I always get psyched for The Olympics and it never lets me down, especially when I see athletes being good sports and shaking hands after tough games. I’m not kidding — that’s the kind of attitude the world needs more of, instead of all the flag-waving and wearing of the flag as a cape. I mean, enough, you already get a medal.

I totally have Post-Olympics-fever fever now because Bob Costas1 or Al Michaels2 or Ryan Seacrest3 on NBC-TV on my TV said it’s only like 18 months until the next Olympics, which is gonna be the Winter Olympics in Russia, in this place called Sochi, and except for Boxing, which for some reason I always think is in the Summer Olympics,4 I like the next Olympics better, the Winter ones, mostly at this point because there’s no Beach Volleyball to hog up all the Regular-TV time. Downhill Skiing, man, that shit is 100% Pure Adrenaline! The Giant Slalom! The Super G! Speeds up to 80mph, and it’s nothing but a Human Being on skis! I think the Luge is dopey, I mean why not have Ice-sailing or Tobogganing outdoors down a real hill and not on a super-dangerous manmade track? But I still say Winter Olympics is the Best.

In the Summer Olympics, checking out all the killer Athleto-bods is part of the Spectacle and Pageantry, and there’s lots of satisfying semi-nudity in the swimming and diving and stuff, especially in the diving with the new Showering part? Against that wall? Jeez. But with respect to the Sport, even the players in the Beach Volleyball know their outfits are part of the Appeal, but of course the other reason there was so much Sand-Volleyball on Television was they (The National Broadasting Company, which didn’t have as much stuff or as much different stuff on Regular TV as they shoulda) figured the USA Womens team that won twice before, which is pretty crazy, because they started eight years ago,5 was gonna get another Gold Medal — and they did, bless their sandy butt cracks.6

Hey, what about Beach Sand Luge? They could make a giant Sand Castle Luge course and hose it down to make it all slide-y, and then put people with Athletic Bodies on Luges and hose ’em down while they are sliding along the Luge-track in bathing suits?

I enjoy watching the regular Volleyball, but Sandball volleyball is OK, I mean, it is a game being played against an Opponent.

The most ridiculous (besides having a horse in the Olympics) is this Rhythmic Gymnastics. Anything can be a Sport, as long as it can be evaluated, right? I watched some Rhythmic Gymnastics featuring a team of five ladies who were moving around very precisely and Gymnastically and tossing balls up into the air, and it was pretty cool, and certainly a remarkable display of skill, the way they could throw the ball wa-aaaaay up in the air and catch it with their feet, and all throw the ball at the same time and then do some tumbling stuff and catch the ball, but it looked mostly like dancing, which is great, but I don’t think it really works as a Sport. It’s something I would applaud in Vegas, you know? If I got a Package Deal to the Wynn or the Bellagio or someplace (realistically, probably the Tropicana, though) and it included tickets to the Rhythmic Gymnastics? I would go and check it out. It’s like that Cirque du Soleil stuff, which is also mostly about getting horned-up over fit bodies. I never saw one, just the ads on the bus for the “Zumanity” one, of the Cirque. But hey, howabout those STOMP people at the closing ceremonies doing all that STOMPing, rhythmically? That shit is Athletic, why not put it in the Olympics?

I thought the Closing Ceremonies were a little more fun than the Opener, mostly because the athletes and coaches who are left (as in not the ones who are Too Important to stick around when they don’t have an event) got loose and were having fun, so it made the Festivities seem super Festive. They got even more Englisher and had the Spice Girls riding around up on top of Ye Olde English taxicabs, and somehow I think you could make an Olympics Event out of that. I thought each Spice7 was a very accurate and powerful representative of her own Spice-ness. That movie is very underrated, I think, the Spice Girls movie. I thought the thing where they had David Bowie’s song “Fashion” going and people in uniforms were goose-stepping made the moment as creepy as the song, and then when they had a bunch of fashion models walking around showing they all got Gold Medals in Walking, that was something they could have done without, you know? Also that chick Jessie J? One dose of her was enough, then they hadda go and have her sing the Freddie Mercury part on “We Will Rock You?” Annoying. Also that Russell Brand dude sings worse than Gene Wilder.

Also, I started to feel bad because the lady on TV who was talking about the Rhythmic Gymnastics kept referring to the balls they were throwing around as “apparatus,” which makes me think she’s sick of people coming up and going, “Hey, lady, all your sport has is a buncha Pixies and Sprites tossing balls at each other and waving sticks with ribbons on ’em. Why don’t you see if they could strap garbage cans on their feet and dance rhythmically, like they do in that STOMP show, huh? Burrrp!”8

I never saw any of the Table Tennis, which, to me, also sounds like it should be a Winter Olympics event, because usually nobody is really into going down to the rec room in the basement to play Ping-Pong when it’s nice out, so it seems more like a Winter activity, eh? I know it’s not Ping-Pong, it’s Table Tennis, and I’m looking forward to Beach Table Tennis whenever that gets invented. But hands down, the most intense competition-action I saw was the Badminton. Damn, I’m not kidding. Spend a few minutes on a doubles match, that shit is 100% pure adrenaline, seriously.

