Denver did it right in 1972.
!!! Update – 2 Oct 2009: Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting! Yaaayyy!!! Dodged the bullet !!!
Flashback … in this case, w-a-a-a-a-a-y back … to 532 AD in the ancient city of Constantinople. According to Wikipedia:
“The Nika riots … took place over the course of a week in Constantinople in 532. It was the most violent riot that Constantinople had ever seen to that point, with nearly half the city being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.”
The people of Constantinople themselves did what the barbarian hordes could not do – destroy the city. And for what, you might ask? Well … there were these four major sports fan groups: The Blues, the Reds, the Greens, and the Whites. It was a sports riot. The major sport at that time was chariot racing. I’m not making any of this up.
This kind of thing forms the basis of my opinions about organized sport. As a force for evil, it ranks up there with slave trading and wars of conquest. People who pay money to paint their bodies and sit for hours in freezing arenas to watch genetic abberations play with rubber balls seem to me to be a special kind of crackpot.
And yet, our president plans to travel to Denmark to prostrate himself and our nation before the new Bourbon princes of sport, the International Olympic Committee, and beg for the chance to spend national treasure that we don’t have and paralyze one of the greatest cities in our nation for months in a public worship of the children’s taunt, “I can do anything you can do better.”
And some people say space exploration is a waste of money!
In 1972, Colorado became the only state to do the unthinkable: turn down the Olympics. There is a movement in Illinois to do the same thing. I wish them well.
Maybe OBama is going over there to learn how to talk with nut cases like those that foster the Olympics. Maybe he can learn how to make sence out of the farces I heard when Mr. Iran and Mr Afghanistan were interviewed . Your right I can’t spell their names. I have enough trouble just listening to them. Lena
Are comments to this page moderated for flaming or offensive content? Maybe you can draw some of the nutcase responses from the local news websites to generate comment wars.
But in regards to the Olympics – for those true sports fans, I’d suggest a permanent home for the summer olympics (why not Greece where they started, or England where they were resurrected) and for the winter olympics (why not Switerland – purported to be the most politically neutral). Then the games could focus on the sporting event instead of how a select group of businessmen can make a killing, while only the well-heeled can afford to travel the world to watch. And you could spend money once to build world-class facilities – not every 4 years.
Actually, yes. Comments are moderated. On two levels. First, they’re screened by a program to filter out obvious spam. (I always check it before I do a final delete on it just to make sure I’m not deleting a genuine comment.) And in addition, I’m notified whenever a message is posted and I check each and every message.
I’m not interested in generating comment wars unless those comments have some valid content. If comments are patently offensive, I’ll delete them and send a private email back to the source. But, as you can tell from what I write, extreme opinion and “patently offensive” are different things to me. So I would lean on the side of leaving comments alone.
I like your suggestion. The thing I like most about it is that those locations are thousands of miles away from here.