Michael Phail

Today, I was welcomed to Facebook by a honking banner congratulating Michael Phelps. I’m no fan of his, so I’ll assume that this message went out to, that’s right, every single member of facebook. At least those in the United States, anyway. He’s got some 800,000 fans on his facebok page, and I’m sure he’s got more that haven’t declared their fanhood (is that a word?) on facebook. It doesn’t stop there. Today in World History, we had a class discussion about Mr. Phelps (“Have you seen what he eats for breakfast!?”) for a good quarter of the hour-and-a-half long period. I’ve never been a great fan of sports, I enjoy participating in and watching cycling, though the only biker I could identify is Lance Armstrong, but here’s what confuses me most about Phelps. He was virtually unknown before the 2008 olympics. I think he broke quite a few records, if I’m not mistaken, and would definitely set one in a pie eating contest. For comparison purposes, I did a google search for “world records broken at 2008 olympics.” The first article I could find that seemed a tad legit had this as the third sentence:

 It was unfathomable that Michael Phelps could have possibly done so well and captivated audiences around the world. 

I dug further. Almost all the relevant pages were based entirely in swimming. When did we become so interested in swimming? Last I checked, football was the most american sport; that or baseball.

One last thing that’s been bugging me is the fact that, not too long ago, the good people in America decided to boycott the olympics, due to the fact that China wasn’t doing much to help the tragedy in Darfur. Now as far as I know, China hasn’t changed their policies much, and has instead focused on telling the chinese people what to wear to impress American tourists, and making sure farmers don’t use too much water for their crops, so that there will be enough to feed thirsty tourists. Yet here we are, about a week into the games, and I can’t enter my second period class, without hearing rants about Phelps, “Phants” I like to call them.

Now I’m not quite sure there’s a point to this post, but I kinda needed to get my opinions out there, and am hoping that someone else out there isn’t mesmerized by Phelps’ diet. By the way, ladeez, I can eat a lot too, if that’s what interests you.

Update: Turned off related posts. I’ll lose a bit of traffic, but oh well. Thanks, marcys!