The Summer Olympics

I love watching the Olympics, summer and winter. I absolutely cannot stand the commentators, those whining, anal-retentive voices telling me how this athlete, after a super-human performance of some extraordinary event, should lose 0.125 points for having one eye closed during the dismount. Or whatever. My long-suffering wife usually hears me say two things during the evening: "Wow, how did she do that?" and (to the commentators) "Oh, SHUT UP."

I just watched an American woman miss a bronze medal in a swimming event, the 200-meter butterfly, by 0.14 of a second. That's a hair less than one-seventh of a second. Can you clap your hands seven times in a second? One of those claps would be the difference between third and fourth place after churning through 200 meters of water. And that leads me to one of my pet peeves about the Olympics, the idiotic notion that there's something wrong with a silver or bronze medal. Yeah, everybody goes for the gold, or you'd not have the motivation to be there. But, hey, in a field of world-class athletes, any medal that says "Olympics" on it is a valuable thing to bring home. I don't have an Olympics medal of any color. Neither do most of the sports columnists in American newspapers, who generate more manure than an equal number of Clydesdales.

NBC just flashed an invitation to download Paul Hamm's favorite songs. Great idea. They should also let you download whatever it is that Micheal Phelps listens to. Better yet, they should play music as an alternative sound track on TV. Let me watch the athletes performing while listening to their favorite music. Let me hear the commentators only when they are saying goodbye.