Where's My $60?

I finally decided to cave and watch some winter Olympics. The whole thing with China in 2008 still bothers me, but I always watched the Olympics before 2008, and if unacceptable previous hosts made that untenable what about Moscow in 1980 (which America correctly boycotted) and Berlin in 1936?

I still wish the IOC could see the error of its ways and just refuse to consider totalitarian regimes as hosts. Besides the brotherhood of man stuff, those totalitarian hosts always cheat like crazy.

So anyway, I don't like all the sports: I love figure skating, and the luge is fun for one or two runs but all luge slides look pretty much the same to me. Well, except for that shocking fatality, that was just gruesome.

But with the long commercial breaks and with some of the sports not really catering to my ADD, I surf a lot when I'm 'watching the Olympics.' And in this case, I didn't get much Olympics watched because I found the most amazing TV show.

It's an MTV thing called Disaster Date, and they were having a little Valentine's Day marathon of it. It's basically a Candid Camera style thing, with people being set up on blind dates, usually by someone they set up with a clunker. So with tons of insider information, the actors playing the 'date' can basically throw everything their mark tries to avoid at them.

So a woman who hates when someone plays with their food gets set up with a guy who introduces her to Mr. Grapeleaf. A guy who can't stand girls with too much makeup gets a chick who already has a ton of it on and spends the whole date adding more, and insists on drinking her wine through a straw because she just put on fresh lip gloss.

Like I say, they were having a marathon of this show, and I could barely bring myself to flip back to the games because this show is so perfect. The goal is to get the mark to sit through 60 minutes, and they get a dollar for every minute they make it through. A surprisingly large number of people are so reluctant to offend that they make it the whole hour.

Including a guy who's 'date' double booked, invited the second man to join them, and then snuck off with the second man to apparently hook up in the bathroom. She comes back adjusting her clothes and with her hair mussed and tries to stick the mark with the check for all three of them.

Then, thinking of a few of the dates I've been on since the divorce, I want a dollar for every minute of the date with the chick who wouldn't stop texting her friends for 30 seconds. See also the woman who boasted of getting makeovers on two consecutive days and described the intricacies of her bikini wax over dinner. See also the woman who turned out to have a husband in prison.



Anyway, not to be a cynic, I've been on dates that were quite fun, too. And I'm sure I'm the disaster story for a woman or two out there. And just to prove I'm not a cynic, we made pretzels this afternoon and shaped a few like hearts.