Darwin

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Olympics.  I never did care much about sports.  There was a time when I was a kid that I enjoyed football and even played it in high school.  It turned out to be a hell of a lot of work though and by the time I graduated, I didn't care much about it at all.  I see even less reason to care about it now.

I see where Bret Favre, (who insists everyone mispronounce his name as "farv", rather than "favor" which we all know it should be) retired from retirement.  Favre used to play for the Green Bay Packers and they would gladly have taken him back, but he opted to go to another team that was willing to pay him more money.

Favre said in an interview, "I am not a traitor to Green Bay.  This is strictly business."  And I thought, wait a minute, isn't that the exact definition of a traitor?  Someone who switches sides for money?  Of course I've railed before on how fans will loyally support even the most losing teams, but the teams seem to have no reciprocal loyalty to the fans.  There were the Baltimore Colts moving to Indianapolis, the Houston Oilers moving to Nashville, the Oakland Raiders moving to Los Angeles, then back to Oakland, the St. Louis Cardinals moving to Phoenix, the Minnesota Lakers moving to Los Angeles, etc.

At the moment everybody is wrapped up in the Olympics.  World records are falling like rain.  The biggest story so far has been when a little girl lip-synched the opening ceremonies because the real singer ostensibly wasn't as attractive.  So now 2 little girls are scarred for life, one because she's not pretty enough, the other because she can't sing.

The second biggest story is the swimmer winning a record number of medals.  The question now being asked is, is this guy the greatest Olympic athlete of all time, or just the greatest swimmer?  He may be both, or he may be neither.  Maybe there's a better swimmer out there who never went to the Olympics.  Maybe he would suck at any land based competition.  Who knows?

The third biggest story, is the tight controls over the press while reporting from China.  China has a terrible record for internet freedom.  I have a friend from Hong Kong who started a website while she was living in Holland.  It was a website about her cat.  Only 5 or 6 of us ever posted on her website, but it was a nice, and pretty much innocuous website with a half dozen people posting about their cats.

Now she's moved back to Hong Kong and does business between there and another city in mainland China.  And she can no longer see her own website.  She can still post to it, as it's still based in Holland but she can't see it.  How paranoid can China be if they regard a website frequented by 5 or 6 cat-lovers as a threat to national security?

The minute she moved to Hong Kong I wanted to scream, "No, stay the hell out of there!  What are you fucking crazy?"  But I was afraid to say anything for fear of getting her into trouble.  Now that she can no longer view her own website there's little point in me posting my concerns.  In fact it might only have a more detrimental effect.  If I simply told her to "Get the fuck back out of China!", could she actually be jailed for something I said?

Maybe China has simply shut it down until it can be reviewed by some government censor, and who knows how anyone amoral enough to become a censor in the first place will view even the most innocent of websites?  What is it that China has against cats?  Darwin

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