SPORTS! Sports sports sports sports sports! I do love sports, I really do, but in the same way I love Strictly but can't even be tangentially arsed with Dancing On Ice, so do I feel with The Shitty Winter Olympics. While I watched the London 2012 Opening Ceremony with goosebumps and the odd manly tear welling, I watched the inevitably ironically camp Sochi ceremony out of the corner of a distracted eye, even missing that choir singing Get Lucky.
Not even the nostalgic/sexy violin appeal of Vanessa Mae declaring for Thailand's skiing team (?!), or the groovy dancing of American lugers has been enough to pique my interest. While some viewers are similarly indifferent, others are actively offended, as the BBC commentary has been considered, among other things, bombastically jingoistic. Non-British football fans who watch UK TV have argued that for years.
Inclement weather is sort of relied upon for the Shitty Winter Olympics, but not so much for Premier League football, where some games fell victim to the current splonge of awful weather (splonge being the offical collective term in this instance) but a waterlogged pitch is small beer for the people living in a saturated Somerset and other places so drenched. Phil Hammond was the latest to go round looking concerned, and got a whomping from a woman in a hi-viz vest. So bad is the flooding and the tension around the response that headlines are starting to get biblical, as the phrase "Floods Rift" was revived this week for the first time since the Exodus Examiner covered Moses' nifty Red Sea parting.
If the mismanagement of a natural disaster looks embarrassing though, spare a thought for the poor reporter who found out the hard way that Samuel L Jackson and Lawrence Fishburne spell and pronounce their names differently. Or indeed for Dane Bowers, for breaking the world's pathos-o-meter this week by getting a suspended sentence for making a scene in Butlins in Bognor Regis. No further punchline is necessary. Or for Kristen Stewart, whose attempt at poetry (I know right?!) was pilloried. It's a hard and subjective art is poetry (I myself dabble in haiku from time to time) and had it been announced as a lost work of William Carlos Williams it may have been heralded (wiffleball reference notwithstanding) as genius. But what we can all agree on is that this is objectively bad.
And speaking of actors who are just terrible, Shia Le Boeuf won't go away, despite consistently telling us he's leaving. This week's dick move involves a Cantona quote and bags over the head. The only way he could inflict any more awfulness on the world is if he moved in with David Blaine, and MTV made it into a reality show.
Mind you, even that level of awfulness could possibly be trumped by a massive war. This week Donegal Labour Councillor Frank McBrearty cried havoc and let slips the dogs of international incident, when a PSNI Land Rover ended up south of the border in Lifford, the mean streets of which this reporter calls home. And as I or anyone with local knowledge knows, or indeed anyone with access to Google Maps, is that this was much less incursion as it was taking the wrong exit off the roundabout.
If Ireland did find itself with causus belli, then maybe the Olympic medal-winning boxer turned politician Kenn(y)(eth) Egan could emerge as a strong wartime leader. Or failing that, if his posters are anything to go by, a 90's teen sitcom stalwart. Rejected slogans included "Now That's Fresh!, "Yeeeahh Boiii!" and "Shabba!".
As Egan becomes that rarest of things, a boxer hitting the canvas not for monetary gain, if he was looking for ways to ingratiate himself with new Irish people he could look no further than the example of...Will Farrell?! He came to Bundoran in the early nineties and played Trivial Pursuit with the Donegal relatives of his then-girlfriend. I think we all know how he'd diffuse any international incidents. To the Quad!