GGGOOOOAAAALLLLLLL!

I suppose your kid just puts his toys in the toybox like a loser.

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White Trash Tweet

If you're a business that is going to sponsor an individual (probably an athlete), you're going to want to be sure that the person that you're sponsoring will be a good reflection of your business. If you have a classy business, you're going want to make sure that you're not sponsoring someone like Tonya Harding, for example. That won't look good at all. (Even if you're a lead pipe manufacturer. It's still probably not a good move.) So if you're a company like, say, Jaguar, you're going to want to sponsor someone who would seem to have a great deal of class. Maybe that's asking too much. How about a classy person? Some class? Let me put it another way. If you're Jaguar, don't sponsor someone who is going to Tweet "Suck on that faggots!" Wait. What?

Correct. It would seem that there is an Australian swimmer named Stephanie Rice. She's apparently a fairly big deal. At least in Australia she is. Then again, she was also a pretty big deal at the Beijing Olympics where she swam her way to three gold medals. And since three gold medals is nothing to sneeze at (unless you're allergic), Jaguar decided to sponsor this young dolphin-esque swimmer. And just like a Jaguar, she sure isn't difficult to look at. Behold!

Ah, yes. In the typical pose that one would expect from a swimmer. Laying atop rumpled bed sheets with hair all a-flowing. Sure. That's how all women look when they're just hanging out. Uh-huh. All the time. But I digress. The point here is that this woman is apparently a big fan of the Australian rugby team, the Australian Wallabies. Huh. For such a brutal sport, that's kind of a wussy name, isn't it? The Wallabies? (Granted, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL went for years with their mascot as a guy with a feather in his cap who was winking. Not the most manly mascot anyone has ever dreamed up.)

But the Wallabies apparently beat the South African team. (I cannot locate the name of those blokes in any report of this because the media is now sucking worldwide. Thanks for that, sucky worldwide media.) They won 41-39 in a game that was described by The Telegraph as "a nail-biting victory". I'll take their word for it. I have no idea if that is a high scoring game or just an average score that was tight in the end or what. Not a clue. None. I guess that I just need to learn more about rugby, as I can't really assume that every publication reporting on this sort of thing is going to spell it out, but I really wish they'd maybe just give us a little clue.

Now, Ms. Rice was so excited about the victory that she did what anyone would do in that situation. That's right. She tweeted. Good Lord. I'm so over people and their tweets, I cannot even tell you. But what I can tell you is what she tweeted. And it wasn't very Jaguar-esque to tweet out to the entire world "Suck on that faggots!"

I wasn't the only one who thought that it wasn't exactly the kind of person that Jaguar might not want to sponsor. Yeah, Jaguar thought the same thing as well. They dumped her. They were more elegant about the announcement than I was just then, of course. A one Mark Eedle, who is the marketing and public affairs manager for Jaguar Australia, said, "We made a decision yesterday, and we've terminated the agreement with her."

They terminated their agreement with her?! But...but...she made a really weak apology after she was told how stupid she was! You mean that it didn't matter to Jaguar that she said, "I made a comment on Twitter on Saturday night in the excitement of the moment. I did not mean to cause offence and I apologise." That's what she says in the "excitement of the moment"? She gets so excited that she tweets "Suck on that faggots!"? You know, some people simply shout, "Yipee!" What if they had been playing a German team? Would she be tweeting what she thought the Jews should do? I certainly hope not.

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The Hermaphroditic Sprinter?

Am I one to judge? Of course I am. But this is a case where there needs to be some sort of judgment. Technically, I suppose I don't need to be the one doing it, but what fun is that really? Not much. Let's begin.

Over there in Berlin at the IAAF World Championships in Athletics competition (it's Track and Field, not to be confused with Field and Stream), there's a bit of controversy. Well, maybe just a question. I don't know if it qualifies as a controversy just yet, but it's ramping up to get there. It makes you stop and think, though. It at least makes you wonder. But whether you stop and think or you just wonder, both can be expressed in this situation with the extremely apt expression "WTF?" That's because in the women's 800m race, the winner...well...see, some folks wonder....it's just because.....and the.....you can't really....oh, for cryin' out loud, here! This is the person who won the race. Behold!

