Olympic Mold ...

... And Mildew

Like several other people, I have been watching the Olympics.

Ordinarily I do not watch sports of any kind. This is not because I disdain, on principle, displays of athletic prowess. It is because I do not enjoy the episodes of cognitive dissonance that sport, in its current incarnation, precipitates. In the first place--but wait, are you sitting down? Because this is a real shocker--sport is sexist!

That's right. Watching a professional sporting event on television--and I'm not even talking about the intermissions for T&A beer commercials--is the spiritual equivalent of hearing "You are nothing! NOTHING!" shouted at you for 3 hours. It's all men, men, men. Giant, rich, sex-crazed, drug-addled men who can kick your ass! Boo-yah.

Am I the only one who's tired of watching men who can kick my ass flex their moneymakers? Is it so inconceivable that a person might be interested in seeing how the other 51% of humanity flex their moneymakers? Occasionally they'll show a 20-second clip of Mia Hamm inspiring prepubescent girls to bonk leather balls with their heads, but that seems to be about the extent of Title 9 in televised sports. In fact, women's sport accounts for only 7% of all sports coverage, according to the Women's Sports Foundation, and most of that is figure skating.

Women's sport does exist, but 97% of all team administrators are men. Just ask my friend Rachel's friend Tobi's ex-girlfriend, who played, before the thing got cancelled, professional football in a league where the teams had names like "The Vixens," "The Sexpots" and "The Hot Wet Beavers."

In the second place, fine, if it has to be all men, can they at least do what sports figures are supposed to do? I mean, am I way off base here, or is sports not supposed to be an earnest, good-faith contest between hearty, wholesome, heroic youths? That's the narrative, anyway. But the reality of sports is a gross display of dirty, drug-enhanced money. In spite of the fact--or possibly because of the fact--that they are paid princely sums, none of these professional players seems capable of not hawking overpriced gym shoes made by third-world slave labor, not raping women, or driving sober.

And college sports, where the purity of the turf is supposedly some hallowed principle, are even worse. It's not just that these young date rapists skate through two years of college without attending a single class, or that their coaches set manly examples by lying on their resumes, going whoring, and fixing grades; it is de rigeur for colleges to ply athletes with hookers and bling. My brother-in-law works for the coach of a major college basketball team, who, he says, is in the process of luring a prospective player into his den with an illegal, custom-made Armani suit. Now, it means little or nothing in my young life what coaches or college students do for laughs or what they wear while they're doing it, but the point is, hookers and grade-fixing and Armani are against the rules.

Breaking the rules is also known as poor sportsmanship. That's right, I said "sportsmanship." Remember that, from 7th grade basketball? The concept seems quaint and old-fashioned and corny, doesn't it? That is because sport without sportsmanship has eclipsed the kind with sportsmanship. Clearly the resulting drug convictions and murder trials are an entertaining spectacle for many. But for me, the enterprise loses its luster. There is no solace even in Little League. Professional teams are drafting toddlers straight out of nursery school; teeny bopper jocks are getting shoe endorsement deals. And I just read about 4 coaches of a youth soccer club who got suspended for taking their boys to a brothel on a team trip to Amsterdam.

Anyway, back to the Olympics: I am not immune to the doping scandals and bribed judges and whatnot, and it is no secret that lucrative, soul-devouring endorsement contracts loom on the horizon for many of the better-looking athletes. So I have no illusions about the innocence of the games. But at least during the Olympics you get to see some girls compete in something besides cup size.

So, as I said, I've been watching, and I have a few observations I'd like to get off my chest over the next few days. I will start today with the obvious.

Synchronized swimming is retarded.

I am aware that the sport has long borne the brunt, along with ice dancing, of Olympic guy-humor. And I have heard its proponents declaim that it demands an astonishing dose of athleticism and should command greater respect. In this heated debate I have little interest; it's no skin off my nose whether water ballet is an Olympic sport or not. But I want to meet the dude who came up with the idea of teams of smiling young girls in bathing suits competing to see who can best do The Robot underwater. I am fairly certain this guy has a funny story to tell.

The Curse of the Spandex Knobs

The situation was dire. I'd received from my parents a summons to present myself for Sunday brunch at my sister's distant suburban country club, and I was running late.

Even when my family isn't involved, Sunday brunch is my least favorite meal of all time. Especially at these 1-star hotels and resorts, where they lay out on slabs all the dessicated refuse they couldn't sling during the week, smother it in yellow sauce, and call it a buffet. Sunday mornings should be a time of quiet brooding. At no time should they intersect with rubber scrambled eggs hurled by a 9-month old niece over whom your once-sentient mother can now but gurgle in a continuous loop, "Her so tired! For goo'ness sake!" But I couldn't slither out of it without incurring a serious divet in detente. So I bucked up.

