HILARIOUS!

There are only a few things that I find TRULY funny. To these things, I will usually laugh out loud and find myself giggling a few days later as I remember it. This article is one of those things. The other is always Jay Leno's Monday headlines. I do not like to read, but I LOVE the Olympics. I have watched them ENDLESSLY for the last 2 weeks and am sad to see them come to a close. This article by Joel Stein from TIME magazine (Ammon's bible) brings some much needed closure. I was offended by the first line, but once you get passed it and realize he's being sarcastic, you will LOVE IT!

Raising the Stakes at the Olympics by Joel Stein:
I hate the olympic spirit. No competition should be ruined by an undercurrent of peace and harmony. Would baseball be better if Derek Jeter hugged David Ortiz after every game and talked about how wonderful Boston is? If you want an endless event in which everyone pretends to respect everybody else, go to couples therapy. If I'm going to spend two weeks watching something, I want to see some people pouring Champagne on one another and some people crying at the end of it. That's why I watch the baseball playoffs and Girls Gone Wild. How damaging to sports is the Olympic spirit? After all these events, I have no idea who won. Sure, NBC sometimes flashes a "medal count," but that is the stupidest way of measuring victory since the Electoral College. Gold, silver and bronze all count as one point? Then why make different medals? Sure, it practically guarantees that the U.S. gets first place, but that's only in a system in which it's as good to be third best as actual best—and in that world, Ralph Nader would get to make presidential decisions. If you also gave a point in the medal count for fourth through 6.7 billionth best in each sport, China and India would be kicking ass.

So I've been working on a new scoring system to improve the Games. The first step is to eliminate all but one medal event per sport. You know why Michael Phelps won eight golds? Because they were all for the same thing. Turns out, he can swim fast when he does two laps and four laps — and when he's alone and when three other Americans go right after him! You want multiple medals? Do multiple sports. Phelps gets two medals only if he's the best swimmer in the world and the best Taekwondoist. For soccer, the most popular sport in the world, the Olympics give out one gold for men and one for women. That's fewer than go to race-walkers. Shooters get 15. Canoeists get 16, and that's assuming that the 14 rowing events are somehow different. To be fair, under the current system, the basketball team should be having competitions in three-point shooting, dunking, rebounding, passing, that halftime trampoline thing, T-shirt cannon-blasting and restraining Ron Artest.

In my system, overall points would be weighted by how popular the sport is, as determined by television ratings. You got a bronze in the gymnastic floor competition? That's 100 Olympic points. You nailed a gold in the modern pentathlon? (That's pistol-shooting, épée fencing, swimming, horse-jumping and a run.) You get two points and the right to keep whatever European royal title your family is holding on to. Boxing champions get only three points, since everyone would clearly rather watch ultimate fighting. Sports in which competitors wear makeup get a deduction, as do sports played in only one area of the world: badminton (Asia), water polo (California), field hockey (Smith College). I would also consider body mass index in the point system. Phelps is clearly in incredible athletic shape, so he'd get twice as many points for his wins as the table-tennis gold medalist would. In fact, if time allows, I'd have all the gold medalists, except wrestlers, wrestle one another in an overall 1,000-point super-Olympic event to determine the world's best athlete. I'd also make them all live in one house and complain about one another to the camera a lot.

NBC highlights only the top few competitors in most sports, but the winners would look a lot more impressive if we also got to see the worst. So I'd give the last three places anti-medals, all made of a decreasing quality of chocolate, starting with Russell Stover and working down from there. Then we would use the European soccer system, in which we'd kick out the country with the most anti-points. Not just out of the Olympics, but out of the international community. The country would lose its seat at the U.N., the little stamp it puts on passports, all its welcome to signs and whatever war it's currently waging. Also, the country that comes in first should get something real: maybe some extra carbon output, four years without tariffs or the right to put its flag on all the world's airplanes.

The stakes need to be raised. We can't continue to have every gymnast hugging every other gymnast when her floor routine ends, and not just because it's bound to be used as bait on To Catch a Predator. If the purpose of the Olympics is to make the world more peaceful, maybe the reason it hasn't succeeded is that the Games aren't warlike enough. The ancient Greeks got themselves oiled up to wrestle for a good reason: to channel their bloodlust into something meaningless. Also because they were crazy gay. Globalization has made getting along with countries we've never heard of more important, and the best way to do that is to beat the crap out of them in sports we've never heard of and then rub their faces in it. If we're going to get along, we're going to have to learn how to hate each other when it matters the least.