MY UPDATE NOW THEY ARE OVER: IT ALL HAPPENED. NBC COVERED IT UP. AND RIO IS BANKRUPT. THE VENUES WERE EMPTY. AND THE COVERAGE SUCKED. SEE MY BLOG ON FIRING NBC.
According to legend, in 490 BC the runner/herald Pheidippides ran 26.2 miles from the city of Marathon to Athens, to announce that the Greeks has defeated the hated Persians and kicked their Iranian butts out of Greece for a few hundred years. His achievement inspired a phenomenon whereby otherwise level headed citizens turn themselves into future knee replacement victims by running 26 mile road races for no other apparent reason to than to prove they are too hardheaded to take up a more relaxing sport like golf.
Another curious phenomenon was the original Olympic games were played in the buff, making them way more popular with the ladies back then. After the gents put their loin clothes back on, women stopped showing up until the invention of women’s ice skating and the men’s swimming competition, where they get a pretty good idea of the endowment of the athletes if you get my drift.
So far I have spent two paragraphs on pure digression, managing so far to avoice addressing the subject. This is due to the martini I have consumed before dinner (2 measures Tito’s, twist of lemon. Perfection in a glass). If you just try one of these martinis, you will have derived huge value from having read this blog, forget my upcoming mock fest regarding the Rio Olympics.
So the Olympics in Rio are going to be a huge crazy, Fukashima level disaster. Really, nothing is going right down in Brazil, where the Two Stooges (they couldn’t even get Moe. Curly,or Larry, just Joe and Shemp) are in charge of the show and Mother Nature has decided to add her hemlock to the poisonous stew they have on the stove.
To start with, Brazil is a third world country. Its third worldliness is in fact a record low for the Bribe-meisters that run the International Olympic Committee. China is even poorer and more destitute than Brazil, but with over a billion citizens and the benefit of a violent communist dictatorship they could afford to build fantastic venues without delays or environmental impact studies . Plus the Chinese know how to build stuff. It is not clear that the Brazilians do.
Thus far the Brazilians have already set a new Olympic record (har!) for mishaps, disasters, government waste, human waste, environmental fiascos, health hazards, malfeasance, and ineptitude which are truly Olympian in scope and scale. If I could list them all, you would lose interest and go back to the Bachelorette, or The Big Bang Theory reruns (there is apparently an inexhaustible demand for these despite the annoying presence of Jim Parsons in the cast. So I will only mention the highlights, which I believe will dissuade any of those hardy readers planning on a trip down to see the games from going.But hey, if you want to risk permanent disease or armed robbery, by all means check it out.
Number one on the hit parade is the human excrement and garbage that makes the waters of Guanabara Bay in Rio a veritable cesspool, (see photos, above.) Into these malodorous waters will be cast the unfortunate sailors, rowers, swimmers (!) kayakers, and other unfortunate waterborne participants in the hallowed summer games. According to reports these athletes will accept a 99% risk of viral infection in return for the opportunity to attain a lifetime of glory after winning an Olympic medal. The IOC members who doubtlessly accepted seven figure bribes to place the Olympics in this third world, disease causing, Zika carrying swamp will be sitting in a five star hotel drinking Dom while the poor athletes are gagging down human crap at the beach. It is great to be a fat cat, right? One can only hope that Karma and Dante’s Inferno exist, and the IOC Potentates who accepted an open sewer like Rio as a venue are cast into the 9th level. See the relevant quote, below:
“in certain venues, Olympic athletes are almost certain to come into contact with disease-causing viruses that in some tests measured up to 1.7 million times (!) the level of what would be considered hazardous on a Southern California beach.” In December, a second round of tests showed that the Olympic waterways teem with viruses and bacteria even far from land.”
Now, they could have assigned the games to Chicago, but on second thought they have 70 shootings per week there, (over 60 just in during the three day 4th of July weekend), so it may actually be safer to swim Rio. London or Barcelona, anyone?
Back to the unfortunate Rio Follies, where we will see how screwed up the Games there are going to be.
Mother Nature has intervened to infect South America, and eventually everywhere, with the Zika virus. The hapless organizers of the games couldn’t have predicted an outbreak of a deadly virus, of course. But what are the chances of a disease outbreak in a hot, humid, South American country at any given time? 50-50 is a realistic forecast. (See stories on Ebola, Malaria, Dengue Fever, etc.) So athletes who are chasing fame and fortune can die of fecal virus infection, suffer years of intestinal disease, or they could find they can’t have children due to their Zika virus. No wonder all the pro athletes are giving it a miss. They ALREADY have fame and money, who needs an Olympic medal? They have families and Nike contracts to worry about.
Then there is the huge government spending and attendant waste. When you put the two words “Government” and “Spending” together, you know immediately that the graft and waste will amount to at least half the bill. And that the actual cost will be twice the original estimate, meaning that government graft and waste will amount to 100% of the original budget!! These principles and math apply everywhere in the world, of course. We Americans can take smug pride in the fact that we are much better at this sort of thing, since our government officials have access to much better offshore bank accounts. (Note how few US government officials got caught up in the Panama offshore banking scandals. Our politicians use the Mafia and accounts in Lichtenstein to launder their bribes, so they did not get caught.)