I bucked mostly because I had the drive to look forward to. My sister's club is located at the other end of an extremely choice bit of long, scenic, winding road, and I am fortunate enough to have a Porsche. It is a winning combination. Ordinarily I bar operating heavy machinery before breakfast, but the one redeeming aspect of Sunday brunch is the peculiar hour at which it takes place; I would have plenty of time to lube my moving parts with some life-giving caffeine before taking to the open road. Thusly fortified, and noting with some astonishment the 80-degree weather without a cloud in the sky, I retracted the ragtop and lit out across hill and dale at a high rate of speed. The wind in my mullet, the sun dappling my cheek, Missy Elliot emoting about her vibrator, and just ahead, the best, twistiest part of the road--the situation could not have been improved upon. A kind of adrenalin-calm washed over me.

That's when the cyclist cut me off. That's right, a cyclist. Not a Ferrari. Not a Gremlin. A guy on a bike.

On clement Sunday mornings, Austin's picturesque byways are lousy with swarms of gaudy spandexed retards who think they're Lance Armstrong. For reasons unknown, it is their heart's fondest wish to harsh the motorist's mellow more or less constantly. They run red lights, they dart unpredictably, they flip you the bird, etc. The aforementioned cyclist dude was no exception. As I hove into view behind him, he glanced over his shoulder and observed my approach. He then directed his gaze toward the glorious stretch of hilly hairpins that lay ahead. He looked back at me. He looked ahead. I watched in horror as he appeared to swell with a sort of hideous invincibility. Clearly he had ascertained that I was about to reap the rich rewards of Boxster ownership on one of the most exquisite roads in Austin, toward which contingency he apparently nursed strong objections. So he summarily swerved in front of me. His mantra: "I will outrun this stinkin' Porsche!"

For a split second I thought I might flatten him, but in the nick of time I did him a solid and slammed on the brakes instead. Whereupon I was obliged to grind down to first gear and crawl behind him up a 40-degree incline at 2 miles an hour, for what seemed like weeks.

As we crawled, the two of us--he, on his suicide mission, I, trying not to stall the engine--I meditated on things. Eventually a few salient points floated to the surface. For instance, I did not like this guy. He looked like a goober in those skintight pantaloons, and his fake US Postal jersey was off the scale in terms of glamour-don'ts. And he was clearly an idiot. If he had waited even 2 seconds he could have had the road to himself, because I would have roared past him, torn into the succulent flesh of that hill like a starving carnivore, and been out of sight in the blink of an eye. But no. I was stuck plodding up the best road in Austin like a garbage truck. Plus, I'd almost killed a man, the drive was ruined, he would likely suffer an aneurism trying to keep ahead of me, and I would be late for inspection.

Then I cursed Lance Armstrong. This was all his fault, really. I wished he would stop using his power for evil, and go on television, and remind these spandex knobs that, unlike him, they are not physiological anomalies, and that while many Porsches do have brakes, they are mostly just for show.

And so forth.

As it happened, I endured the brunch pretty well. Everyone's attention was rivetted on my sister's infant, whose every twitch and gurgle was received by all as gripping entertainment of the highest caliber, such that I was scarcely called upon to justify my existence at all.

On the way back to town, I was caught in the maw of the world's longest stoplight, the one at MoPac and Bee Caves. On the median I espied a fairly forlorn guy holding a cardboard sign upon which was scrawled some incomprehensible shit about God and hunger. I offered him a George Washington, which he bounded over to accept. Then it was just the two of us there at the intersection for a while, I in my Porsche, he with his cardboard. Eventually he remarked that I must be enjoying my nice car on so frabjous a day as this.

The light changed.

The Bolour Supplement

For your viewing pleasure, Twistyfaster.com now offers two exciting new pictorial supplements.

Assorted Wild Animals of South Austin My newest project kicks off this week with several creepy bugs and reptiles

Morsels Today A look at pop culture filtered through my dinner

And don't miss Songs About Pictures of Food , the audio companion to the aforementioned.

Marriage Blows Chunks

Why The Whole Thing's Got To Go

Marriage is weird and creepy. A procedure with origins in the brackish protoplasm of primitive civilization and its first dirt-slogging economies, its original purpose was simple, if grim: to ensure, by recognized custom, the orderly exchange of chattel--such as goats and women--between families and through future generations. This created patriarchy.

