Day: August 23, 2004

some punk ass bitches stole “the scream” – after the shit that happened 10 years ago, you’d think they woulda lojacked the art or something. we are never going to see another major exhibit in oslo during our natural lives.

not that i was planning on hitting up oslo anytime soon.

still, i hope these guys are smart enough to not try and ransom it. or, if they are, at least they will be smart enough to take it to another country first.

i heard about this fairly momentous heist in a snippet on BBC news, as i was flipping around lookin for julia child specials (which were airing all over today). i had to turn to my dear nemesis friend the internet to get the details, as i was unwilling to spend 20 minutes listening to olympics blather.

oh, snap! yeah, i am talking shit about the olympics. it has nothing to do with the patriotic claptrap (or lack thereof) that is oft foisted upon naysayers of the event. my problem with the olympics is that they have nothing to do with real life anymore – it is a completely vacuous machine. the fact that that first 20 minutes of bbc was largely devoted to the details on the stripping of two athletes’ medals on account of chemcial influneces (i kept checking back to see if they were gonna talk about “the scream”) strongly reinforced the bitter outlook i have had on this incarnation of the games.

see, when they started these things, it was a way of offering recognition to those who were the best at the crafts of the day. soldering being what it was back then, many of the things which required evaluation for accolades were heavily physical events. some fishermen were kick ass swimmers. fucking everyone ran and walked, so seeing who the best was at that meant something. what fucking percentage of the contemporary population uses a goddamn javelin in their day-to-day?

nowadays, the bulk of human endeavor has been moved away from the physical daily way of doing things. it has not disappeared, but it is definitely not what the majority can claim an in-depth firsthand on i don’t want to watch the world file-collating/power stapling exhibition anymore than i want to watch a bunch of overstressed athletes stake their entire “careers” (and no small amount of corporate backing/futures) on whether or not shaving their balls will give them that .0013 sec “edge” in “the competition”.

my, that was an awful, yet vivid run on. i think i will leave it anyway.

really folks, there is a reason these games are still around, and it doesn’t have anything to do with pure athleticism anymore. nike is still alive in athens today, but in logo only (oh man, a greek pun within a pun, bad sign). that statement is overly pessimistic of me, and i am trying not to be compeltely pessimsitic verbally anymore. i will restate my assertion in a slightly more positive manner.

it is obvious that the olympics have less to do with corporate sponsorship and commercial agendas than american politics do.

wait, no, fuck…lemme try again.

the best thing about the current incarnation of the olympics is that even though they are rife with corruption and hopelessly far from the original spirit of the games, they keep american politicians out of the tv news for the first 20 minutes, for at least a week, during the waning portion of an election year.

speaking of news, my much lamented lost hat turned up under mysterious circumstances. i think it was abducted, and replaced by a clever facimile, which explains why some serious oxy-cleaning it was in need of managed to bleach the shit out of it. damn those harlem extradimesnional portals. regardless of the hows and whys, i am overjoyed at it’s return from whatever mysteriously lettered dimension it had found itself in until very recently.

enough outta me. shouldn’t you be watching the womens’ barefoot one-legged hopping relay?