Darth Vader at the Olympics

Yes, the title is correct.  The story is innocent enough.  One of the world's fastest double amputees will be allowed to compete in the Olympics.  Hooray for disabilities everywhere!  Hooray for everyone!  The world is becoming a friendlier place!

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/olympics/05/16/pistorius.olympics.ap/index.html

But wait...

What if someone gets three of four limbs sliced off with a light saber and is thrown into a lake of fire, then wears a crazy mask with a techno-mullet and gets James Earl Jones' voice but has superhuman strength?  Can Darth Vader now compete in fencing?

What if Tommy John surgery in baseball actually gave erstwhile finesse pitchers the ability to throw the ball 100+ mph, like in Sparky Lyle's The Year I Owned the Yankees?

What about Robocop in a wrestling match?

Imagine the NBA if marijuana gave players a competitive advantage.

With all this talk about keeping sport pure from blood doping and steroids these past couple of years, how do we account for TIP's (Technologically Improved Players - a Sparky Lyle term) now?  How do we decide what's good for sport and what's an unfair competitive advantage?

The lines may never be drawn well enough.  Some new bleeding heart may enter the fray at every turn, championing the cause of the latest TIP.  Soon, there will be no people competing in their own skin, except at the Ablympics, the new competition made for non-TIP's.

And it won't matter, because it's just a game.  If we want to show our nation's prowess now, we just fly a stealth plane in the middle of the night and drop smart bombs down elevator shafts from 3 miles away, or blast them with lasers from space.

I don't know what I'm getting at here.  I guess I just thought I'd give you the heads up.  If the first woman who encouraged a man to openly share his feelings - in public - knew that one day we'd have emo music, she might have thought differently.

Signing off.  I've said enough.

A thing that I've had to ponder over the last two weeks:

The people are not right.

Let's go all the way back to the beginning and slam through the Bible in under 5 minutes.

Adam and Eve, the only two people on earth, got together and made the wrong decision.  All the people in the world got together and said, "We choose option B."

I'm sure there's more, but for the sake of time we'll cut to a posse of brothers, maybe some of whom were indifferent, maybe some of whom were aghast.  They sold their father's favorite son into slavery.  Good job, fellas.  Way to get your dear old dad to love you more.  Whose idea was that?

God uses all of his force to get a whole nation out of slavery.  All the people get together out in the desert, and what do they do?  Piss and moan.  Build a golden calf.  Fear the battle ahead when the spies come back to tell of the land you're supposed to go to.  Do EVERYTHING we can expect from a mob.  Only two guys from the whole nation got to go into that new land, and this because they had been separated for a while and got to speak to one another with clear heads.  Imagine Caleb and Joshua sitting on the mountainside, watching a sunset.

Once these people are in the new land, God has to continually inspire rulers called "judges" to slap the crap out of them because they keep making idols for themselves.  There's a whole book about it.

The people decide they want the tall and handsome guy, Saul, to be king.  Whoops.

A mob of religious guys get together and trap the town slut so they can stone her.

The political and religious leaders get together and decide to do away with a stinker of a people's leader who is threatening all their preconceived notions of authority.  Q: How can you just get rid of somebody like that?  Somebody who is developing a pretty strong following?  A: Get a mob of people together and give them a choice.  They will invariably pick the wrong prisoner to free.

They will pick the wrong person for office. 

They will follow the wrong religious leader.

They will listen to the worst music and watch the worst movies.

They will be placated.

Their empire will fall.  For this reason.