Olympic Meddling

If Memory Swerves™, ‘twas on this day in history (July 28, 2012) that the Opening Ceremony of the XXXYZ Olympic Games in London commenced, with Yours Truly Dooley® on hand in an honourary police capacity. The Olympics, as I understand, date back to the B.C. era (Before Chlorination) and take their name from Mount Olympus, a lavish water park and rock climbing wall on the Greek Aisles™, site of the first organized games, where beefy male cragsmen competed in “races” up a slippery, marbled slope — the original "slippery slope" — stopping intermittently to engage in fierce Greco-Roman wrasslin' matches (pictured below) for supremacy and reward — which is to say, a lifetime supply of Greek yogurt. The Winter Olympics would follow in the A.D. era (Astronomy Domine) and saw Jamaican bobsledders “lunging” down a faux snow-covered toboggan slide at treacherously high speeds, often hurtling into the car park to their deaths, much to the delight of the crowd. But that was then and this was not then — this was here and now! — where we witnessed sheer British exceptionalism on display from a patrol perch in Olympic Park or Stadium on an evening that brought a tear to my eye and a stirring — or rather, stiffening — to my loins. Knowing that the world was watching — in family rooms, wearing matching pajamas of their nations, huddled around high-definition, rent-to-own, 55-inch plasma televisions —made one proud to wear the police-issue Union Jack boxer shorts distributed at the station house the week prior, and almost made one forget the parade of British embarrassments on the world stage at the time, such as T-shirted dream crusher Simon Cowell, blabbering longhair Russell Brand, artsy fartsy public exhibitionist Banksy, standup curiosity Eddie Izzard, soup 'n sandwich bully Gordon Ramsey, dieting office floozy Renee Zellwegger, married annoyances the Osbornes and Beckhams, home-wrecking wife of royalty Camilla Bowles, cockney-accented resident-but-not-a-citizen Madonna Guccione and goofy, one-or-possibly-two-hit wonders Chumbawumba and Kajagoogoo, neither of whom, as I think of it, would have looked out of place in hand-to-hand, foot-to-nutsack team battles at Olympus so many bare-arsed moons ago. All hail — if sometimes fail — Britannia!