Tuesday, August 19, 2008

On the Olympics, my two furry friends, and Facebook

As I write this, to my far left is Rocky. Joey is behind me. Both are peacefully resting, and I am enjoying every moment of it while it lasts.

My in-laws are on their way to Italy for a couple of weeks, and my brother-in-law, who lives in Brooklyn and usually looks after my in-laws' dog, is heading off on a cruise, too. So for the next two weeks at least, possibly more, we're looking after Rocky, Nicole's 14-year-old wuss of an orange-and-black dog. He's a handsome guy, and incredibly lovable. He hates confrontation and usually scoots away from other dogs.

Then there's Joey, our own adopted 7-year-old half-Husky/half-jackass, who isn't too great around other dogs sometimes.

What could possibly go wrong?

Actually, a little over two days in, it's so far so good. Rocky sleeps in the living room (there's no danger that he'll do anything destructive, no matter where he is), and Joey sleeps in our bedroom (where he sleeps anyway, because the half-jackass side of him is always a wildcard, even without other dogs around). Rocky gets two doggie treats for breakfast (one of which was promptly eaten yesterday by Joey upon his discovery that there was food on the ground) and one for lunch, and Joey gets pretty much whatever he wants whenever he wants it (within dog-food limits, but usually covered in a sprinkling of cheese), because I'm a big softy. Feeding them at night has been an issue, because naturally Joey feels like he needs to eat Rocky's food, despite having a perfectly good bowl of ... whatever that is ... in front of him.

The bigger difficulty is trying to take them out for walks - they're both wanderers, so having a leash in each hand makes them very difficult to control. Besides, Joey could get a little aggressive under the right circumstances. He's not a violent dog by nature - far from it - but given his insecurities around other dogs, it's best not to tempt fate. Anyway, Rocky is older and is used to being allowed out on his lawn without a leash to take care of business, but without fences here to keep him in, his unfamiliarity with the neighborhood, and the leash laws (which I fully support, given how many dogs are around this neighborhood), I have to accompany him. Since he's an older dog, he has to go more frequently, but for shorter walks. Joey, on the other hand, accompanies me for 30-45 minute walks three or four times daily. I'm not sure which one of us walks the other, to be honest. The thing is, when one sees that the other is going to go for a walk, he decides he wants to go too, and each starts to feed off the other's anxious energy. Next thing you know, I have two dogs engaged in a spiraling game of "Me! No, me! No, ME!" for my attention.

I don't care who goes first. I'm the one who has to walk around picking up poop all day, so I can't exactly find any motivation to play favorites. I'm the big loser, any way you slice it.

A side note: Joey loves (more specifically, goes absolutely crazy for) Duck and Sweet Potato treats, so we decided to try the banana chips from the same. Intrigued by their smell, I popped a small one into my mouth and ate one for the hell of it. Going down, it wasn't too bad, but the aftertaste made me run to the mouthwash. Yech. I've also tried Frosty Paws peanut butter doggie ice cream. I have no shame. The chips did not taste like bananas, nor did the ice cream taste like peanut butter. If I were to be marooned on a tropical island with an unlimited supply of the chips, I could probably survive. The ice cream, which one would think would be a fantastic supply to have to rely upon on a tropical island - not so much.



Count me in as what the right-wing talking heads would call an America-hating liberal, I guess, because I could not possibly care less about how many medals our Olympians win. The idea that one country's total medal count should somehow matter on a global scale is ridiculous and shallow as far as I'm concerned, but every two years there's an emphasis on who wins what. This year, 'can the host Chinese athletes show China's rise to prominence by taking home more medals' than the US seems at times to be a popular question on TV and in print.

And I just don't care.

Yes, the medals themselves do count, and anyone who wins them should be proud. That's not a question at all. But if a swimmer from another country beats an American swimmer by a fraction of a second, my first reaction is going to be "well, good for them" instead of "it's embarrassing that we lost." (If the "Redeem Team" loses in the basketball tournament, for instance, the story will once again be how the US team managed to lose, not how their opponents found a way to win, and I think that's more than a little unfair to the other team.)

