Did The Athenians Have Streaming Video?

I pretty much don't know of anything else that exists on television at the moment, and I've spent more time in front of a television than I have in years.

So, here's some thoughts a week into the Summer Olympics:

* Women's ping pong looks quite surreal at 3 a.m. on CNBC.

* I find myself uncharacteristically consumed with nationalism. I want American domination, no matter how compelling the story is for an athlete of another country. I feel like a cliche, and I often root for underdogs, but America's been a bit down on its luck lately, and I love what this country is meant to represent.

* I just can't get over how people wait four years for one moment. If an athlete fails, he's going to be four years older when tries to do it again.

* I don't prefer sports that rest on the whims of judges.

* I never knew how compelling swimming medley relays can be. Four guys each do a different stroke, which is a true testament to art in athletics. It's almost like a classic anthem rock group shredding guitar, bass and drum solos.

* The hero of this summer's Olympics is Jason Lezak. He sprinted faster than anyone in history to overcome a deficit over the last few seconds to beat that French guy in the first relay who was talking all that shit about "smashing the Americans." And tonight he held off the Australians to give Michael Phelps that last gold. He's the ultimate wingman.

* Gymnastics is all about waiting for somebody to screw up.

* Running is so iconic. No other Olympic sport evokes such epic historical moments (Jesse Owens in Berlin; Black Power in Mexico, Carl Lewis everywhere, etc.).

* The Romanian who won the "women's jogging" competition (as my son likes to call the marathon) must have felt like she conquered the world when she entered the stadium.

* I want the basketball team to embarrass anyone who dares stand in their way, unlike 2004 when I suffered from a contrarian satisfaction that we had to settle for the bronze.

* It's pretty easy to remember that everything is exactly 12 hours ahead -- at least on the East Coast.

* So it's kind of emblematic of the repeated misjudgments of the McCain campaign when it ran a negative political ad immediately after that inspiring Lezak comeback.

* And I don't understand making a negative ad that shows a picture of Obama looking especially positive and youthful instead of an embarrasing, scowling, mouth-wide-open video still.

* I don't quite understand "connection points" and "start values" ... and I question a sport in which a camera pans into a computer screen for drama ... but if we've got a dog in the gymnastics fight, I'm with it.

* Rowing ... I just can't stick with it.

* This thing about the Olympics being in China is a monument to dysfunction. Polluted air and 8-year-old gymnasts who look petrified and Tiannamen Square and a gluttonous opening ceremony that typifies an oppresive narcissism ...

* ... and I'm not buying the creepy "bird's nest"stadium architecture as a representation of organic Chinese culture.

* I thought it was cool when one of our gymnasts looked into the camera and said, "What's up, America?" as he sat down after spinning on a bar with one hand.

* The American girl gymnasts played it a lot smoother and looked a lot tougher than the guys.

* Americans generally look happy.

* I like that our volleyball players don't bitch at their teammates at every mistake like those Europeans.

* The president was right to attend the games.

* I didn't realize that Michael Phelps was double-jointed in his knees and ankles and has 14-sized flippers for feet and has a long torso with short legs and a massive wingspan that makes his body a prototype for swimming.

* It makes me wonder how many other people are built like that and don't realize they could be good swimmers.

* If I were a woman, would I think Michael Phelps is hot?

* That Jamaican runner shouldn't have slowed down.

* Sunglasses at night are cool in sprinting.

* The Olympics are a refreshing respite from professional sports. The pros aren't nearly as compelling to me in light of the Olympics and the lower-profile athletes who have one chance to make an indelible mark on American history.

* Good to see Kobe say that being proud to win for your country isn't an outdated notion. And I like how LeBron recognizes the Olympics as the "biggest stage of my life."

* Dara Torres earning the title of the world's second-fastest swimmer at the age of 41 after five Olympics (and two that she sat out in between) is reassuring.

* When does Jeremy Wariner run?

