but more like a giant flaming goiter.
Cowards are death to any organization that thrives on moving forward, on fostering creativity and bolstering worker morale. Cowards are useless wastes of space and resources and should be swept from the payroll immediately. They will only hold you back and piss you off.
Think about it. If the Cowardly Lion was too scared to join Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow on the Yellow Brick Road to meet Oz, he might never have found the nerve he had in him all along.
In our office today are boxes of doughy, sweet, greasy and goddamit, delicious filling-injected balls of dough called Paczkis..pronounced poonch-kees. That’s Polish, I believe, for “imminent death.” They look like jelly donuts, and many are stuffed with it, along with custard, various fruits and creams, only enhancing their effectiveness as desserts d’demise.
It’s all related to Fat Tuesday..the beginning of the Lenten season. The idea, I’m told, was the heavy use of lard is part of the tradition of emptying your cupboards of the stuff by frying up pastry in it.
Here’s a riddle? How many brands does it take to screw up a light bulb? Answer: All of them! Here’s the situation. Tried to buy a light bulb lately? I did and my brain blew. Let me, er, illuminate the issue. Old days: Her: “Hey honey, the bulb in the bathroom blew. I need a 60!”
So we go to the nearest big box discount store to score some squigglies, technically known as CFLs. None. Go to another. None. Go to one leading home improvement store. None. WTF! I thought squigglies were supposed to supplant bulbous bulbs..the ones with filaments that sear your fingers..that incandescents were going to be as dead as Edison. Yet, there they were, looking smug on the shelves where squigglies once sat. An online search then revealed it’s lights out for squigglies because they contain mercury, which can kill you, so bulby-bulbs ain’t dead yet. BUT..they’re losing ground to bulby-looking LED bulbs which are supposed to last like a million years and burn cooler, making them better than incandescents, except a dozen of them cost the same as the monthly power bill for all of Akron.
At this point I’m tempted to boycott bulbs completely and head to Yankee Candle where I can stock up on a couple of cases of Marshmallow Vanilla Madness tapers and pillars and go completely “Little House on the Prairie.” Maybe if enough people did that a bulb would go off in the heads of the manufacturers on how to go back to one standard. For godsakes…make it easier for us humans..to replace our lumens!
t wasn’t the lead story in any newscast, or even an item, but in case you missed it, this week marked the 
One this cold day, the Marine Midland Bank coughed up a few grand to have me do my show outside next to its newfangled contraption that would allow customers to drive up and do their banking with no human interaction. The name ATM hadn’t yet come into use. They just called it an “automated teller.” For three hours I stood in the freezing cold yapping about the thing that would not yap back, accosting drivers who stopped to struggle with the new technology. When I attempted to stick my mic in their cars asking them how they enjoyed the new experience, some gave cogent answers, others believed they were being robbed of the cash they just received from what some called “that goddamned money vending machine.” Luckily, no weapons were drawn, or fired, although I had to jump out of the way several times to avoid being run over. Perhaps the most harm I suffered was breathing in carbon monoxide for three hours, which provided me some insight as to the life of a New York State Thruway toll taker. Since there was no delay, whatever the folks said was aired, thus giving the nice people at Marine Midland some rather unfiltered feedback as to their new gizmo.
After another successful trip to our nearby Ikea store, it’s occurred to me foolishness like the federal government shutdown and other such obstacles could easily be avoided by following adopting the Swedish furniture chain’s model. The main feature being, its instructions for assembling Ikea furniture use no words, and one must concede, words are what stand in the way of progress.
Eliminating words, and by extension, conversation and testy debate, cuts right to the chase. The only goal is completing the project with a minimum of wasted time and effort, and, yes, words… whether it be legislation, treaties, or screwing the taxpayers. 
edLINES 