Today on the 5: I've done a couple of pretty dismal 5s this week, but I want to make this one something better! As bad as world can be a lot of the time, I've recently found a refuge from miserry: the Olympics!
Ozone Nightmare
Go Watch The Olympics
Welcome to your daily five for Thursday, August 8th, 2024! You know, the last two fives that I've done this week have not exactly been joyful episodes and honestly I don't like doing them. I don't like doing episodes where I'm talking about stuff that makes me angry or upset or I think is detrimental to all of mankind. It's not happy for me. I'm not somebody who enjoys reveling in misery. I really don't. I'd rather be talking about things I like and things going well than that. And so for the last five of this week, let me do exactly that because I have found in the last week and a half or so or whatever it's been at least some measure of offsetting all of this garbage and terribleness and misery that's in the world. And that has been the 2024 Olympics, which I have to say for somebody who has zero athletic interest outside of baseball was never an athlete. Don't know much about any of these sports. Don't really care most of the time about these. Watching the Olympics has been a truly joyful experience. I can't say that the peacock Olympic thing has been the most flawless. I have not had the same problems with some other people have had. There are some weirdly inserted ads, but by and large the fact that I got to watch this at all has just been wonderful because so often in at least the United States, I don't know how it is anywhere else. I can only speak to where I live. So much of sports competition in this country in the end comes down to people that you can tell what other people they're competing about against to fail. There is I mean, almost every sport you will see people that ultimately are just being hateful about their sport that they're and not all of them. But there's a lot of it. I mean, you even see it in kids sports where parents just go out of control because they want their kids to win so badly and they want them to win at the detriment of others. But in the Olympics, there's very at least I haven't seen any of that this year and I can't remember the last time I did where it didn't feel like everybody involved from the competitors to the audience. Everybody just wants to see everybody do as well as they can. Now, of course, the competitors want to be the best in the world. You can understand that the people of their countries that are in the audience want them to do as well as possible and ideally sure to get the gold, but nobody does it with malice. There is this I don't use this word about stuff that I often partake in, but there's this heartwarming quality to it. I was watching, I mean, any number of things, but just recently the pole vaulting thing, which I have no interest in pole vaulting. I really don't. I mean, it looks terrifying to me to try to make a pole hit thing and then not flip yourself over backwards and break your neck. But this guy who a Swedish and I don't remember the name, he is father of an Olympian. He'd already set the world record multiple times and you saw the the other two competitors and I don't know, I think it might have been Norway and the United States. I don't remember. I think it was the Nordic flag. These two people were actively trying to get everybody behind the Swedish individual knowing that they had already lost, but wanting him to keep breaking the world records and he was trying for 6.25 meters. I don't even know what the measurement is, whatever it was, and he failed twice and on his third attempt, he did it and the whole place, the whole stadium just went berserk and it was just this outpouring of happiness. They didn't care whether they were Swedish or not. They didn't care whether their country had come in second, third or not placed. They were just delighted to be in this place, in this arena and see this thing happening and everybody was losing their minds and it was just this purely joyous moment and I was, I was nervous about something I have zero stakes in. I wanted this individual to clear this bar even though it meant nothing to me, not from my country, don't care about the sport, nothing. Just wanted to see somebody who clearly wanted to do the best thing they could actually achieve it and that's such a rarity. There's so little of that I see in the world in general where you just want somebody to do well no matter what and to see other people regardless of where they're from or where they are or anything else wanting to see these people just do as well as they can. Like I said, it's just a nice oasis in what has largely felt like an era of misery and so I would encourage you, if you have not watched the Olympics live, you can go watch the replays, I don't know how long peacocks gonna leave them up but as far as I know you can go watch them at least for a while, go watch some of these things, go watch these people competing and just being friendly to each other and not wanting to tear each other down and seeing people cheering for everybody whether they're from their country or not, it's just nice to see it. It's just something that we don't get a lot of often and honestly we could probably use more of. We only get this every four years, maybe we should have it more often or something of its equivalent because it has just been so nice to watch something that is people competing and competing in a way that is friendly and good-natured and encouraging. So again, if you've been sleeping on the Olympics and you just want to get a break from all the misery, go find it, go watch it because honestly, it's a wonderful thing to experience and everybody should experience it later.