'Yes, We Shall'

By Hugh Munn
The Georgetown (S.C.) Tattler
Capital Bureau

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Sen. Barack Obama on Friday launched a surprising new round of political ads designed to present the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as the actual coming of the Antichrist -- a push that campaign advisers say could cultivate a new "apocalyptic voting bloc."

"There is a new hope for America, for the world, and I am He," Obama says in an ad showing him speaking before a hungry mass 150,000-strong gathered along the shores of the Gulf Coast in Corpus Christi, Texas. "Verily I tell ye: 'Yes, we shall.'"

The ads, airing in several states in the Southeast and Midwest, superimpose Obama's likeness in holy locales such as Mt. Sinai, Egypt, along with messianic-themed soundbites meant to impart the impression of pseudo-divinity.

The new angle, campaign insiders say, seeks to win over so-called evangelical Christians -- particularly those labeled as habitual email forwarders -- who have felt alienated by a Republican nominee who doesn't represent their values on pressing issues like gay marriage and the salacious content of reality television programming.

The ads each aim to raise a central question: Why would those who relish the idea of an imminent rapture try to thwart the election of a figure they believe will signal the coming of the return of Christ -- an event they have so long awaited?

Since Obama vanquished Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, a loosely organized but prevalent contingent of conservative opponents have used the internet to undermine the Illinois senator.

The group has employed the use of forwarded emails and obscure, hastily created blogs to offer the theory of Obama as the coming of a messianic figure who will lure the masses into false idolatry and signal the coming of the Apocalypse.

Popular derivations of the apocalyptic theory presuppose that the Antichrist will be "a persuasive man in his 40s, of Muslim descent, who will deceive nations with a Christ-like appeal" -- a view disputed by a substantial sum of theological scholars.

While the proposed "apocalyptic voting bloc" as the Obama envisions it has yet to be created and cultivated, Obama advisors say the candidate has an opportunity to peel off a piece of the traditional Republican base.

"It's no secret that John McCain's standing among the 'evangelical base' is, shall we say, like the seed that was sown in rocky soil," senior Obama campaign advisor James Robertson said. "We believe we can appeal to the notion of 'change you'd be a hypocrite not to believe in.'"

The McCain campaign offered a swift response on Friday.

"We believe that people of faith believe in us, and we believe that belief is a cornerstone of the American dream," McCain campaign strategist Harvey Monde said. "And we believe that believers will reject the cynical notion that they aren't willing to cast off this mortal coil as their faith calls for them to believe in."

The ad campaign has drawn skepticism from political analysts who say the Obama camp has overestimated its powers of persuasion.

"This is the biggest gaffe of Obama's march to the White House since he refused to wear a flag lapel pin," says Muhman Abid, department chair of political studies at Tulane University. "Who's to say that this supposed voting bloc actually wants the world to end like they say they do?"

Still, one political expert says that given McCain's lackluster campaign strategy thus far, Obama has plenty of leeway "to throw some stuff up and see what sticks."

"Why not?" says Bill Spanasian, a lobbyist for the political action group Cynics For A Cynical Tomorrow. "You know, change we all can be duped to believe in that will mean the end of the world. Awesome."

Remnants

It starts with an anxious scurry of doing.

Front flips marking the first plunge of the summer into a night-lit pool.

Then, days pass ...

Heavy legs and a subdued, fulfilling melancholy.

An inevitable sense of loss .

Strangers are friends.

Remembered, years later, for the part they played in a finite suspension of all that's wrong with life.

It's better that you never asked their name.

Demotivational Speakers On The Rise Nationwide

'Accelerated voluntary attrition' the best way to make the most of companies' hiring freezes, analysts say

By B.L. O'Harde
Democratic American Motivator Magazine

They can only admit it privately behind closed doors, but the message is clear: Corporate executives across the land would rather their employees just quit.

