Oh God, not another Olympics. Seriously? Are we still doing this? Do we still have countries coming together “in the spirit of friendly sporting competition,” even though it’s really just an orgy of political posturing, patriotic chest-thumping, and advertising overload where a corporate logo is slapped on anything that holds still for more than thirty seconds? Bizarre pseudo-sports that no one would even attempt if there wasn’t a chance of pulling a medal out of it? Two weeks of incessant coverage? Whining over partisan judging? Maudlin stories of athletes “doing it for their sick relative”? Performance-enhancing drug scandals? Constant updates of events that feature all the thrilling drama of standing in line at the DMV?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The only time countries meeting up is interesting is when automatic weapons are involved.

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Have you heard about this? My fiancee sent me the link to the site of a guy who was mentioned in Time magazine. Seems Dave Bruno took a good, long look at his life and, feeling weighed down by too many possessions, has decided to live one whole year with only one hundred items. That’s it. One year, one hundred items. Now, this, to me, is the definition of insanity. I’m a tech junkie and a stuff whore. One year with only a hundred things? Madness. Couldn’t do it. I’m all ready to be impressed by Dave’s fortitude, and then I visit his site and discover that he’s basically full of crap.

This guy has so many loopholes and cop-outs in his “challenge” that he’s not giving up anything. To start, anything “family” or “household” doesn’t count. So any and all furniture—couch, chairs, bed, tables, even the piano—and apparently the TV, stereo, VCR, DVD player, and everything in the kitchen all get to stay. Talk about roughing it. Next, only his personal items are being purged, nothing his wife or daughter owns. So he still has access to all his wife’s stuff. Needs to borrow her car? He can. Realizes one month down the road he got rid of something he needs? Use hers. Hardcore, dude!

But it gets better. One of my first thoughts when I considered living with one hundred things was my books. I’ve got a lot of books. The fiancee has even more. It would be extremely hard to part with those. Well, Dave thought so, too. His solution? Books don’t count. They’re simply not part of the challenge. He says he “might” pare them down but they’re “not a focus.” I also worried about my collectibles and memorabilia. Dave’s solution? Why, he gets to keep them! All of them! Woodworking tools, family heirlooms, his model train sets, they all get to stay. But he’s going to put them in a box he can’t open for a year. You are just sacrificing left and right, Dave! Oh, and anything in a “group” like socks and underwear counts as one item, no matter how many individual items he actually has.

But here’s the best. He comes right out and says this in the opening: “I get to set the rules and decide when a rule can be stretched or outright broken. Basically I’m going by the spirit of the challenge not the letter of the challenge.” So, essentially, if it gets hard or he doesn’t like it or he sees something he really wants, well, he can just change the rules. Can’t get by with one hundred things? Ahhh, make it one-fifty. Still in the spirit, right?

So, Dave was so disgusted by his cluttered lifestyle that he’s rebelling by living in a fully furnished house (with piano!), with a completely stocked kitchen and loaded bookshelves, while keeping all the personal items he doesn’t use everyday in a box for a year. Wow. Inspiring. Way to declutter your life, which, I believe, was the whole point of the endeavor, right? Or were you just looking for a little publicity?

You want to see people truly living with only one hundred things? Visit any college dorm in the country. You’ll find dozens of them. I’m willing to bet I spent my dorm years with about one hundred items to my name. Less if empty pizza boxes don’t count. Better yet, check any alley in Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. You’ll find a lot of people there living with far fewer than one hundred items.

But they’re not going to get into Time for it.

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The fiancee and I went to see The Dark Knight in IMAX on Monday night. 9:15PM show and it was a sell-out crowd. Great movie, by the way. Recommend you go, and see it in IMAX if at all possible. Anyway, the movie gets done, the credits start to roll, and, I swear, at least one hundred people immediately flipped open their cell phones as one to see who might have possibly tried to call them or text them during the two hours when they were—gasp!—not reachable by cell phone!

What is this? Are you all doctors on call? Do you have some huge business deal pending at midnight on a Monday? Expecting a call from your lawyer about that escrow account closing? Folks, you don’t need to be in constant contact with each other twenty-four hours a day, especially for the kind of insipid, banal crap most of you seem to be talking about when you take these all-important phone calls while seated next to me in a restaurant. Honestly, are you that starved for attention and contact that you simply must check your cell phone anytime you have to go more than five minutes without being able to answer it?

In fact, you know what? Got a challenge for you cell-phone addicts. For one day, one twenty-four-hour period, turn off your cell phones. Just shut them off. Toss them in a drawer. Leave them at home. No calls. No texts. No email. If you want to be really crazy, the next day, erase all your waiting voice and text messages without listening to or reading them. Just go for twenty-four hours without being reachable at every waking moment for your friends to let you know whatever insignificant thought just crossed their minds.

Call me up and let me know how it goes.

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Our apartment is on the third floor, and offers us a decent view of the swimming pool of a neighboring apartment complex across the street. The other day, there were several people splashing around in the pool, having some summer fun. The sky started to turn dark as a storm began to brew in the west. I love a good thunderstorm and settled in at the window to watch it roll in. The swimmers swam on, unwilling to give up their fun for the threat of bad weather. There was a grumble of thunder. Soon, rain started to fall. Not a torrential downpour, just a good, steady rain.

At this point, the bathers clambered out of the pool and, still dripping, stretched their towels over their heads as makeshift umbrellas and dashed for their cars. And I had to wonder: Why? You were just swimming, you’re already drenched, and here you are scurrying under cover so you don’t get—what? More wet? I can understand wanting to get out of a large body of standing water in a thunderstorm, but there had been no lightning, and I sincerely doubt the towels would have helped a bit if there had. This was all about the rain.

