Things have happened in the past five months. This is for them.

So once (okay, twice) upon a time, I had a blog then I got kind of busy or lazy and forgot to update it. Well guess what kids, we're going for the trifecta because THE BLOG IS BACK! AGAIN!

CURRENT SNACK: POPCORN WITH CAJUN SEASONING
CURRENT MUSIC: BEN FOLDS FIVE - WHERE'S SUMMER B. (THE B. STANDS FOR BLOG)

I don't really know where to begin, so I'll just pick my new apartment to start with. I am living alone now and aside from the fact that my cable jacks don't work and I have been missing a drawer for the past 2 months, it seems pretty cool. You can cook a steak at midnight or take a shower with the door open or basically do whatever! It's a chance to have fun and hang out without friends! My place is full of furniture that isn't collapsing and I have pictures on the wall in frames so it kinda looks like an actual civilized person lives there.

This charming fellow lives in my dining room.

The downside to all this is that it means I live in Chapel Hill now. And the fact of the matter is that Chapel Hill will never be as good as Raleigh. Maybe it has more trees but it also has more hippie assholes on bikes and I have to drive much farther to get to the store. Plus everything is that nauseating shade of blue and yeah ok I'm whining a little bit here but come on.

In case you don't know what I'm doing here, which I assume you do or you wouldn't be reading this blog, I've got the whole law school thing starting in exactly one week. Aaaand hopefully in three years this will allow me to collect a substantial amount of dollars. And then maybe in a couple decades I can be a senator or something. I can't wait to see this blog show up in an attack ad someday.

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Well anyway I guess that probably wasn't very exciting for you, huh? Kind of a bad way to bring back the blog. Maybe something topical would be better? How about the Olympics!

I guess you probably know they faked the fireworks in the opening ceremony and had a little girl lip-sync some song because the one who actually sang it wasn't cute enough, and that this decision was made "in the national interest." I think this has kind of made the world raise an eyebrow at China and the seriously messed up way in which they do things. I also enjoyed Bela Karolyi complaining about the Chinese women's gymnastics team being underage and making Bob Costas really uncomfortable. But the thing you don't really get to hear about on the NBC coverage is the way the Chinese train their little athletic child robots in 3,000 "athletics academies" that take 400,000 kids and train them to win gold medals, at which point I assume they are then disposed of (the kids, not the medals). Time Magazine details the programs for a few sports:

"At the Luneng Table-Tennis School in Shandong province, 230 boarding students crowd a gymnasium set up with 80 Ping-Pong tables. In the morning, children train for about four hours. A few hours of academic classes are held in the afternoon, more than at many other sports schools. Three times a week, students hone their table-tennis skills also in the evening. Many kids see their parents for only a couple of weeks each year."

"At most other Chinese sports schools, suffering is considered integral to the athletic experience. At the Weifang City Sports School, where little Cloud is being trained to be a weight lifter, most of the kids are so chronically exhausted that during their afternoon break, they collapse in eight-to-a-room iron bunks to sleep. The Weifang academy is a collection of moldy concrete buildings, with only red socialist banners to break the monotone grays."

The propaganda director assures us that the kids practice for only a couple of hours a day. But students I speak to without a minder present say they train for at least five hours. None of the dorm rooms I visit have any textbooks--strange for a school that the propaganda director tells me is "mostly for academics, with sports training just as a spare-time activity." Wang Ting, a 15-year-old runner, looks at me blankly when I ask what she does during her time off. "I run, and I sleep," she replies. "That's my day."

Also this:

One by one, the little girls walk to the wooden blocks and extend their legs into the splits, one callused foot balancing on each block, their straining bodies hovering just above the ground. Coach Yang Yaojun, his sweatpants hiked high over his belly, ambles over to the girls, smiles and hands the nearest one a stopwatch. The girls, who are six and seven years old, do not smile back. Teetering on the blocks, they wait as Yang straddles each leg in turn, resting his 70-kg frame on their outstretched limbs. No matter how tough the girls are, no matter how much resolve they have mustered, the tears come within seconds. They do not cry out, though. They just well up soundlessly and stare at the seconds ticking down on the stopwatch. After half a minute, Yang stands up and lifts the girls off the blocks. They stagger with the first step, their oversized thigh muscles visibly twitching. By the second or third step, the tremors and the tears are gone. When a child does this six days a week all year long, save a short holiday at Lunar New Year, there are only so many tears she can shed.This assembly line of pain at the Weilun Sports School in China's southern Guangdong province asks an extraordinary amount from its 1,000 full-time students. Here, in the cavernous gymnastics classroom, the girls are drilled again and again as if they were in competition, with judges monitoring their frozen smiles. They must not show weakness, no matter how grueling the exercise. "Big smile, little friend," yells Yang as the girls go through 50 reps of leg kicks with weights tied to their calves. Yang's wife, also a coach, observes: "Maybe to foreigners, this looks cruel. But it's because we start kids very young and train them hard that we have become so successful in gymnastics." Says her husband, who has been coaching since 1983: "The Chinese race knows how to endure hardship. Our job is to push these kids to their limits, so they can perform gloriously for our nation." Behind him on the wall, below oversized Olympic and Chinese flags, giant red lettering summarizes the motto of the Weilun school, proud breeding ground of eight athletes at this month's Athens Olympics: "Patriotism, Unity, Struggle and Devotion."

So yeah it's pretty disturbing but at least some people are winning things the old-fashioned way! Granted the gymnasts from every country probably have some pretty grueling training, but at least when the American gymnasts are done competing they can go to college and have some kind of opportunity in their later years instead of dying from a snakebite in a rice field!

I honestly haven't been watching the Olympics too much, but it sounds like the Americans have mostly been doing pretty well themselves, thanks mostly to Michael Phelps and the basketball team. It's a good thing swimming gives out medals like Cracker Jack prizes. I felt a little bad for the women's gymnastics team, particularly Alicia Sacramone, who has a thick neck and the natural disadvantage of being the only gymnast I've ever seen with some big ol' boobs.

It's ok Alicia we still love you :)

Also did you know Kerri Strug actually got pretty dang hot since she stole America's heart by doing a vault with a sprained ankle or something and having a really ugly haircut?

Ooh damn girl dat's a sexy Cosby sweater you got there

Also just to make you feel better about not being an Olympic athlete yourself, here's a reminder of what can happen when you try to actually do things:

"My arm has a lil scrotum on it now!"

NOT SO TOUGH NOW ARE YOU, TOUGH GUY? I could beat him in arm wrestling now and I haven't trained a day in my life!

Also I'm not exactly sure what's going on with this but the Spanish basketball team might ruffle a few feathers with this one:

They ain't Chinese but they do play joke

At this rate, we'll probably end up with WWIII before these Olympics are over. Let's just wait for football season to start for real and maybe we can put all this hostility behind us and go back to ignoring the rest of the world.

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Ok that is enough blogging for tonight. Gotta ease back into it, you know? Maybe in a few years they will have Olympic Blogging. As soon as they do, I am starting on that Michael Phelps 9000-calorie-a-day diet.

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