The economy is spiraling. Shareholders are angry. Horseshoe-haired heads are on the chopping block.

Enter: the demotivational speaker.

With hiring freezes reaching sub-zero temperatures, companies are learning that crushing, corporate-wide employee cynicism is a weapon to be wielded, not a phenomenon to be feared, says Dr. Dan Douner, head of the National Demotivational Alliance, a consulting firm that is considered a pioneer in the field of demotivational speaking.

Key to the alliance's strategy is an initiative known behind closed doors as "AVC."

"We're incredibly honored to help companies downsize through what we call Accelerated Voluntary Attrition," Douner said. "Most executives these days are Baby Boomers who see outright firing or laying off employees as hypocritical to the worldview they held 30 years ago."

The program rests on the notion that employees effectively stripped of motivation will be encouraged to surrender their jobs, allowing salaries to be absorbed, Douner explains.

The process, however, requires a deliberate, concerted effort to target the most-appropriate employees to encourage to quit, he says.

The core of the program rests on training seminars designed to identify those best to keep and those who "would be best served to realize that we appreciate their past service but that we no longer have a place for their favorable performance and, more importantly, their competitive salaries," Douner says.

Among the seminars:

-- "Ask not what you can do for your company. Ask what the company likely believes you should avoid doing."

-- "The change will be painful, but we'll succeed as a team -- even if we fail."

-- "How not to blame the person who screwed it all up and still come out on top."

The cumulative effect of the seminars -- designed with intense sessions constructed to push the normal psyche into a state of survival mode -- provides insight necessary to identifying and classifying current employees, said Fuller Bolschitt, a leading demotivational trainer.

On one hand, Bolschitt said, a number of employees quit because they see the training seminars as metaphors for how the workplace has become a toxic environment.

These people -- labeled "unfortunate relics of constructive institutional insubordination"-- are immediately targeted as the main focus of the demotivational purging effort.

Meanwhile, the training helps retain those employees who have been identified as having superior passive-aggressive skills -- skills that will serve to further foment resentment in the workplace and alleviate pressure on actual decision-makers, Bolschitt says.

"Those employees are the lynch pin of an organization," he says. "Corporations keep them demotivated on the promise that their skills will lead them to the ranks of middle management, where petty power struggles will invariably force more people to quit and reverse-motivate themselves to protect their jobs."

And along the way, Bolschitt said, they will periodically force one another to quit, leaving vacant a frozen middle management position in addition to the lower-level job they had vacated that also is now frozen.

"In the short term, we have to increase management positions, which helps us give the impression that the tenets of our demotivational campaign are virtue" he said. "After a while, however, they end up hating one another and not the company and fail to notice the subsequent cuts in their management field."

That, he said, helps the company maintain the image that only the most-talented are allowed to continue working, giving them the foundation to rationalize carrying more workload and in turn keeping the company's most-basic functions operating.

"In all of this," Douner says, "we have to remember that everybody wins -- except those who lose."

To schedule a seminar, Douner suggests visiting the alliance's website or calling 1-800-INVECT.

I Really Need To Unplug That TV Outside

Shouldn't the show's title be ... "Are You At Least As Smart As A 5th Grader?"

Because nobody's won the million yet, and even if they had, who's to say the kids couldn't answer questions above their grade level?

Or maybe we can only know if a contestant is smarter than a 5th grader if one or more of the 5th graders fails to answer the right question.

And how many questions would the kids have to get wrong -- and how many would have to get the questions wrong -- for the contestant to quantifiably be smarter than a 5th grader?

It seems like the show's rigged so that the kids' feelings never get hurt.

Even if they get it wrong, they can take solace that you wouldn't do any better. And they wouldn't recognize otherwise if you were.

Unless you win the million.

Let's see how a "Jeopardy" champ would do.

Or maybe the champ would freeze given the chance to lose more than $100,000 if he's wrong about whether the sun is 10,000 or 1 million degrees.

Which I was.