Aaahhh. Now do you see what all the hubbub is about? I'm sure you do. That is a picture of a one Caster Semenya of "....a remote, rural part of Limpopo province in South Africa", according to our friends over there at The Telegraph. Caster is 18 years old and has apparently improved her performance in the 800m race by incredible amounts over just a few months (7-ish, to be more vaguely precise). Usually with such a wide margin of time being shaved off of your previous time there is usually talk of doing so by artificial means, aka 'roiding up. Steroids. And while Semenya is muscle-y, that's not what they're concerned about. They're concerned about whether she's running with the appropriate opponents. That is to say, she might be a man.

Again, who am I to judge? Well, I'm me. And I'm gonna. Judge that is. Upon first glance, all I could hear was the Aerosmith song "Dude Looks Like a Lady" running through my head. Well, that and the thought that she's a guy. Simply put, that's a man. But I looked at some footage of how she ran and I also looked at a whole bunch of pictures and in some of them, I'll totally admit that there was a slight hint of a female. I couldn't say what it was. I could say what it wasn't. It wasn't the unshaven legs. It wasn't the rippling muscles. It wasn't the short hair. But there was something. (Ironically though, if there is "something", that won't bode well.) Maybe it's that there isn't a whole lot of room in that outfit to, um, tuck...if you know what I mean. (And while I don't have one, I'd imagine that if you did have that thing all tucked up there, you'd chafe quite a bit if you were running 800m with it like that. You might even rub it down to a little nub, like the eraser on a pencil, if you had really picked up some speed.)

Some of the things that caused others to question Semenya's gender shortly after her arrival in Berlin were her "...muscular development, her narrow figure, deep voice, a dusting of facial hair and her masculine looks." I'm going to take issue with the deep voice part. There's nothing wrong with chicks with deeper than usual voices. Nothing! They're still chicks. They just sound like dudes...mostly on the phone. And they get called "sir" a lot....again, mostly on the phone....so I've heard. So just because someone has a deep voice, that doesn't mean that you need to be calling them "sir" because they're really a man. Then again, it does help if they don't look like a man as well as have the deep voice. That's all.
But as far as the rest of it goes, the "dusting of facial hair" is definitely cause for concern, if not alarm. Just because you're female and athletic doesn't mean that you have to sport a "dusting of facial hair". You an be a female athlete and still be able to be identified as a female. Look at these two from Jamaica that were also at the World Championships. No one is questioning whether they're female or not. Behold!

So now what's in store is that they're going to do a gender verification test which, according to IAAF spokesman Nick Davies "...is an extremely complex procedure." Wait. What? Extremely complex? How many pairs of pants does she have to drop?

According to a one Dr. Richard Auchus, a specialist in disorders of sexual differentiation, "We can get quite philosophical here -- what does it mean to be male or female?" How non-philosophical do you want to get, Doc? Because it's really pretty basic as to what it means either way. Why must it always be so complicated?

There's going to be a series of tests to determine if Semenya is female. (Rumor has it they will include attempting to parallel park, seeing if she stops and asks for directions, has any interest in football and can work the remote control.) These tests would seem to include "...a physical medical evaluation and reports from a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, an internal medicine specialist and an expert on gender." That seems like a lot. But apparently, just dropping the ol' pants isn't good enough if someone happens to have been born with ambiguous genitalia (which is not a bad name for a band).

But even without the ol' AG (ambiguous genitalia), it's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened before, where a person of one sex can somewhat pass for a member of the opposite sex and therefore does the most logical thing which is to compete in athletics as a member of that opposite sex. Of course. Take the case of a one Samukeliso Sithole. According to the BBC he "...won seven gold medals in women's competitions in 2004." And then it was discovered that she was a he, a fact that he tried to weasel out of by claiming he was a hermaphrodite. That didn't fly and he "...was charged with impersonation and causing psychological damage to fellow athletes." (Wow. If they had that sort of charge here in the US, half of the sports players out there would be charged.) Once they figured out which prison to send him to (they chose a men's prison) off he went, where he later claimed "...to have periods and feared becoming pregnant. Sithole said the male organs became enlarged after a traditional healer took revenge after not being paid for treatment last year." Nice going, Sithole!

