Monthly Archives: July 2012

Freak Speak

Do you want your country to be world’s Olympic champion? Then learn how to row, shoot, and judo chop.

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Humor Post #71 from the world’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Middle School Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

As I was saying… uh, yeah, it was about all those puddle-headed Olympic sports we have to suffer through in the next two weeks. First, let it not be said that Crankenfuss doesn’t appreciate the Olympics. Hey, any day with sports on a channel (here it’s NBC… obviously) all day long is better than a day filled with knuckle-dragging game shows where the audience is screaming, “Ask for a vowel, Ricky!” or “A $5,000,000 price is right for that new electric race car! Tell Drew that!”

But a whole bunch of these Olympic sports don’t exactly capture my full attention, ya know. And why is that? Cause I don’t pay any attention to them the rest of the year either. Just today I checked to see what’s on NBC for the day. Here you go: Starting at 10:00 AM, it’s… ya ready for this? Maybe you better sit down in case you get a bit woozy with anticipation.
Swimming,
Beach Volleyball,
Volleyball,
Water Polo,
Rowing,
Canoeing.
Hmm, let’s see. Swimming’s great, but after that I’m not exactly wetting my undies with excitement. Beach volleyball is cool, I admit, and anybody’s gotta appreciate — well, guys at least — a bunch of babes in skimpy little two piece bathing suits cavorting around in the sand? What’s not to like? But hey, c’mon, don’t you think that’s exactly the reason the Olympic guys added beach volleyball? I mean, how popular a sport is it? Uh, outside California and Florida (and Hawaii?), probably not very. But girls going wild in bikinis? “Hoo boy, the Olympics are right there, baby! Gonna sell a lot of beer and car ads with stuff like that, aren’t we?” the GIC’s (Guys in Charge) crow to each other as they high-five each other.

And not to be to big a party pooper on volleyball — well, okay, somebody’s gotta say it — the thing gets kinda gets boring after the first two hours or so. About 80% of the points go like this: 1) someone stops the incoming shot (sometimes with a great diving save) and bops it to guy/girl #2. Then #2 sets up #3 with a high, soft lob. And then of course, #3 spikes the @#$%^&@# out of the ball and the whole thing repeats itself. That’s it. Over and over and over for forever, it seems. I only need a couple games before I actually consider going outside and getting some exercise of my own.

Water polo? Where do I go to play that around here? Yeah, you got that right. Not a great number of youth teams to choose between, that’s for sure. How did this sport become Olympic worthy?

And finally for my day’s entertainment, we have rowing and canoeing. Oh, joy! Lemme see, which would I rather watch: basketball or rowing? Not a very tough decision. And how about this? In basketball, there are — count ’em — two gold medals, one for the men, one for the women. And for rowing/kayaking/canoeing, how many do you think they have? 5, 10, even 15? Wrong, wrong, and wrong. There are 30 events in those “sports.”

30???

So the Olympics are telling me if your country has the best women’s and men’s basketball teams in the world — and notice that I put women first. Hey, I’m a modern kind of dude — you can earn two gold medals. But if you really want to bring home the bacon, get everyone in your country rowing or kayaking or canoeing starting say at age two and you can have a great start at winning the whole Olympics. At last count, I believe 30 beats 2.

In fact, for a complete picture, here’s a page from Wikipedia, my always favorite source of info on the net, that shows how many medals come for ever sport:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_events
Study this page like I did and I think you’ll agree that here’s what you do to win the Olympics, baby!
You encourage everyone in your country to get good at one of these events:
rowing/kayaking/canoeing (30 events),
Judo (14 events),
and Shooting (15 events).
That’s 59 events in all, 177 medals in all (gold, silver, bronze). Hey, you have a great chance to be #1 in the whole wide world! Heck, even countries like Andorra and Luxembourg would have a fightin’ chance with a national program like the one I’m proposing. And while those rowing things might not be that attractive to every kid, especially the four or five year olds, ooh, judo and shooting… why, that’ll get most all the little guy dudes into trying to be Olympic champs.

And all thanks to Crankenfuss, your country can be #1 in the world!

Why haven’t our Presidential candidates talked about this? Just one more reason Dr. Crankenfuss should be a senior advisor to all sorts of people who want to succeed.

And to think all this comes to you for free.
What a great world we live in.

From Your Dude with the ‘Tude,
Dr. Crankenfuss

Freak Speak, Uncategorized

The Olympics are very cool. Except for when they make horses wear dresses.

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Humor Post #70 from the world’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Middle School Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

All, right, it’s Olympic time. Crankenfuss likes the Olympics. Sports and lots of them, lots of good stories about the athletes, and you even learn some history about jolly ol’ England. I like to swim and already those muscled swimmers make most adults I know look like little wussies. And I’m talking just about the lady swimmers. The men are even more awesome. Someday they ought to have some normal guy walking alongside the pool while the swimmers compete so everyone would get a sense of how fast those dudes are motoring through the water. I got out my trusty calculator and figured out that in the 100 meter freestyle they’re doing around 12 1/2 minutes miles, which ain’t that fast. IF YOU’RE RUNNING, THAT IS. But try walking a mile in 12 1/2 minutes. Man, you’ll be bookin’.

Anyhoo, I like a lot of the Olympics. But hey, I wouldn’t be Crankenfuss if I couldn’t find some stuff to whine about so here it comes:

THE OLYMPICS HAVE A BUNCH OF SILLY SPORTS!

Yeah, that’s right. Some sports are way more equal than the others. Let’s say you win the Olympic marathon. Man that’s over 26 miles and what’s worse is to win, you have to beat the east Africans and I have to believe they’ve been running since they escaped from their cribs when they were about three days old. I know they test for steroids, but with those guys they should test for pony genes too.

