and they're off...

My mind is sponsoring a race right now. It's between "how fucking outrageous and stupid will they get?" and "how idiotic will enough people be to buy it?"

As P.T. Barnum never said, you'll never go broke betting on the obnoxiousness of right-wing race-baiters...

what ever happened to baby Nadia?

More on the ugliness of Olympic female gymnastics - this from Dave Zirin's online column on the issue, a quote from Joan Ryan's book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes:

In 1956 the top two Olympic female gymnasts were 35 and 29 years old. In 1968 gold medalist Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia was 26 years old, stood 5 feet 3 inches and weighed 121 pounds. Back then, gymnastics was truly a woman's sport....[In 1976] 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci clutched a baby doll after scoring the first perfect 10.0 in Olympic history. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 85 pounds. The decline in age among American gymnasts since Comaneci's victory is startling. In 1976 the six US Olympic gymnasts were, on average, 17 and a half years old, stood 5 feet three and a half inches and weighed 106 pounds. By the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the average US Olympic gymnast was 16 years old, stood 4 feet 9 inches and weighed 83 pounds, a year younger, 6 inches shorter and 23 pounds lighter than her counterparts of 16 years before.

So what's driven this trend toward ever-younger athletes? (They would be ever-younger had not a ruling finally been delivered limiting competition to girls and women 16 and over.) Not the sport itself, evidently.

"women"'s gymnastics: child abuse

Read this New York Times article by Buzz Bissinger. Plain and simple: in order for the girls (not women: the average age of this year's US team, for instance, is only 17 and a half) to develop skills necessary to compete at the Olympic level, they can have no childhood, only grueling and rigorous years of training. And of course, the decision to undertake this training is, by definition, not a decision made by the athlete as an independent adult, it is a decision made for them by her parents. The effects of such nightmarish training on these girls' bodies, their development both emotional and physical, would be bad enough by itself, but the odor of worse abuse attaches itself to the intense relationships coaches develop with these girls. Bissinger points out several examples of sexual abuse pre-teen gymnasts have suffered at the hands of their coaches, and while such cases are surely a small minority, the demanding/dependant relationship between coaches and the young girls is psychologically damaging in any event.

The Romans enjoyed gladiatorial combat to the death, and while the abuse suffered by female gymnasts isn't quite so extreme, at least the Romans didn't kid themselves as to the source of their enjoyment or the suffering of its victims.

easily amused

My backup system for downloaded mp3s involves grouping them into playlists of 20 songs each and burning them onto a CD. I don't organize the playlists; I just let them play alphabetically by filename. Anyway, playing my most recent such CD in the car, I found out that the track "Colours Move" by Fuck Buttons (I don't know if that name's supposed to designate a type of button, or if it's an explanation such as might be uttered by Flasshe) is followed directly by two songs from the band Holy Fuck.

Dirty words and alphabetical order, huzzah!

Anyway: with a name like "Holy Fuck" and a decided krautrock drone, you've gotta imagine Julian Cope is just kicking himself for not having come up with that band name first. And indeed, Cope's Head Heritage site gives the album that contains "The Pulse" a glowing review.

As for Fuck Buttons: they too are working the droning groove, in this case with a slightly freaked-out gazin' o' the shoes feel going on.

So there you go: hope you fucking enjoy them.

Fuck Buttons "Colours Move" (Street Horrrsing, 2007)
Holy Fuck "The Pulse" (Holy Fuck, 2007)

what a lovely lovely lovely world

A small publisher, Beaufort Books, has agreed to publish O.J. Simpson's "hypothetical" book about the killings of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. Ironically, rights and ownership of the manuscript have been awarded to the Goldman family - and so the book's publication is being reframed as, somehow, an attempt to "honor the memory of the victims" of the murders. Yeah, if I were murdered, I'd sure want the chief suspect - who, of course, has obviously dedicated his every waking moment since to a search for the "real killer" (and who, unrelatedly, has removed every mirror from his mansion) - writing all about how he did it. I'd feel really honored for sure.

The title of the book, formerly If I Did It, is now slated to be Ha-Ha-Ha I've Totally Gotten Away With It You Stupid Bastards: Fuck You, I'm Off to Play Golf.