Seriously, what kind of a guy wants to win something so badly that he'll pretend to be a chick and go run against a bunch of women? That's really pathetic, yes? It's also nothing new! This goes back at least to 1932 with the case of a one Stella Walsh, later nicknamed Stella the Fella (you can see where this one is going). According to an article over at The Mirror , she won "...Olympic gold for Poland in the 100 metres at the 1932 Los Angles Games", then in 1936 won a silver in the same event and went on to set "...100 national and world records, including 51 Polish records, 18 world records, and eight European records." That was all fine and good until 1980 when, as a bystander to an armed robbery in Cleveland, Ohio, she was shot dead and her subsequent autopsy revealed that she had male genitalia. Holy canoli! I'm still wrapping my head around this one. Mainly because I've been looking at photos of "Stella" and wondering if there were any questions at the time that this was going on. I look at these photos and I think "You could have at least tried to alter your appearance. Maybe shave or something." She's pretty manly. Behold!

See?! What did I tell ya? But get this! At the Berlin Games in 1936 high jumper Hermann Ratjen "was forced by Hitler and the Nazis in Germany to pretend to be a woman and call himself Dora". I guess that if Hitler is asking/telling you to be a woman, you be a woman. ("Would you like me to put on a sundress, Fuhrer?") They did this because the Nazis "...wanted to ensure that Germany won much more medals than they had done the previous Games." That didn't go over so well when Hermann came in fourth in the women's high jump. And that is why Hermann Ratjen did not go down in history as one of Germany's most famous athletes. He was found out in 1938 when on a train where he was recognized by a couple of women. Even though he was wearing a dress (still going with the Pretend-like-I'm-a-woman-for-Hitler ruse), it was something about his beard stubble that gave him away. Go figure!

But again, I have to ask, was anyone questioning this at the time it was happening? Or, in this case, were folks just going along with it because of the Hitler factor? I'd be OK with that, you know. Not saying anything as to not upset Hitler? Not a problem. Seems reasonable.

The "extensive gender tests" on Semenya are expected to take a while, so we won't know right away whether she's all woman or all man or some sort of hermaphroditic sprinter (another really good name for a band. Hermaphroditic Sprinter.). But until something or someone says otherwise, she's a chick and she won the 800m race and that's how it should be for the time being. While this likely won't be the most pleasant public relations incident that she'll ever be involved in, at least when it's done, it's done and she won't have to go through it again. In the meantime, just a slight touch of femininity can go a long way. Just something to think about.

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Sportin' A Condom

Ah, the Olympics. And with every Olympics comes the Olympic Village. Here's your basic Olympic Village scenario. The vast majority of the athletes will reside in the Olympic Village during the two weeks that the games are going on. Now remember, these are Olympic athletes, the average age of which is around 27 and the average physique of which is around "Oh, my God." So you take a bunch of 27 year old, hard bodied, good looking athletes and put them all up for a couple of weeks in the same, ungoverned accommodations for a couple of weeks and what do you get? Fornication Nation, that is correct.

Come on, you've heard about how wild the Olympic Village can get. And even though I know it's still pretty rowdy, I also know that it used to be a lot more rowdy in previous years. You know, before they really started testing for performance enhancing drugs and the testosterone was flowing like water through an open spigot. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of testosterone flowing in the Olympic Village. Mix that in with just a little bit of ego and a long time fantasy involving parallel bars and a balance beam (giving a whole new meaning to the term "floor exercise") and you've got yourself a sex fest. As one athlete put it, "It’s not an orgy, but it is socially vigorous." (I'm going to remember that term in the wild hope that I will one day get to use it. Or, at the very least, be socially vigorous Just once. Please?)

And fortunately for our amusement and enjoyment, the Chinese condom manufacturer Elasun has come up with a way to combine the spirit and tradition of Olympic athletes screwing like crazed weasels on crack with advertising ingenuity to bring us Olympic themed condom advertisements, starring none other than the oh-so-versatile condom itself. Behold! The Condomization of the Beijing Olympics!

Olympic Basketball Condom. This gives a whole new meaning to the term "slam dunk".