I know it's not realistic to expect otherwise, because the US side of the story is what drives TV ratings and sales of magazines, but good people who worked very hard for years (just as any athlete from any other country in any other sport) deserve some credit, too.

What I care about, especially with the state of global relations as strained as they are today, is that the Olympics are governed fairly, and that the athletes respect each other. The two events that have been tarnished by controversy (that I know of) are the kinds of things that I hope are kept to a minimum (though the possibility that there are Chinese gymnasts who are actually younger than reported is another story altogether). I just don't want to hear that something like the 1972 basketball game controversy has struck again.

Before the games started, there was so much news about China's hosting abilities, the smog that was supposed to suffocate everyone, the crackdown on internet availability and freedoms, and the refusal of the government to allow visas for some former athletes to visit. While these are absolutely very relevant stories that should be reported on or investigated as needed, I'm glad they've taken a back seat to the actual results of the games themselves.

I watched Michael Phelps win those eight gold medals with awe (and felt bad for his teammates, who were completely overshadowed). I saw the craziest damn game of badminton and didn't care that the Chinese won the gold. I found out that there's such a thing as Olympic trampoline (!), and that it looks absolutely terrifying. I saw a women's water polo game go into double overtime, then into a shootout. I saw kayakers guide themselves through a man-made white water obstacle course. I listened in amazement, realizing that NBC sports actually found "experts" to provide commentary for each of these!

I realized that none of these sports will be on live network TV again until 2012.

The funny (funny strange, not funny ha-ha) and somewhat unfortunate aspect of the competition to me, in a way, is that these athletes train every day of their lives to race or throw something or who knows what, and that anyone who finishes fourth or lower is pretty much forgotten instantly. Why is this unfortunate? Why should we care?

Look at it this way: the difference between first place (13.16 seconds) and 30th place (13.84) in the second round of the Men's 110-Meter Hurdles (not the medal round, I realize, but the heats leading up to it) was less than .7 seconds. That's less time than it takes to take a breath.

To train all your life and finish 30th, and still be only .68 seconds behind first place ... well, that's pretty amazing, as far as I'm concerned. The commentators will sometimes throw in a "so-and-so has fallen well of the pace" or "so-and-so brings up the rear", as though the performance is somehow not impressive. Well, I'm impressed!

Put me in the water with Michael Phelps, and he'd lap me three or four times (at a minimum, likely more) before I got from one end of the pool to the other. That's falling well of the pace! That's an embarrassing performance!

So I say let's watch the games with wondrous eyes, enjoying the spectacle of seeing the world's greatest athletes pushing themselves because they excel at their sports, rather than worrying about which country wins what and how many. They'd kick my ass and yours if we tried to do what they do, so let's just sit back and enjoy, and not worry about China's odd decision to have a "cuter" little girl lip-synch a song sung by another (apparently "uglier"?) little girl at the opening ceremonies. It should be a non-issue.

(And let's hope that Janos Baranyai, the Hungarian Weightlifter, is OK after his horrific incident.)

Four quick thoughts:

1. Again, on Michael Phelps. The question is now apparently "Is Michael Phelps the greatest American athlete ever?" The most celebrated, perhaps - but even then, let's wait a few years and see if his light still shines as brightly as it does right now. The greatest? Ask a decathalete, or one of those crazies who does the Iron Man competitions. Phelps is impressive, absolutely, but hardly the "greatest", I think.

2. If your event is the shot put, you must really love shot put. Because nobody else cares. Sorry.

3. The foot races? The 100m, 200m, and so on? They should attach it to a runner on the inside of the track and make the runners chase it, like dogs at the track chase the rabbit lure. First one to snatch the gold medal wins it!

4. Remember when Bob Costas seemed better, somehow?



Finally: Facebook applications.

First of all, I'd been so reluctant to sign up for Facebook, because I did Friendster for a while, and once I got used to it, everyone switched to MySpace. I was happy there for a while, too, then some people started LinkedIn, and then everyone moved to Facebook. Too many social networking sites, I thought. But Facebook actually turned out to be pretty neat. (WordScraper, anyone?)

