On a lighter note

Away with the idea of being a killjoy - is the OLympics really about being joyous? - the American swimmer Phelps is being lauded in the Guardian and MSM generally for eating around six times the ordinary person eats. All this in order to swim. Swimming is a pleasant enough activity (in a pond or a river somewhere etc.) but reduced to speed, brutality and competiveness it is an odiously tedious spectacle. Also the ends, a little gold medal standing on a podium singing the national anthem, are futile.

Now, after taking that into consideration think of the food crisis currently affecting millions in the world. One person eats six times the normal amount of food - fthat is, 'normal' for the west - in order to splash about and feel good whilst millions go without food altogether.

Phelps is just one person, of course, but his pointless consumption is tasteless in the extreme but par for the course in the US and symbolic of its decadance and decline.