Olympic Archery Condom. The ol' "bull's eye" will never be the same.

This one confused me at first. I wasn't sure why the horny stick figure was hiding behind a radiator. But it turns out this condom is supposed to represent water, thus, the Olympic Swimming Condom.

Olympic Breast Nipples Condoms. Oh, whoops. Sorry. I meant, Olympic Gymnastics Condoms. (Once I saw the lines coming out of them, I realized they were supposed to be the rings, NOT the nipples. Easy mistake.)

And finally, Olympic Cycling Condom. (It also looks like Olympic stick figure getting ready for all of the Olympic Village Humping.)

The Elasun condoms are made in China (probably out of that same melamine stuff that ended up in our pet food). And in the age old tradition of having Chinese to English translations being less than grammatically correct but more than amusing, Elasun does not disappoint us with their slogan:

Sports make you health!

Well, OK then. Good luck, athletes. Enjoy all your wild, uninhibited, no strings attached sex with other good looking, hard-bodied and horny Olympic athletes in your Coital Kingdom for the next couple of weeks. And please, all of you horny guy athletes over there, please do everyone (especially yourself) a favor a wear a condom. If all of the stories about all of the Olympic Village sex are true, you're really going to want to wear one because by the end of the games, even you won't know where yours has been!

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Too Many Olympic Events

There is apparently a lot more to this whole Olympic event stuff than I realized. Just when I thought I knew what a "sport" constituted, I have to go and read exactly what the sports are at the Olympics this year. And let me tell you, they're not all sounding very Olympic-y. In fact, some are sounding kind of boring-y and others are sounding kind of WTF-y.

First, there are the equestrian events. OK, um, "equestrian" means "with a horse". I don't think that animals should be participating in the Olympics. They're just not for that sort of thing. Unless they're pulling chariots into a stadium full of crazed and screaming Greek spectators right before they bring out a bronze medal finisher and a couple of lions, I don't think animals should be allowed. Besides, who gets the medal? The guy riding the horse! How much sense does that make? It was the horse that jumped or pranced or did whatever it did. The guy just sat there on it's back. And he gets a medal for that? They shouldn't call it the "U.S. Olympic Equestrian Team". No, that should be called the "U.S. Olympic Sitting There Team".

Then we have badminton. When I think of those thin little rackets that look like they're rolled from Reynolds Wrap and that little shuttlecock thing whooshing through the air, I usually don't think of the Olympics. I think of family barbecues in the backyard. (I also think it would have been really cool if, during one of those barbecue badminton "games" that we were actually able to hit the shuttlecock over the net more than once. It never did. The dumb game held our attention for about 5 minutes or until one of us hit the shuttlecock on the roof. It was usually a toss up as to which one would occur first.) Really, the only pleasure that comes from having badminton at the Olympics is that you get to say "shuttlecock". A lot. Shuttlecock. Shuttlecock. See?

Handball is an Olympic sport. I did not know that. I also did not know that it was such an intense sport that there was apparently some match fixing going on involving the Asian federation of handball and the Kuwait federation of handball. Match fixing. In handball. Is nothing sacred? Oh, and from what I can tell, handball is basically soccer without all the feet. Instead of kicking the ball, you're throwing the ball. (Yeah. I'm sure that will make it much better.)

Then there's the pentathlon. Who came up with this? It makes no sense. It's like they just took a bunch of sports, threw them all into a hat, pulled out five and voila! The pentathlon. Never mind that they don't seem to have a lot to do with each other. They're not even in the same sports family. The pentathlon consists of:

• Epee fencing (OK, so sword fighting. No suits of armor, which is really a shame because that would be must see TV right there.)


• Air pistol shooting (To do this, you must have one hand firing the gun and the other hand tucked into your belt or your pocket. Then you shoot at a target approximately 30 feet away. No suits of armor in this part either.)


• Next, after you've used your steel sword against an opponent and fired a gun with one hand in your pants, you're ready for a 200 meter freestyle swim! (You will need to remove your hand front your pants for this.)


• They must have decided that, in order to make sure that nothing in this event makes sense, someone shouted, "Bring on the horses!" After you've toweled off, you're supposed to hop on one of these creatures and make it jump over little fake fences.


