The Olympics and Other Horrors

Okay, yes, it was my fault that the propane ran out before I ordered a refill. It was not my fault, though, that the internet went down, forcing me to watch a bit of the Olympics.

I checked the propane tank early last week and the gauge suggested there was about 10 percent left. In that I last had it filled at the end of September, I thought that 10 percent would get me through the cold wave that was underway, with temperatures falling to -10 Fahrenheit or lower each night. I had figured with everything so cold, the gas company would be busy with real emergencies and I didn’t want to get in the way with what I figured would be a routine delivery. Frankly, hearing the stories out of Ukraine, where the satanic Putin and his orc-ish demons are trying to freeze the population to death, I felt I had little room to complain.

On Monday morning when I awakened to a 50-degree living room I learned that my estimate of the BTUs I’d get from 10 percent of a 500-gallon tank had been overly optimistic. (Though I was still better off than the poor Ukrainians.)

I have an unusual relationship with the gas company, as do some others here. Each July there is a propane sale. You can buy pretty much all you want at the low summer price and have it delivered as needed through the winter. So I still had some that was paid for but not delivered. I’d hedged my bets a little this year; maybe Trump was telling the truth and gas prices would fall, in which case propane would be cheaper now than it was in July, so I didn’t order enough. It is never wise to bet that Donald Trump is telling the truth. I had to order some now at the current, higher price.

I phoned the gas company early Monday morning, and I expect the delivery real soon now. Fortunately, the weather has moderated and I have some space heaters.

Tuesday I awakened to the discovery that the internet and phone service were out. Frontier Communications is not a reliable outfit and, in my experience, it hasn’t been for more than a decade. When I paid my bill this month I was reminded that Frontier has been bought by Verizon, a much bigger unreliable company. The service is no better but the price has been raised by a third.

If I’d had internet, I would have phoned right there and then and ordered Starlink, the Elon Musk SpaceX satellite internet company. It seems to have become more reliable and it certainly has become cheaper. Through a very inexpensive third-party internet phone company, I’d even be able to keep the phone number that I’ve had for lo, these 21 years.

Tuesday night the internet was back, but I’m starting to have renewed doubts about Musk and his companies. The reason is that beginning Tuesday evening anything I posted to former Twitter, now X, would not be sent and this message would appear: “This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can’t complete this action right now. Please try again later.” I did a search online and found that this is a common issue among those of us who are neither automatons nor spamists. The rumor — I cannot confirm it — is that this common occurrence seems to happen especially to those who do not hold Donald Trump in high regard (though that doesn’t narrow it down much, does it). I’m not going to pull the plug on the reprehensible Verizon until I’m sure that Starlink is not subject to the Musky whims of those who might be cranky that the DOGE jobs they hoped for never materialized. Musk is a genius, but he is also nuts, with the emotional maturity and temperament of his sometime pal Trump.

The reason I was desperate to get the internet back was an astoundingly well researched and damning series of reports published this week in National Review by the brilliant, serious, and experienced lawyer and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy. It lays out strong evidence of organized crime, bribery, pardon-selling, and conceivably treason committed by Donald Trump, his bag man Steve Witkoff, and their respective sons as well as a group of internet finance grifters both here and abroad. It is stunning. Being complicated and not actually involving celebrity gossip, it was not covered by the part of the press critical of Trump. It certainly wasn’t covered by the Fox Trump Network (on whose airwaves I do not expect to see McCarthy anymore). If you subscribe, you can read it here, here, here, here, and here.

I very much hope that as a public service NR frees the series from the paywall, because if it were widely read the voices demanding Trump’s impeachment, and the trial, conviction, and imprisonment of the others, would be deafening. Yes, Biden and his son were as corrupt as all get out. Trump’s criminal enterprise is orders of magnitude greater. It turns out that everything you suspected about Trump doesn’t even begin to tell the story. And anything Richard Nixon did was failure to leave a tip by comparison.

I’d hoped to summarize McCarthy’s reportage and analysis, but until last night I didn’t have the final two parts thanks to Verizon d/b/a Frontier.

Instead, with only local television, all I had were various syndicated judge shows and . . . the Olympics.

The first Olympics I remember at all were in 1960, about which what I chiefly remember was the name Wilma Rudolph. People were excited about the Olympics that year because it was televised. As a tiny kid, I was puzzled that for a while there was nothing but the Olympics and then it was gone, I was told, for four years. We had by 1964 endured the 17-year cicadas, so I guessed that this was like the 4-year athletes. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line when you’re a kid.

By the time the Olympics returned I was mystified at how, and wondered why, generally sane grownups would spend hours sitting in front of the television watching it. That question remains today, maybe even more so. The one exception in my mind is curling, a game so silly that it was the very essence of the Olympics to me. It has become popular since I discovered it 20 or so years ago, but my affection for it was ironic while I believe that there are people who like it for real.

Mostly I’ve not paid attention to the Olympics. There are times when we’re forced to, of course, such the 1972 Munich games, where Palestinians (you remember, the people for whom one-time professional victim Carrie Prejean made an ass of herself the other day) attacked and killed 11 Israelis. Eight years later came the “miracle on ice,” when the U.S. defeated the U.S.S.R. at hockey, which apparently mattered to some. Hockey has never much appealed to me and it was strange that we were celebrating as if we had defeated the Russians at something important. Later I visited Lake Placid, site of the alleged miracle, and was saddened at how 20 years later the place, which is pretty enough, seemed to be coasting on its fading Olympics glory. I think they could get more mileage out of The Lady in the Lake.

A notable Olympics milestone was in 1994, when the American figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked by a thug hired by one Jeff Gillooly. He was not angry over having a last name that sounded like Australian slang but instead because he was married to another American figure skater, Tonya Harding, and he or they figured Tonya would do better in the competition if Nancy had broken legs. We’ll never know, because the thug failed to break her legs, Kerrigan won the silver medal and almost won the gold, and Tonya failed in her effort to establish the sport of armed combat figure skating. It sounds like the kind of thing that would appeal to Donald Trump and his followers. He might want to get right on that. Perhaps he could resign to pursue that dream.

There have been a lot of scandals, which were sometimes more interesting than the games themselves. They were summed up nicely in the depiction of the East German Women’s team in the (very funny) movie “Top Secret.”

As in the movie, the biggest noise lately has been men pretending to be women, and here it is shown most of all how times have changed. It was 54 years ago that Islamists were thought criminals when they attacked and murdered Israeli athletes. But just 52 years later, an Algerian man was able to beat the stuffing out of female Olympics boxing opponents and he was given a gold medal for it. (Oopsy, last week it came out, so to speak, that yeah, he’s a guy.)

So it may have been a good idea the Greeks had, when they held their Olympics while naked. Additionally, if that practice were adopted now it could get heterosexual men interested in at least some of the figure skating. (Perennial commentator Dick Button, a figure skating champion and father of children, died last year just a day after the Potomac River air collision that killed many from the Skating Club of Boston, some of whom were friends of his. He was 95. Those of us made to endure Olympics figure skating as children found him to be a likable presence.)

From the dab of the Olympics I was forced to watch Tuesday — figure skating, dammit! — I saw that like everything else it has become commercialized into more an attempt at entertainment than a celebration of sporting excellence.

Maybe I’d better give Elon a call after all. I don’t want to risk that kind of experience again.

But I see that the gas truck has come and refilled the propane tank, so first it’s time for my first shower since Sunday.

Of course, it’s nearly warm outside now. So the threats of death from freezing, and from exposure to figure skating, are both greatly diminished.