One of Facebook's wonderful time-wasting lures are the "applications" you can choose to add to your profile. One of the applications I made the mistake of adding was the "Compare People" application. Very rarely will I actually respond to the question sets presented, because I don't want to offend or puzzle any of the people I consider (and want to RETAIN as) friends. So consider the ramifications of the questions "Who is hotter?" and "Who would I rather sleep with?" when presented with random photos of Friends A and B.

Yes, I realize you can vote anonymously, so that the person getting your vote won't know it's me who is voting. That's almost beside the point.

When one chooses, the friend who gets the vote is notified that someone has "awarded" a superlative of some sort to him or her. It's just ... weird. I don't know.

Add to this that I'm married ... well, you see what I mean.

It would make the application a lot more fun to fill out if you could add a line or two of text to clarify why you voted the way you did. For instance, if I know for a fact that Friend A snores like a buzzsaw, I could mention that little nugget in response to selecting Friend B as the person I'd rather sleep with, thereby completely removing any sexual aspect to the question (not to mention staying on Nicole's good side! :) ). Another example: in the photos that came up under the question "who is hotter?", one of my friends is photographed in ski gear with a lift in the background, and one has a big floppy hat to protect against the sun. Clearly, based on the presented evidence, Big Floppy Hat person is MUCH hotter than Ski Gear person. If only I could remark on the temperature aspect of the question ...

I've anonymously been voted on several times (fortunately for my ego, though, very few). One hundred percent (of the one person) who voted in the category said I'm the person he or she would "rather get stuck in hancuffs with". Very nice, thank you. One hundred percent (of the one person, again) who voted said they'd rather hang out with me for a day (perhaps because they couldn't stand two days? - see, bring the comedy, and this stuff's much easier to answer). Good, good. More powerful? Well, I do have the strength of ten men, so I'm one-for-one in that category, also.

"Nicer". Nicer?

First, a note about me: Women love me. Men want to be me. Children idolize me. The entire animal kingdom considers me to be a champion of their cause. I don't, as far as I know, have an arch-enemy.

However, only one person out of three voted me "nicer". Granted, I don't know the circumstances of the votes. Perhaps my "opponent" was a long(er)-time, closer friend that I had no chance of "beating" anyway. Maybe the people who voted were drunk, or thought it was opposite day, during which you had to flip your vote.

So, to the one person who voted me as the "nicer" person, thank you ... but I swear, if I ever find out who the two fucking assholes were who didn't think I was nicer, I'm going to get a baseball bat and start cracking skulls. Then, I'm going to set fire to their cars. I'll show THEM who's nice, goddammit!

Just kidding, of course. The only category I'm actively politicking for votes in is "best profile picture" - I put in some good time Photoshopping some of those, so if you'd consider me in front of the giant pile of donuts, the army of me, or me fronting Guns N' Roses when the choices comes up, I'd really appreciate it.

Another aside, from my days in High School: In every yearbook across the country every year you'll find the Senior Superlatives section, or something like it. Seniors vote who will be most likely to succeed, Class Clown, etc. Anyway, of the three of us nominated in my senior year, I won "Most School Spirit". Rules prevented one person from winning more than one Superlative, so the guy who actually got the most votes decided he'd rather win his other category, so the award when to the #2 vote-getter. In a tremendously wonderful ironic twist regarding school spirit, the #2 vote-getter didn't want the award because he wanted to be in the yearbook as little as possible. So I won, by default, simply because I was the "other guy". The sweet taste of victory!



A final note for the day, also Facebook related: someone, somewhere, anonymously wrote a very nice little blurb about me. I don't know who wrote it, or why, but thank you very much, whoever you are. It really made my day, and it was one of the nicest things anyone's said to me in a long, long time.

I figured anyone who'd take time to write such a thing probably reads this blog, and since I don't know where to send the thanks otherwise, this is as good a place as any to mention it.

So seriously, thanks a ton. :)

(You did mean to send it to me, right?)



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