• Finally, there's the 3,000 meter run which the Olympics like to call "cross country". Here's the thing, though. If you win this event, you win the overall competition. WTF?! So you could suck at swords and guns and horses and pools, but run like the wind and you've got yourself a gold medal? How is that fair?

I'm not sure who thought that some of these events were a good idea (or even thought that anyone would want to watch them even if they were a good idea). Really, does anyone in this country watch anything other than those little pixie girl gymnasts and the foot races? Oh, and the throwing events. Discus, javelin, shot put. The Olympians love to hurl large heavy objects through the air as far as they can. They've loved it from the beginning from what I can tell. (The only question I have about it is why they like it so much. It's not like you're aiming at someone with your javelin, hoping to impale them for some bonus points. The shot put isn't heated on a bed of coals until it's a glowing red ball of fire that will be hurled almost immediately and with little or no care as to the direction. The only care will be "getting this thing off of my flesh before I start seeing my own bones.")

Two weeks of this stuff. That seems like a long time. Especially when they save the good stuff (ie, the foot races and the pixie gymnasts) until the end. But by the time the good stuff does finally happen, I guess we're more than ready for it. After all, you can only see so many shuttlecocks before you need something new. Trust me.

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The Smartest Soccer Playing Goldfish Ever

I think I can safely say that it's perfectly all right to assume that the UK is officially whacked. Whacked as in looped. As in lost it. As in "What in the hell is going on over there?!" Read this and tell me that I'm wrong.

Over yonder at telegraph.co.uk, is a story about a goldfish that plays soccer. That is correct. A goldfish. The universal disposable pet of childhood. Apparently, this particular goldfish, whose name is Comet (cute), can fetch with a hoop, slalom around a series of poles and push a rugby ball over a set of posts. Huh. Diverse. Comet can also play basketball and football, fetch and even "limbo dance under a bar". OK, um, it's a fish. If by "limbo" you mean "swim", I can buy that. If by "limbo" you mean "limbo" you're out of your freaking mind, Jack. Anyway, Behold! Comet, the soccer playing goldfish.

So who is responsible for this fiasco? Apparently, Comet the goldfish has been trained by a one Dr. Dean Pomerleau a 41-year old man whose specialty under which he sports the "Dr." title is unclear and who lives in Los Angeles. He says that he trained Comet by using a "technique" called "positive reinforcement". He continues by telling us that "This involves rewarding the fish with food when it successfully completes a task." Duh.

Just because Dr. Pomerleau has the moniker "Dr." in front of his name doesn't necessarily mean that the laypeople are going to be impressed with words like "positive reinforcement". You want to impress us with big words? Try something that we have no idea what in the hell it means. We can pretty much surmise "positive reinforcement". But try throwing something like "oligotrophic gyres" at us and watch our eyes glaze over in awe and wonder. But back to the fish.

Dr. Pomerleau says that anyone can do this with their own disposable pet. With just a little bit of time and the right amount of food to dole out for the "positive reinforcement", the fish can very quickly learn the complex tricks. I'm beginning to wonder if that's how the "Dr." got to where he is today.

But who am I to talk? I had fish sticks for dinner and this guy has a fish that plays underwater soccer while doing a limbo. Or something like that. Whatever it is, Dr. Pomerleau already has an official world record for having the fish who knows the most tricks. That underwater genius would be Albert Einstein, a three year-old calico fantail fish. But Al better not be getting too comfortable over there in the World's Smartest Fish Throne. That's because Comet already knows all of Al's tricks! Soon Comet could be the World's Smartest Fish. But until then, Behold! Albert Einstein, the World's Smartest Fish!

It doesn't really seem fair to Al that Comet gets to take over. I mean, if Dr. Pomerleau kept teaching Al, Al would continue to reign. Though I don't know what the average lifespan of a goldfish is (or a calico fantail for that matter), I would imagine it's pretty short (those things last about a day after you get them home from the pet store in that Ziploc bag). So perhaps preparing the next fish to hold the title is a good idea, Doc.

I'm off to teach my Sea Monkeys to line dance.

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