Be honest now!

I got interested in the games when I walked in on my wife cheering on a Dutch woman cyclist.  The powerful young lady was charging hard down a winding hill in a light drizzle, the pack trailing far behind.

“Ho-hum,” thinks I.  “Cycling.  Typical chick’s sport. Tame, boring…”
And that’s when her rear tire did a lockup on a wet turn and she rocketed head-first over the handle bars.  As you can see in the video below, her face-plant into a concrete curb at 30+ miles-per-hour was just plain nasty.  We thought she was dead.

Happily, she came out of it okay, but this video is pretty gnarly.  If you think watching a video of a brutal accident means you’re a bad person, that’s okay.  Don’t click on the link.

But for all you bad, bad people—enjoy!

Events prior to this olympics augured real oddness.  Robberies of athletes, and corpses and hospital sewage in the bay of the swimming venue was bad enough.  But a truly golden olympic moment came when a busload of Chinese journalists had to dive for cover.  Their bus had driven up on a gun battle between police and drug dealers that lasted an hour and resulted in six dead.

Unfortunately, no one thought to film the event, so I have no exciting exploitative video of anybody getting killed or injured to delight and entertain.  I did, however, come up with an equally terrifying and soul-scarring video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6ldO_78Ta4

…this 1976 Donny and Marie tribute to Elvis— If you click on the arrow, you are a deeply disturbed individual.

But all that horror aside—-floating corpses, gunfights, Donny and Marie—-, we just knew Ryan Lochte, international swimming star, raconteur, bon vivant, crepe suzette, and a whole bunch of other cool French words I don’t understand, would come through with his own special kind of strangeness, didn’t we?

Sure we did.

Lochte (or as I call him, Johnny Manziel—All Growed Up) claimed to be the victim of an armed robbery, which he was.  He failed to report, however, the whole story which involved a drunken assault on a two-dollar wall poster by him and some friends.

With the authorities in Rio already humiliated by the crappy state of their crappy country, they salved their bent pride by calling out the poster swat team.  Declaring war on Ugly American Lochte, indignant government representatives and high ranking poobahs demanded apologies, cash, and autographed T-shirts—but mostly cash.

Lochte did all kinds of mea culpas, and when it was over, I figured his involvement in this silly scandal would kill his career.  Later I was relieved to hear he’d landed an exciting gig competing on “Dancing With the Stars.”

No doubt you’re thinking that was pretty stupid, nothing more stupid could possibly have happened at the Olympics. Right?
Well you obviously didn’t see the women’s 100 meter preliminaries.

This was the first year the Saudis had a runner in the women’s 100 meter dash, which gave us all a good look at the special brand of Saudi Islam called Wahabbiism.  Wahabbi muslims believe women are big stupid camels who should behave in exactly the same modest (slavish) way they did in the time of Muhammad—1,400 years ago.

Which explains the stupidity you see below, done in the name of Saudi ‘modesty’.

Naturally, the media fawned endlessly over this “strong and brave” representative of all Saudi womanhood.  Because nothing says “strong and brave” like subscribing to a religious sect that says you can’t vote, can’t drive a car, can’t leave the house without a male chaperone—

Surprisingly, things got dumber, the dumbest being the special medical ‘treatment’ taken by swimming superstar Michael Phelps.  It’s called cupping.

This ridiculous form of ‘alternative’ medicine consists of lighting a flame under a small glass globe and placing the globe against the skin.

As the flame devours the oxygen under the globe, a vacuum is created, sucking the skin and blood upward into the globe, creating a big juicy bruise.

Its supporters claim this ‘treatment’ goes all the way back to the ancient Chinese, but I’ve done exhaustive research on the subject (more than ten minutes on Google and Bing) and was only able to trace it back to the Renaissance.

Based on further consideration, however, I realize now my skepticism was probably unfounded.  Medical journals of the Renaissance treated cupping seriously. Their manuals even included in-depth instructions and illustrations of the cupping placements best used in the promotion of good health and well-being.

I don’t know why I’m such a skeptic when it comes to alternative medicine.

Dan McNeil,
Owner/Operator
Cartridge World on Campbell