Ciao Olympica (or: Next Sunday, bran muffins)

Judging from my recent lack of regularity in posting, it would appear that my army of blogging monkeys has gotten into the cheddar again. Always blocks them up. But they've managed to squeeze out a few random Olympic thoughts. Call it a last shot of Olympic spirit: citius, altius, exlaxus (swifter, higher, more likely to produce in explosive bursts).

The Olympics are over. Well, I'm assuming those were the closing ceremonies on TV this morning. Otherwise, Andrea Bocelli and Avril Lavigne are touring together. And the steering on Sam Sullivan's wheelchair is seriously messed up.

(As an aside, did you see Sammy spin around with that flag? Christo, a couple of times I thought he was going to drive off the edge of the stage. That would have been awful. Unless he wasn't injured, and somebody held up a "6.0" card -- that would have been awfully hilarious, in an inappropriate and quite possibly insensitive sort of way.)

Speaking of almost big finishes, Canada finished third in the medal standings. Not bad. Not quite on top, but right below the guys below the guys on top. If the medal standings were a bunkbed, Canada would be sleeping on the floor under the bottom mattress, uncomfortably wedged against some lego and hoping that the US went pee before bedtime.

A best-ever 24 medals -- that's what a year's worth of our $110M five-year commitment to funding our elite young athletes has bought us so far. Let's see, at $22M a year (carry the two, solve for X, subtract the absolute value of pi)... that works out to about $916,666 per medal.

Some would call that a lot to pay for a few moments of superficial national pride and a glorified mantle ornament. (Or was that something for the DVD rack? Perhaps a re-release of The Cutting Edge, widely recognized as the 2nd worst movie ever made, just behind the critically panned independent film, My Life as a Booger.)

Anyway, $917k is a lot of coin to blow on, well, a coin -- especially when you think about the legacy those funds could have established for thousands of young Canadians in real need.

Consider the following: at that price, Pierre Lueders' silver in bobsleigh would put every one of Canada's estimated 18,336 tobogganless children in a brand new GT Free Flight Sno Racer (now only $49.99 at Canadian Tire). To paraphrase from the Bible: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day... give a child a hypersonic kiddie luge with a rigid plastic ski at the front, and you don't need to feed him much of anything anymore, what with the bowel ressection that will follow his inevitable 72 km/h gut-impalement at the bottom of Johnson's hill.

Consider further that, for the price of Team Gushue's gold in curling (often described as the geekiest winter sport) we could get every nerdy teenage guy on every Reach for the Top team in Canada a thrilling, and instructive, night with a high-priced hooker. Growing up, that was my Olympic dream. I still get a tear in my eye just thinking of it. (Hurry hard, lads, hurry hard!)

And for the cost of just one of the record five speekskating medals pumped out by Cindy Klassen's formidable and well-funded thighs, this country could have bestowed a ThighMaster Gold on as many as 84,955 of its most underprivileged (as in, undertoned) young women. And that's a lifetime of superficial pride, not to mention a 90-day warranty.

I mean, let's get our priorities straight, people.

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