Sports of Sorts

Honestly, how many Americans seriously care about the quadrennial Summer Olympics? About as many as who are passionate about the World Cup of football (soccer to us Yanks). We care about American football, basketball, baseball (see below) even NASCAR over the Olympics. Quick, name some gold medal winners from the 2004 Athens games. But NBC has paid $900 million for the rights to the upcoming Beijing games and has signed up a bunch of increasingly nervous sponsors to bring us many hours of taped results (available real time on the Internet and elsewhere). The sponsors are nervous because once again politics has raised its ugly head (remember Moscow 1980?) pushing drug tests into the background. Caused by protests of China's abysmal human rights record (Tibet, Darfur) but curiously not their penchant for exporting defective and poisoned goods, the torch relay has been interrupted in San Francisco as well as London and Paris. This relay originated not with the ancient Greeks but as part of the infamous 1936 Berlin games. Worse yet, British PM Gordon Brown won't attend the opening ceremonies. Probably President Bush will attend recognizing who exactly owns our country.

Baseball is back and a certain team is attempting to celebrate the centennial of William Howard Taft's election as president by winning the World Series (even getting into it would be the first time since Harry Truman's initial year). All this excitement, coupled with 15 major league games played almost daily provides enormous material for that weird form of verbal blogger known as the caller to sports talk radio. If that's possible, most of these men (there are few females) are less informed and more opinionated than us "real" bloggers. Of course, the callers don't run the same risk as some of the professional bloggers, that is actually keeling over from the stress of coming up with daily or hourly blogs. Unfortunately, even a few deaths have been reported. Don't worry-- the Normal Blogger is certainly not stressed out, and certainly won't be until five or ten thousand people are totally dependent on this blog for unusually perceptive information.