In Rio they are apparently on course to overspend the budget of $3.6 billion by 30%, (update as of 7/18/16, now 50%) or $1.8 billion extra. Belts are being tightened, according to the alert journalists at the BBC. The Brazilians are going to offset the $1.2 billion dollars of projected overspend by making the promotional videos in house, among other paltry and ineffectual efforts. A good guess is that the overspend will be $3.6 billion when it is all said and done. Not chump change in a country with a per capita income of $15K. I bet they would like to have that money back so they could reinvest it in writing off bad student debt, like we do in the US.
For a truly hilarious look at the level of completion of the venues and buildings that are intended to be used for the Olympics, click on the link below. Basically the only thing they have managed to complete is the venue for team handball, surely the most obscure and unimportant sport that you could watch there. If this isn’t an apt metaphor for a world class cluster, what is?
I hear by the way that the IOC is contemplating the addition of Rio specific sporting events, such as turd dodging, stickup artist target shooting, mosquito swatting, total number of sexual partners, most creative sexual positions, and most communal sex acts (must include at least one other person to qualify.) More on these events, below.
If you are not already laughing uproariously at the Brazilians’ capacity for corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, (or are perhaps more appropriately, feeling horrified and despondent) you can read the whole of the article attached. The Brazilians decided to build a new subway line to facilitate transportation during the Olympics. A minor planning glitch is that the subway is going to the highest income suburb in Rio, so after the games no one will ride it. The impoverished citizens hoping for an upgrade to the current, decrepit system get bupkiss. Meanwhile, the original cost estimate of $1.6 billion is now $2.9 billion, (see earlier allusion to the ironclad rule of government project cost estimates, at 50% of actual cost). So the Olympics will piss away $3.2 billion just on a useless subway line. By the way, just for your consideration. IT PROBABLY WON’T BE READY FOR THE OLYMPICS!!! AIN’T THAT GREAT! Oh, and there is a bribery scandal. What are the odds?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/international/ct-rio-subway-line-olympics-20160620-story.html
The cost overruns by the previously mentioned Stooges running the Olympics have bankrupted the State of Rio de Janeiro, so they have had to be bailed out by the national government. But all those Olympic visitors will surely bring in the money!! Oh, only 40% of the tickets have been sold. Can you short the State of Rio?
As if these calamities were not enough, there are even more problems facing the Olympics. Human body parts are washing up on shore in Rio, (maybe these will come in “handy” at the team handball venue?) Olympic athletes are being robbed at gunpoint. (Where are the Modern Pentathlon participants when you need them?) Since the state has been bankrupted, the police have no bullets or toilet paper, so they are smelly, irritated, and powerless to deter armed robbers. According to the reporters at the San Diego Times Union, the State of Rio is facing a complete collapse of public safety and public services. Corruption is being blamed. How about being stupid enough to host the Olympics? Note that the profligate hacks who run the City of Boston Mass. were not dumb enough to fund the Olympics. They have already spent all their money on leaky and fatal tunnels. And the citizenry knew that whatever cost estimates that the crooks that run the place came up with would be 50% off. Some of them went to Harvard, you know.
I tried to understand why so many of the athletes are still so anxious to go to Rio. Many face death and or ominous health hazards. The answer dawned on me when I read that the Olympic Committed has bought 450,000 condoms to hand out to the athletes. Apart from wondering why these pampered elite athletes can’t buy their own contraceptives, I realized that the expectation is that the 15,000 athletes are expected to do the horizontal bop 30 times during the course of the 15 day event. Actually, make that 60 times, since only the males will be wearing them. That is an astounding 4 times they will be having sex DAILY. Given that prospect, is it all that surprising that almost everyone is still coming (har!). This has got to be the biggest extended orgy since Caligula reigned in ancient Rome. I checked, Bill Clinton is expected to be there. I have no firm reports that he will be in line for a free condom distribution, but he apparently screwed 2,000 women before his stint in the White House, so giving Bill a few dozen freebies seems like an advisable precaution. Maybe he can get the condom allotment for the handball players, whose lack of income opportunity and low media profile likely means they will be playing TWO kinds of hand-ball (har!)
There you have it, thousands of people risking disease, death, crime, and disappointment in the hopes of achieving fame, glory, and scoring a whole lot of athletic ass. Although I have been fairly critical of the Brazilian Olympic bosses, I am hopeful that most of the events will have stadiums, as I would hate to miss any of the awesome summer games. Throughout history, the athletes have had to put up with way more hassle and bullshit than was necessary, due to the malfeasance and incompetence of the people in charge of staging the games. So let’s hope for the best, and remember that while they bounced baseball and softball they did add beach volleyball and snow boarding, (although a winter game still a pretty awesome decision) which are something else. So thanks to the IOC for getting a few things right.
Hopefully the next Olympics, which will be in Tokyo, will somehow transcend this kind of fiasco. Don’t count on it, Yujin (Japanese for ‘Bub”). I expect the poor slobs in Japan to be equally fleeced by their corrupt government, (but I repeat myself). Tokyo managed to beat out Istanbul. Too bad, they could have added terrorist bullet dodging and bomb disarmament to the official sports. Plus the women would have had to wear Burkas, so there would be less need for condoms. Maybe they could have broken even? Nah. Check out the picture at the top, it’s a picture from the swimming venue in Istanbul. This is a ‘Burkini”. As satire I think it speaks for itself.
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