I'm not spending a whole lot of time watching the Olympics (I'm still cursing myself for turning off the TV before I saw Paul Hamm make his comeback, but I had a 6:30 flight the next morning), but I am reading Dave Barry's Olympics columns. And they are good.
On the taxi drivers of Greece:
It's not just that the taxi drivers are aggressive. It's also the Greek Motor Vehicle Code, which, as far as I can tell, consists of a single law: No Stopping. The motorists here do not stop for anything, including other vehicles, stop signs, red lights, pedestrians, buildings and the Acropolis. If you're driving here, and you see something in your path, your sole responsibility, as a Greek motorist, is to honk your horn at it. After that, whatever happens is not your fault; if the Acropolis, having been duly warned, fails to move, that is tough tipiyokti for the Acropolis...
Once you're in the taxi, the real excitement begins. The driver, in addition to honking, is usually very busy talking on the radio and the cell phone, smoking, writing things down, yelling and gesturing at other motorists. I was in one taxi where the driver got off an expressway at the wrong exit, so he reversed and drove the taxi, at perhaps 40 mph, down the ramp backward onto the expressway. Seeing my facial expression (EEEEEEEEEEEEEE), he gave me a big smile, as if to say: "Can you even BELIEVE we are doing this?''
The weightlifting competition I saw was the women's 63 kg class. I'm not sure whether this means the actual women weighed 63 kg or the weights they lifted weighed 63 kg. Or possibly the temperature in the weightlifting hall was 63 kg. There's no way to know for sure without finding out what a ''kg'' is, and my belief, as an American, is that if I have to start understanding the metric system, then the terrorists have won.
But before you get too cynical about the Olympics, let me stress that not all the athletes are taking performance-enhancing drugs. Some of them appear to be taking performance-reducing drugs. I refer here to the U.S. All-Star Billionaire Men's Basketball Team...
In this Olympics, our men hoopsters have been playing like -- to use the Greek word for it -- tipiyokti. First, they lost to Puerto Rico, which is ridiculous, because Puerto Rico is basically the 51st state. It's like losing to New Jersey. But then the U.S. men lost to Lithuania. Lithuania! I mean, I'm sure it's a fine country and everything, but it has, what, 50 residents?
I bet the Lithuanian gross national product is less than what the U.S. men's basketball team spends per week on sneakers. This is embarrassing, people! We're America! The most powerful nation on Earth! The entire world hates us anyway! We should at least be able to derive some athletic benefit from this, in the form of stomping the juice out of Lithuania.
Listen: If we let Lithuania beat us in basketball, it's only a matter of time before France does. And if that happens, we basically have no choice but to use nuclear missiles.
Posted by kswygert at August 24, 2004 04:58 PM