Hey!, look who it is, the “Cranky Old Guy.” He can show up without warning and, really, without being invited. But since he’s old and kinda pathetic we feel obligated to let him have his say when he stumbles in. Today he seems to be mostly agitated about the Winter Olympic Games or, as Americans call them, the Spin-Aimlessly-And-Fall-On-The-Ice Games. His mind does tend to wander, however, and when you spend your days asking yourself questions that can never be answered, you end up obsessing about strange things. Ladies and gentlemen, the rambling mind of the C.O.G.

• Why is a tall, muscular man throwing a sixty-five-pound girl to the ground on an ice rink called assault in real life, but in the Winter Olympics it’s called figure skating?
• How can original Hot Wheels be worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars when my childhood chums poured gasoline on them and lit them on fire in their backyards?
• How come guys (or gals) that seem obviously Caucasian get to be on the Japanese or Chinese or Korean Olympic teams? All kinds of people want to emigrate to the US and then stay for as long as they want but at the first sign of competition, they jump ship and want to be on someone else’s Olympic Team; they’re all-in on America unless it’s way easier to make Bulgaria’s luge team. Here’s a news alert, Team USA isn’t very good at the Winter Olympics, so if you can’t make the US team and need to unearth some long-lost grandparent so you can be on Lichtenstein’s squad, you’re probably not Olympic material.
• If you have to use a stiff bristle brush to get dried-on food off a cookie sheet, what do you use to get the dried-on food off the stiff bristle brush?
• Shouldn’t the money spent on sending a bobsled team from Jamaica to the Olympics really be spent on something more practical? It was a fun novelty thirty years ago but now it just seems like a disrespectful extravagance for the second poorest country in the Caribbean.
• When you’re eating beef jerky or some other packaged food you often encounter a little square white packet. We all know that it’s a moisture pack inserted so that your jerky won’t dry out, but why is it labeled, “DO NOT EAT”? Which one of you fuckers has been eating the moisture packs? Do you eat the prize in the Cracker Jack too? If it wouldn’t have been labeled, would we all just be chewing up chemical packs and looking for more? I get that some people need practical advice, but this is offensive.
• Ever see a name on the back of a football jersey that says Smith III or Williams IV or Jacobsen Jr.? I always took this type of designation to mean that there was also a Smith I and a Smith II on the team, you know, brothers and they didn’t want us to confuse one brother with the other. Apparently, that’s not the case. Well, if the suffix on the back of jerseys isn’t there to help prevent confusing the different Williams’ or Jacobsen’s on the team, then it needs to be removed. The back of a football jersey is not the place to document your ancestry. If you’re the fourth William Williams in your family, no one cares.
• Why did we acquired Alaska if its inhabitants aren’t any good at Winter Olympic sports? Aside from the oil, I thought that was the whole point. A million acre sheet of ice, the sun never comes out, this should allow plenty of time for sledding and skiing. Alaskans should be so good at these sports that they should have their own team, every four years they could be their own country. Man, somebody really miscalculated.
• You know that part at the beginning of an Olympic sled race where they start pushing the sled, running beside it as fast as they can? Well, since America typically has the fastest runners, why don’t they just keep running all the way to the end of the course? Yep, why don’t they start running and then never jump in? It seems worth a try since the way it goes now, as soon as Americans jump in the sled the chance of winning a medal gets blow all to hell.
• Why is it that 1,500 people an hour can ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland and yet when you get to the Winter Olympics apparently no American can master the bobsled run?