So anyway you win the marathon. You get a gold medal. And so does the guy who wins the race walk. Yeah, I know it’s like 20 kilometers long, but dude, it’s still walking! Who came up with this thing? “Well, everyone likes running,” they said, “so why don’t we include walking for the people who aren’t so great at running?” Huh?? Why not crawling? Or how about crab walking? Or rolling down a hill? Why aren’t those in the Olympics too?

And then there’s equestrian dressage. It’s a horse competition. From the name, apparently the horses come out in dresses and they get judged. Isn’t that more a Project Runway thing? Horse dressage — gimme a break!

And there are a bunch of sports that seem to exist only for the Olympics. Like rhythmic gymnastics for example. Here’s a link to a cool YouTube video showing a bunch of the stuff they do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBWwm2Wysb8 Yeah, it’s pretty amazing and I could never do it — not that I’d want to, you understand — but people, this is not really a sport, is it? I mean twirling around a baton or bouncing a ball way up in the air or dancing with a long piece of crepe paper? Why not just have a competition for high school bands along with the majorettes doing baton twirling? Or we should have juggling competitions. Yeah, that would be cool, wouldn’t it? All the best jugglers in the world juggling, say,  three balls, a razor-sharp sword, a great white shark, and a baby or two. It would be amazing if they could just keep the baby (or babies) alive. That would get the viewers glued to the tv, I bet.

I’m outta time here. And I have so much more to say. But I gotta run so I’ll continue this in the next couple days.

In the meantime, stick with the real sports and let the silly sports slide.

from Your Dude with the Tude,
Dr. Crankenfuss

Freak Speak, Uncategorized

You want to go on a plane trip? Fine, you can have the one I just suffered through.

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Humor Post #69 from the world’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Middle School Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s been way too long since I posted last, but it’s not my fault, really it’s not. Daniel hasn’t put up anything I’ve sent him because he says he’s too busy writing Moose stuff. Moose stuff? What in the world? Since when are moose more important that Dr. Crankenfuss? Anyway, I’ve sent him three posts and he says he’ll get them up this week. “Just give me time,” he says. Yeah, well, it’s time already.

Okay, here goes. Now I know it says Humor Post #69 up at the top, but there’s no humor in this post. Only justified rage. (See picture at above left.) Yep, that’s how I felt after my 3-day trip to New York City. The trip itself was great. We were visiting my cousin in Brooklyn and I had a good time. She’s way too cool. Went up the Empire State Building, visited the Statue of Liberty, and best of all, went to a Yankees game! But that’s the good stuff. I’m here to rant. And I have good reason to after those plane trips.

Like on the way up, they treated my mom like she was a hijacker or something. She had just bought a big bottle of aerosol sunscreen and the security people confiscated it because it was over 4 ounces or something like that. $12 down the toilet. Boy, was she mad. If she had brought a suitcase along, she could have packed it there, but all we had were overnight bags because we didn’t want to get stuck with a $50 charge for two suitcases. So we had to cram everything into something that would fit in the overhead lockers.

Except for that, the trip was okay. The trip from Raleigh to NYC, that is.

New York City, as I said, was fun and great. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about the Hades we lived through on the way back. See, we got to the airport around 4:00 for a 5:30 flight just to make sure nothing wrong would happen. Yeah, like that helped. The boarding went okay. We were on American Airlines. Then we got ready to take off. We’re like seventh in line and then they send us back to where we started. The pilot came on and said because there was a thunderstorm in Raleigh, we had to wait. So we did wait in that plane, which was starting to get stale, you know. After another half hour or so, they made up get off the plane. Crap! Well, storms in Raleigh usually don’t last very long. We’d only have to wait a while, Mom said. We trudged back into the airport, sat there 10 minutes and an announcement came on and told us to call an 800 number to make new arrangements. They wouldn’t help us where we were; we had to do it ourselves. So Mom called and they gave her all sorts of stupid advice, like “You can take a plane from Kennedy Airport that’s leaving in 20 minutes.” Yeah, except we were at LaGuardia. How were we supposed to get to another airport in that time? Then they tell her there’s a US Air flight leaving in another part of the airport in a little while. So we rush all over the place — that airport is HUGE — to get there and find out when we do get there that we’re too late. All that trouble for nothing. And the US Air people tell us we could have stayed back at American because they had flight leaving at 9:30. Hey, American never told us that! If we hadn’t listened to their advice to go over to US Air, we could have gotten seats on the 9:30 plane. So we go all the way back to American and guess what. Now that’s plane’s sold out, that’s what. So now we’re tired, mad, and hungry. And still in New York.

Long story, right? Okay, the ending is we never got on any flight that night and we had to go all the way back to Brooklyn to stay with our cousin and we had to come back the next morning to FINALLY get a flight to Raleigh. Seemed like half our trip was spent in the airport.

My Grandpa says when he was a kid, flying was fun. They gave you good food and you didn’t even have to pay $6 or $10 or whatever it is they charge now. It came free with your ticket. Wow, what a concept. All I know is next time, we might think about walking to New York. Yeah, we could take our car, but you know what they charge for parking in New York? I could go to college for that.

So Crankenfuss has a warning for all you out there. Just be happy where you are and make all your relatives visit YOU. Or, you can just be incredibly rich, have your own plane, and just jet around to your heart’s delight.

Easy enough. I should have thought of that back before my trip.

Anyway, talk to you very soon again (if Daniel gets his head out of that moose mess he’s in).

from Dr. Crankenfuss,
Your Dude with the Tude