I just wanted to mention Al Michaels again. 9

1 I think what’s going on up there on top of his head is a combo of some sort of hair coloring, plus one of those operations where they take the hair off your back or neck and put it on your head, plus a large quantity of hairspray. The biggest problem I think is the color, because it’s kind of all pretty much the same color on top, but then it’s way light-browner at the sideburns and it’s just not a good transition. It’s just like the Floor Exercise, you know? You gotta have smooth transitions.

2 He looks like he basically is going with what he’s got, but then maybe a little Just For Men and then definitely plus a hellas-whole-lotta hairspray.

3 He has good hair but I really didn’t need him at the Closing Ceremony telling me they were going to darken the mood or whatever when they were darkening the mood, you know? Some day, maybe already, on your TV you will be able to have the live sound of a Sporting Event (in this case a Musical Event) and then be able to filter out the bonehead announcer who talks all over the intro of a live performance of a song and ruins it like he’s a goddamn radio deejay.

4 It is totally in the Summer Olympics. I always forget.

5 All the announcers were constantly reminding me that the Olympics is every Four Years, so if somebody won last time, it meant they won four years ago, and if they won before that, they were really fucking old, in Athlete Years, which are way harsher than Dog Years.

6 There’s no spoilers of Olympics, mostly because almost all the Olympics was five hours ahead of when it was on TV here.

7 I made a joke on the Twitter about Old Spice, but I think the moment has passed.

8 I swear that was not me saying that stuff to her. I respect the athleticism of the Rhythmic Gymnasts, I just don’t get how it’s a sport when they don’t have Horseshoes or Bocce at the Olympics. Because that’s where the Winter Olympics beats Summer, man: Curling.

9 Because when they were all talking about the Winter Olympics, Bob Costas starts trying to crack on Al Michaels, telling him he needs to be prepared and he needs to buy some Winter clothes, but Michaels totally touchés his fake-hair-looking ass and says he thinks it’s a resort city, so he’s guessing the Wintry action is up in the mountains, and he’s right, man, Sochi is totally a Subtropical climate with mild winters, like 50 fahrenheit. Plus it means my man Al is gonna party at the resort, and maybe catch a Rhythmic Gymnastics show.

Previously: Let’s Declare War On The Weather

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias.

You can all stop writing your kids’ college essays and letting them live at home till 26 now and telling your friends that they’re doing great, because someone finally took gold in “making excuses for your kid.”

Police said a 14-year-old stole a car on Sunday then led officers on a chase that ended in a crash on a Parkway East ramp…. “My son was wrong for taking that vehicle but someone jumped out of their car and a 14-year-old seen the opportunity to take the car. He didn’t break the car to steal it. They left the keys in the car. I think as an adult we have some type of ownership to being responsible for our vehicles,” the boy’s mother said.

Okay, Paul Ryan. Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker profile highlighted a disturbing Ayn Rand devotion (minus the atheism of course). Meanwhile, the gawky Wisconsin wonk says he has the Dead, Zeppelin, Metallica and “a lot of grunge” on his iPod. (Is he reminding anyone else of Timothy Simons on HBO’s “Veep”?) It’s safe to assume that “Anthem” is his jam from Rush. Anyway, here’s to him costing Romney Florida.

“I think it’s essential to have similarities. When this whole life is done, and it’s just the two of us sitting somewhere when we’re 80, you want to have things to talk about that you have in common. I think that’s something maybe I didn’t value as highly as a quality I cared about in someone.”
 — Some relationship advice from Kanye’s life partner.

★★★ The cool morning breeze gradually lost its coolness, till there was no point letting it in through the window anymore. The midday heat outside pressed down lightly but insistently. Unto it were bared, variously and without particular regard for age or gender: shoulders, breastbones, the thoracic spine down unto the lumbar. Tanned, ruddied, freckled, blotched — the sun’s accomplishments of the season, or of the years. His-and-hers tank tops. Wear them while you can. By evening, it was cool again.

What could make the world’s mildest-mannered blogger erupt into shouting and profanity? The answer — the AP story “Rich toddlers draw fashion designers’ eyes” — may not surprise you.

Ok. I just got a bill of $197,000.00 for my neck surgery. This is a typo, right? RIGHT?

— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) August 13, 2012

And how was your weekend in healthcare?

“There is almost nothing better for your work than having someone cook and clean for you who is neither a relative nor someone you’re sleeping with.”

(iTunes)

by Damion Searls

A new translation of Nostradamus has just been published — though if you’re a real fan you already knew that! Actually, this is the first time we’ve had access to the real thing: the prophecies that launched a thousand crackpots, in all their trippy medieval weirdness, taken seriously as poetry, translated by a great Guggenheim-winning translator, and decked out with essays and notes to give us half a chance of understanding what the hell is going on. But let’s just flip through randomly, shall we?

Life & death changing Hungary’s regime,
The law far harsher than mere loyalty :
Their capital shall ring with howls, pleas, screams :
Castor Pollux in the lists as enemies.

Above the solar city, the royal bird,
Nocturnal omen, seven months before :
Thunder & lightning, the Eastern wall sheared,
Seven days to the hour, foe at the door.

They’re all like that, almost a thousand four-line blips of disturbingly specific vague futures, plus a sweet six-page dedication to his baby son.

Every time there’s one that sounds like something from the world we live in:

One of the fairer sex, captured hostage,
Shall manage to elude her guards at night :
Camp commander, deceived by her language,
Succumbs to the wench, such a sorry sight.

it’s followed by:

Geneva, Langres, led captive to Montélimar
By those of Chartres & Grenoble & Dole,
Seyssel & Lausanne, shall defraud them all
With a ruse costing sixty marks in gold.

Here’s the Hitler one, since you asked:

Beasts wild with hunger shall swim the rivers :
Most of the host shall move against Hister :
He’ll have the great one dragged in iron cage,
When the child the German Rhine surveys.

“Ister,” spelled “Hister” in old French, is the Latin name for the Danube River. Whatevs.

The Nostradamus book you really want to know about is his other book, The True & Perfect Embellishment of the Face, & The Manner of Making Confitures: Nostradamus cold creams, love potions, recipes for jams and make-up. It kind of makes sense, if you picture a 16th-century apothecary and herbalist practicing medicine along with casting horoscopes.

The whole thing is scanned online, if your Old French is up to it. Here are some recipes in English, for perfect nutmeg oil; powder for cleaning and whitening the teeth (step one: “Take three drams each of crystal, flint, white marble, glass and calcined rock salt, two drams each of cuttlefish bone and calcined sea-snail shells, half a dram each of fragmented pearls, two drams of bright riverbed stones (which form little white pebbles), one scruple of amber and twenty-two grains of musk, and grind them down thoroughly on a painter’s marble slab”); another more excellent method for cleaning the teeth, this one using blue clay; how to make the hair golden blond (lye!); how to make a jam or preserve with heart-cherries; very fine sugar candy; marzipan; and laxative rose syrup.

For adventurous readers, here is how to make a quince jelly of superb beauty, goodness, flavour and excellence fit to set before a King, and which lasts a good long time:

Take whatever quinces you like, as long as they are fully ripe and yellow.

Cut them up into quarters without peeling them (for those who peel them do not know what they are doing, since the skin enhances the smell), and divide each quarter into five or six pieces.

Remove the seeds, because the fruit will turn into jelly perfectly well without them.

As you are cutting them up, place them in a basin full of water, for unless they are plunged into water the moment they are cut up they will turn black.

Once they are cut up, boil them in a good quantity of water until they are well done, almost to the point of shrivelling up.

When they have boiled thoroughly, strain this liquid through a thick piece of new linen and squeeze the whole preparation through it as hard as you can.

Then take this decoction, and if there are six pounds of it, take one and a half pounds of Madeira sugar and put it into the decoction, and bring it to the boil over a gentle charcoal fire until you see that towards the end, it is reducing in volume considerably.

Then damp the fire down, so that it does not burn at the sides — which would give a bad colour to the jelly.

Then, when it is nearly done, and so as to know when it is done perfectly, take some of it with a spatula or silver spoon and put it on a platter, and if you see that when it has cooled it comes off as a globule, without sticking either here or there, then it is done.

Take it off the fire and wait for the scum on the top to settle, then pour the still-hot liquid into small wooden or glass containers.

And if you want to write or gouge something on the bottom of the container, you can do so, for it will be seen easily [through the jelly].

For the colour will be as diaphanous as an oriental ruby.

So excellent will the colour be — and the taste even more so — that it may be given to sick and healthy alike.

(Recipe translation © Peter Lemesurier 2000)

Related: How To Make 17th-Century Delights: Whipp’d Syllabub

Damion Searls is currently writing a biography of Hermann Rorschach and cultural history of the Rorschach Test.