Unless you’re roosting in a cave near Atlanta or Atlantis or Atlantica, you know the Olympic torch is wending its way from Greece to China.
Well, this morning I thought up a “new” term: Olympic torching. But I figured I hadn’t really coined anything new. Good ole Google confirmed I was right regarding one of those statements.
Before I go further, I’ll take two paragraphs for an important disclaimer. I know I should be doing something else. I know I have customer emails to answer, Web pages to fix, and new products to add. I know I have taxes to file, bills to pay, and insurance to investigate. I know I should be writing a business newsletter, updating business records, and posting to my business blog. I know I should be spraying the garden, trimming the trees, and splitting wood.
But when the should‘s in life demand all of my time, I put my foot down (maybe even both). Once a while. And pull my nose away from the grindstone on the butcher’s block. And do something unnecessary. Such as posting to this blog. Or doing a sudoku puzzle. Or playing a game. Once in a while. Such as now.
Disclaimers and excuses aside, how about a little Olympic math?
Of the modern Olympics, which was the bloodiest?
Munich 1972, thanks to the Palestine Liberation Organization or some other Palestinian-Arab outfit. They beat the Israeli team.
How long ago was that?
36 years already.
And what was one of the new things at the Olympic Games 36 years before that one? Munich 1936.
That was the first Olympics that featured a torch as they use it today. And had some other new features apparently, including something to do with priests and rituals and mirrors and stuff.
What else about the 1936 Olympics? Adolph Hitler. You know, that guy that had something to do with Nazis and camps and holocausts. His team beat the Jewish team also. (But as a people, they outlasted him in the long haul.)
So that was the minus-36 side of 1972. And now we are on the plus-36 side of 1972.
I suppose the Tibetans are feeling torched by the current Olympic hosts. What else will China 2008 bring? Will there be an anti-Israeli tie-in somehow?
Meanwhile, you ought to read this article.
As Hank the Cowdog would say, “So there you are.”