With midweek rest from doing the show, the wife and I have been, as many of you have been, suffering through the Olympics. While I have many non-NBC programming options, their coverage remains so consistently wretched and appalling that really, it's hard to turn away for me.

The other night, the tiny little whores (if you're just joining us, that would be the female gymnasts) continued their grating antics, various limbs jouncing about on uneven bars, here and there ponytails bobbing woefully under the vigorous shouts of the coaches, the occasional mons veneris taking a vicious beating on a block of wood. You have to give it up to these little fucking dynamoes; they shot around the arena like a bunch of superballs launched from a cannon into a bank vault; even the supernaturally haughty Svetlana Khorkina--who looks like one day she will make some man out there very miserable indeed--was seen to exhibit a smilelike rictus at one point.

But then after a little while I stopped caring, because for all the flash and dazzle--and, as athleticism, some of it was really fucking impressive--they still in the end just seemed tawdry and misplaced and creepy. Maybe if they put plush toys and pink taffeta all over the place; some tasteful Leo DiCaprio posters for the girls to enjoy. It might start to look normalesque.

As the week has drawn on, we've gotten some perfunctory glimpses of other, less popular sports, like the physics-defying weightlifters, whose chores simply cause my groin muscles to twang and whistle in sympathetic misery. Or the guys riding bikes here and there--unfortunately for the bikers, the Tour de France kind of sucked all the limited appreciation we (Americans) have for tiredly watching footage of guys, well, riding bikes on the road. I confess that I regard watching biking with the same enthusiasm I have for NASCAR, which is to say: none. When bikers fall down, which is by far the most exciting possible outcome, the best they can do is wipe out competitors. When bike tires start hurtling into the audience and causing civilian deaths, then I might grudgingly watch the ESPN highlights.

Today's coverage that I saw started out with the shot put, which is pretty enjoyable. (Though the coverage was again basically an afterthought.) Mostly for the peculiarly male trait of post-performance bellowing. Time and time again, the Living Thyroids would pick up the slug of metal, spin weirdly, and then launch the fucker into space, and then, at the precise moment of release (that is to say, after nothing else could possibly help the shot's trajectory), they would emit horrifying screams, as if bull snakes had suddenly crawled into their anuses. AAAAAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGHH!

Dude, you already threw the thing. You're not helping in any physical way. Then again, if my whole purpose in life was to throw a heavy lump of crap as far away from me as possible, day after day, I might be tempted to cut loose with frequent existential howls of my own too. Maybe these guys are just weirdly regular about scheduling them.

What else? Oh, I saw some "whitewater canoeing." This is fine, but having actually worked on a river before, their definition of "whitewater" is depressingly lax. The jacuzzi-like nonturbulence of the water hardly made me think, "Oh, lord, watch out for the rocks!" No, more like, "Get that canoeist a spritzer!"

And then there was swimming. So much fucking swimming. And it's not just the varying strokes--though that's part of it. It's also the varying distances. And the varying relays. Of varying strokes and distances. You know, after seeing the weirdly cool dolphin-kick several dozen times (and the accompanying wish that Patrick Duffy, the MAN FROM ATLANTIS would show up), really who gives a rotten fuck? Some swimstrokes are plainly ridiculous, such as the breaststroke and the butterfly. Can we just not say: "Look. There's a rock over there a ways off. Get swimming. First one there wins." Do you think anyone would even think about doing a breaststroke? Of course not. Jesus Christ, people, let's just do the crawl. The breaststroke is to swimming as what speedwalking is to track and field: really, just sort of dumb.

But no. We have to endure the backstroke, the baconstroke, and the Choco-stroke, at all distances and configurations, and worse (thanks, NBC, you dumb choads), we have to endure the qualifying heats. This is just the worst. Hey hey, this means nothing, really, since 90% of the time the heats have no surprises at all! This also, in addition to carrying no dramatic freight at all, leads to commentators doing what they do worst, which is talking. I actually heard this exchange:

"How about that young Hungarian team?"

(Barely masking utter boredom) "Yeah! They're . . . really coming on."

(Extended silence.)

Oh, for Christ's sake. Bring back the tiny little whores. I guess given a choice between miserable little girls and laughably inefficient swimmers, I'm more interested in watching little girls cry.

It's just the kind of nice guy I am.