So people who had been completely submerged a moment before were now attempting to not be dampened further by small droplets of water on their way to getting in their cars where they would sit and not be rained on, but remain wet. I don’t know, maybe the PH balance of that pool is way off or something.

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Our apartment is on the third floor, and offers us a decent view of the swimming pool of a neighboring apartment complex across the street. The other day, there were several people splashing around in the pool, having some summer fun. The sky started to turn dark as a storm began to brew in the west. I love a good thunderstorm and settled in at the window to watch it roll in. The swimmers swam on, unwilling to give up their fun for the threat of bad weather. There was a grumble of thunder. Soon, rain started to fall. Not a torrential downpour, just a good, steady rain.

At this point, the bathers clambered out of the pool and, still dripping, stretched their towels over their heads as makeshift umbrellas and dashed for their cars. And I had to wonder: Why? You were just swimming, you’re already drenched, and here you are scurrying under cover so you don’t get—what? More wet? I can understand wanting to get out of a large body of standing water in a thunderstorm, but there had been no lightning, and I sincerely doubt the towels would have helped a bit if there had. This was all about the rain.

So people who had been completely submerged a moment before were now attempting to not be dampened further by small droplets of water on their way to getting in their cars where they would sit and not be rained on, but remain wet. I don’t know, maybe the PH balance of that pool is way off or something.

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George Carlin, one of my comedy heroes, died Sunday of heart failure. He was 71.

I’ve always connected with Carlin, enjoying his cynical view of the world, his examination of language, and his skewering of everyday life. Carlin had the comedic gift of showing you something you’d seen, said, or done countless times before and saying, “Okay, but now look at it like this.” And from that new angle, you saw it in an entirely new way, one which was more often than not ridiculous. And you couldn’t help but laugh.

The good comedians make you laugh. The great ones make you think while you’re doing it. Carlin was one of the greats.

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The fiancée and I went out to dinner the other night. Nothing fancy, just hit the Olive Garden for some breadsticks and pasta. Beats cooking. So we did our wait in the lobby and finally the little buzzer thingie went off to let us know our table was ready. They took us in the back and gave us a booth. As we sat down, I noticed a couple sitting in the booth behing my fiancée. Nothing remarkable, just noted there were people there.

So we look at the menus, pick our dishes, start devouring salad and breadsticks. I’m talking to the fiancé and, looking past her head, I notice that the man seated behind her, with his back to us, has an iPod-style earpiece in his ear. I roll my eyes, figuring he’s one of those cell-phone douches who never takes his combo earpiece and mic off in case he has an important call and can’t be bothered to stop shoveling food into his face before disrupting everyone else’s dinner. But at least he’s not talking into it now. In fact… he’s not talking at all. I realize he hasn’t said a word to his companion the entire time we’ve been here.

Now I’m intrigued. I keep an eye on the duo and, sure enough, neither of them are talking. Understand, this isn’t some elderly couple who have been married for nine hundred years, heard each other’s stories over and over, and just have nothing else to say to one another while waiting for death. This is a youngish, mid-30s couple who should still have lots to talk about. Yet here they are, at dinner, completely ignoring each other. Looking closer, I see that he’s not wearing a single cell-phone earpiece, but a pair of earphones. Is he listening to his iPod at dinner? In a restaurant? Man, his wife must be super-peeved. Wait… I can see, barely through her long hair, that she’s wearing headphones, too. These two came out to dinner just to listen to music?

Now that shows the problem with jumping to conclusions. I had the situation totally wrong. Turns out they did not come to a restaurant just to listen to personal music players. They actually came to Olive Garden to watch movies. By craning my neck a bit, I could see that they were both watching movies, he on a PSP, she on an iPod. Each person was holding their device in one hand and eating with the other. And I had to wonder: Why? Why would you go out to a semi-decent restaurant, with a loved one, and then just stare at an electronic screen the entire night? Why not just order dinner to go and eat in front of the TV if you’re so desperate to watch something? Could they just not agree on what movie to watch? Can you be so tired of someone’s company that you can’t even suffer through a single dining experience without an electronic diversion?

They left slightly before we did, having never spoken a single word to each other. The waitress even had to wave to get their attention when it came time to pay the check. I watched them walk out, no longer staring at their devices, but still wearing their headphones and not speaking. I reached across the table and took my fianceée’s hand. She smiled back at me and we were quiet for a while, too.

Somehow, that was okay.

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Let me just make sure I got this straight:

If someone dresses up in Hobbit robes, wears Klingon makeup, or sits in line overnight for tickets to the next Star Wars movie, they’re automatically a basement-dwelling geek with no life and deserving of ridicule for their fascination with an imaginary universe.

If someone dresses up in an official Dallas Cowboys football outfit, paints their face up in the Cubs’ colors, or sits in line overnight for tickets to the next Lakers game, they’re a man’s man with a healthy interest in sports and deserving of admiration for their loyalty and devotion to the team.

And these two things are nothing alike. Is that how that works?

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Attention cell-phone slaves: The standard ring-tone that came with your phone is annoying enough. You do not need to compound the misery of those around you by loading more cutesy, “individuality-defining” sounds and songs onto the accursed devices. I do not need to be subjected to the theme from The Sound of Music that sounds like it’s being played by a musical greeting card. The original tune was bad enough.

And under no circumstances should any classical piece of music be used by a cell phone for any reason. If modern-day songwriters want to allow their creations to be bastardized into those hideous beeps to gain even more wealth off their mediocre talents, let them. But Beethoven’s Fifth is entirely inappropriate as a precursor to one of your friends calling to find out if you want to go hoist some brewskis later.

So leave your phones set to their factory ring settings. Or better yet, just leave them off.

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I find it hard to take anyone seriously who uses the phrase “super-duper” in a conversation.

Also, “rinky-dink.”

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