Because of its barbaric origins, modern matrimony is rife with primitive symbolism and bizarre protocols. Monogamy heads the list of weirdness. Monogamy evolved as a marriage requisite, not because there was some instinctive sanction against the betrayal of a love commitment (marriage was invented way before love was), but to guarantee the fatherhood of any offspring, so as to legitimize the inheritance of the estate. So important to the male essence is this drive to preserve his genes in the amber of the next generation that nearly all cultures penalize women for monogamy-malfunction, in great disproportion to men.

This created misogyny.

Nowadays, when DNA testing can resolve issues of paternity with much greater precision than the shotguns and chastity belts of yore, monogamy, like so much of the ritualized baggage clinging uselessly to modern reproduction, is entirely moot. But it continues to fester on like gangrene, a ghastly nod to over-the-top patriarchal societies like Nigeria's, where to this day a woman can be stoned to death for adultery.

Since the invention of romantic love and its gradual rise to favor in the 18th century, practically everyone's on the monogamy bandwagon! And why not? Like most things that work Americans into a lather, monogamy is completely neurotic and addictive and impossibly tangled up in religion. Which is why it has become a cornerstone of the marriage myth.

I say myth because the reality is hugely different from popular narrative. For instance, you'd think that in the 21st century we'd have sorted out our misogynist leanings, but no, society still hates women. Therefore it comes as no surprise that in straight marriages, as in most everything, women overwhelmingly get the short end of the stick. What do you think is the leading cause of death among pregnant married women? Murder, that's what. On top of that, over half of marriages end in divorce. An enormous percentage of divorced women are shunted off with the kids to a grim impoverished subsistence, never to be seen again. And even in wealthier households, women average 80% of the housework. When they quit working to raise the kids, they screw themselves out of Social Security. Women should avoid marriage like the plague. There's no percentage in it.

But even if the fantasy were true, where the heck does the state get off penalizing or rewarding law abiding taxpayers depending on who they shack up with? Humans appear to be predisposed toward sleeping around, same-sex, two-sex, three at a time. Some humans are no-sex. What about them?

Thus is marriage, defined as a monogamous sexual relationship between 2 straight people, just so 19th century. People should be able to hook up however they want without fear of government reprisal. Family groups or domestic units of any design or complement, including but not limited to so-called traditional marriages, must be afforded equal privelege under the law. This means three sisters, or two cousins, or six unrelated friends and a French poodle could, at their whim, have a state-recognized household with all the legal benefits currently afforded only to straight married couples.

Among early hominids, male domination and its concomitant division of labor between the sexes may have afforded some evolutionary advantage, but that doesn't mean patriarchy is "natural" in the modern age. There are lots of behaviors once practiced by ancient cultures that probably shouldn't be written into the Constitution. Like trepanning, or sacrificing virgins, or eating grubs. Today, patriarchy, a power structure which is advantageous to only a very few, is gross. And traditional marriage is patriarchy's poster child. It's got to go.

Death of a Hard Drive

I am sad to pronounce the Twisty Mainframe dead at the scene. Passed into oblivion. Gone to its great reward. Grimly reaped. So far, no amount of liquor has been able to stop my mind's eye from revisiting the horrible scene. Night and day, day and night--the escalating shriek of the burning video fan, the screen gone gray and lifeless, the cursor paralyzed in mid-blink, the last rasping whimper of the ATA drive as the life drained out of it, and then:

Ghastly silence, the cause of death--"SYSTEM FAILURE"--spelled out in black Unix doom-scrawl, the unrelenting flashing question mark mocking each attempt to reboot, the taste of fear and loathing bitter on my tongue--the shock was as a Henckels 8" chef's through my heart.

People keep telling me, "it wasn't your fault, you mustn't blame yourself" but after this kind of catastrophe, life becomes an endlessly replayed cycle of what-ifs. What if I'd run those maintenance scripts like I'd been meaning to? What if I'd verified the disk at the first sign of trouble? What if I'd jiggled its cables or reseated its DIMMs? What if, instead of going out for shrimp tacos, I'd taken time out of my busy day to clean its little caches?

I'll never know.

Why, God? Why did it have to be the Dual 2GHz G5? It had never hurt a fly! Why didn't you take some worthless, no-account machine instead, like the squeaky ceiling fan in my bedroom, or that miserable, bread-hating arsonist of a toaster, or the TV, which has fused my tender young booty to the La-Z-Boy as Law & Order loops ceaselessly, noxiously, savagely for days at time? Why? Why? Is it because you really are a Republican?

Well, fuck you, God! Little do you know, but I keep one of those little 12" Powerbooks for use in emergency Wi-Fi coffeeshop situations. Also, owing largely to Comrade Patti's incessant prodding, most of my life is backed up on two separate drives kept in two separate underground bunkers in two undisclosed locations. You'd have to get up pretty early in the morning to blow all my motherboards!