Month: August 2008

Yet more evidence that Dan Grabauskas should not be in charge of the MBTA.

Headline in the Boston Metro: “So What Is Real?”

Of course, they’re talking about the amount of fakery in this year’s Olympics, but still, it’s an unusually philosophical question for a paper that usually covers firefighters, kittens, and Owen Wilson.

I sure hope she’s making this up.

This year, the Olympics authorities will take what is delicate referred to as 4,500 samples, and store them for eight years so that if they develop new tests for previously-undetected drugs, they can go back and check old champions with new technology.

It sounds great, but just imagine the logistical challenges of keeping a room-sized freezer full of urine at ultra-low temperatures for eight years. Just imagine being the person whose job it is to guard that freezer to prevent tampering. Just imagine, some time in 2013: “Hey, Bill, we got a new test developed for synthetic HGH, can you go down to the 2008 Olympic Pee Freezer and pull samples 3021 through 3044?”

Yet another reason that we should not only allow, but promote, doping. My primary desire for it, of course, is that it’ll lead to great leaps in transhuman technologies. Genetically engineered swimmers with fins for feet!

Seeing our jackass embarrassment of a president schmooze with Olympians just makes me want to break the TV.

I guess he’s no more of an embarrassment than the Chinese gymnastics team, which is obviously faking the birthdates of its athletes to get them to competition age. Seriously, look at the difference between the American and Chinese gymnasts– the Chinese have fielded a team of children who have no idea how badly they’re going to injure themselves.

I love watching the Olympics. But you have to keep in mind a phrase that I think is attributed to Brecht: “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.” You don’t need state-sponsored doping programs to know that. You can see the president using nominally non-political events for political purposes and know it.

Today is 08/08/08, which means lots of people will be making a lot of jokes about the 808 synth. OK, well, maybe just me.

Everybody gettin down make no mistake, nothing sounds like an 808!

In my eyes, the Olympics, like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, are mostly an excuse to have a party with snacks and a theme. For the Super Bowl, of course, you have hearty midwinter fare. For the Oscars, there are more options: Elegant finger food, things served in movies, foods based on movie puns (There Will Be Blood Pudding, anyone?) or of course foods that actual Hollywood stars eat (superpremium vodka, diet soda, cocaine).

But what do you serve at an Olympics party? Ambrosia, because it’s Olympian? Chinese food, since the games are in China this year? Power Bars and Gatorade because it’s an athletic event? Or maybe I should serve factory-farmed meat since it’s an athletic event rife with doping and a total lack of concern for the long-term health of the participants?

Maybe we’ll go with Chinese health food at the table and an HGH or EPO injection station in the back room.

There was a lot of bad news this weekend but this Times story about the intersection of failures in medicine and immigration policy was pretty damn terrible. Nobody wants to send an injured man home to die, but nobody wants to pay the bill for taking care of him either. What happens? Well, he goes home to die.

That, and the one about the dramatic rise in jellyfish population throughout the world. It seems that the ocean fishing industry is re-enacting the classic Tragedy of The Commons story.

On the plus side, given that the entire world is going to hell in a handbasket, I feel better about my own failures as a human being. Pass me the employer-subsidized health care and a basket of dolphin chips, would you?

Someone shipped 32 pounds of marijuana to the wife of the mayor of a small Maryland town just outside of Washington DC. The mayor came home, found a box on the doorstep, and brought it inside. Then a SWAT team broke down his door, shot his two Labrador dogs, and took the dope. Now, if that was the mayor’s weed, or the mayor’s wife’s weed, that was very very strange. But what if it wasn’t?

What if someone wanted to teach the mayor about what it’s like to have cops break down your door and kill your dogs? Having drugs delivered to his house would be a good way to do it.