Individuality. A healthy upbringing with a loving family. A well rounded education. Countless free hours of playing with friends. These are just some of the things that will win you jack shit as an Olympic gymnast. Olympic gymnasts should be raised in a box like veal – separated from their families and confined so tightly they can’t turn around and look at the childhood they left behind. At least veal calves get fed. Plus, veal calves are butchered privately – out of sight of the diners who consume them as delicious PETAschnitzel.  Nobody makes a veal calf put on a purple spangly leotard so that it can be slaughtered in public by a cold-eyed Bulgarian judge in front of millions of people for the unforgiveable sin of taking a half step out of bounds and then served to the public as a national disgrace. Just think, most of us will never have the opportunity to disgrace our nation and gymnasts get to do it before they’ve had their first period! Livin’ the Olympic dream! But if the gymnast is good enough and lucky enough to win the gold then she gets to bask in the adulation of her nation by starring in a Subway commercial with Apolo Anton Ohno and Jared unless her accomplishments are overshadowed by her hair. She might even get to compete on Dancing with the Stars and be mocked by the tabloids for getting fat. Seriously, leave ShawnJohn alone – she starved her whole life to bring four fucking medals to this worthless, ingrate lard-ass nation of ours. Let her eat a fuckin’ doughnut. Some people go into the desert to see god. Others go to find themselves, to make art, to commune with nature, to have visions, or to...

To be perfectly honest, I was always a lousy driver. Less then a year after I got my license, I began my reign of terror. Side-swiping my Dad’s 1960ish green van, one of those behemoths that was made entirely out of Adamantium. After that followed a series of unfortunate events, the last happening just a few years ago when I totaled my SUV. Now I can’t drive at all. It started when I was a Senior in high school, coming home late from theater practice one night. I tried to park my tinny Ford Fairmont in front our house and ran up against Dad’s van front bumper. The back passenger door caved in and one of my hub caps knocked off and folded in two, like a PB&J made on one slice of bread. Dad’s van didn’t have a scratch. We didn’t report it, so my car never got fixed. That incident was followed by a series of one-car mishaps. I backed into poles, spun out on icy country roads and scraped garage walls. I’m thinking now that maybe it had something to do with depth perception. Or maybe there was a correlation with how often I hit things when I was singing along with the radio. In between accidents, I loved driving. My chosen college sat exactly 10 hours from my parents house and I would drive back home every few months. Ten hours, by myself, rattling across Kansas in my old Ford Fairmoni (the “t” in Fairmont had lost it’s top at some point, so my car was a unique individual) with only an AM radio for company. The trip was boring, so I popped into the discount store of my college town and purchased a few fake animal nose masks. It...

Fiercely Anticipating Please, tell me its going to happen soon – the end of the NBA Lockout. No, not football, the NFL season is firmly in place, not that I care. What I care about is basketball, specifically basketball playoffs. I love a good playoff series. However, to have a good playoff series, you must have a good season and so far it seems the NBA 2011-2012 Basketball Season is likely to be cancelled. Trouble started right after the end of last season in June. Despite a good revenue year for basketball, the NBA lost about $300 to $500 million for the season. The owners are howling. Renegotiating the contract between the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) David Stern, NBA Commissioner, and Billy Hunter, NBPA Executive Director, laid out competing positions. Neither has moved in more than a month. The NBA has filed a legal complaint claiming that the players aren’t negotiating in good faith. The players are starting to look around for overseas contracts to fill in their apparently inevitable “gap year”. FIBA – the world governing body for basketball has decided that it will allow NBA players to choose an international FIBA team to play for during the lock-out, but only during the lockout. A number of NBA players, from lesser known to superstars including Boston Celtics E’Twaun Moore and the Laker’s Kobe Bryant – are interested. This doesn’t give me a good play-off season to look forward to however. While I sometimes enjoy games during the season, by the playoffs, basketball has become an aggressive interplay of strong, assertive players, sneaky moves, and astonishing throws and catches – what’s not to like? Now that I’ve got you riled up, you can track the developments here:...

A Reader’s Guide to Not Reading Ulysses. It can happen to anyone. You’re at a birthday party, Bar Mitzvah, or PTA meeting. The day has gone well, the weather outside is perfect, you’re happy to be alive. But then the rabbi, soccer mom super hero or neighbor’s boarding school brat references James Joyce’s Ulysses. The innards of your bowels roar, your heart goes all NASCAR, a tsunami of sweat floods your brow, back and underarms. You flashback to Thanksgiving three years ago: the last time someone referenced Ulysses — you confused it with Homer’s The Odyssey. Five minutes later, the host informed you that, unfortunately, they had miscounted the table settings and you soon found yourself eating turkey at the kids table. And now the book rises again like an unread wraith into your otherwise literate life. You have two choices: confess to never having read Ulysses or toss the Hail Mary question: “Is that the one where he masturbates?” Neither choice has a happy ending. You go home alone, despondent. Food loses its taste, sex is mirthless, even an episode of Modern Family fails to elicit a chuckle. You’re not alone. Every year, millions of American’s suffer in silence for not having read the greatest novel of the 20th Century. But now there is hope. I’ve read Ulysses so you don’t have to. Your days of struggling through mile-long passages of impenetrable language and backbreaking bulk when all you really want to do is luxuriate in the grocery store prose stylings of James Patterson and Nora Roberts are over. Just follow these three simple “Ulylessons” and you will sound like a second-year Joyce Studies PhD candidate to friends, loved ones and pets (all of whom have probably also never read Ulysses). Ulylesson #1...