So the 2014 Winter Olympic games are soon to begin in Sochi, Russia;-yawn, yawn!

In my less-than-humble opinion the only activity in the Winter Games that can be legitimately called a sport is the hockey tournament; here at least there is a bunch of burly guys crashing into each other and aiming to thump an invisible object into a goal. The rest of the yawn, yawn is about who can slide down a mountain a nanosecond faster than anybody else, or a bunch of scantily-clad young ladies prancing around on the ice. Not that I have anything against scantily-clad lasses throwing their legs in the air mind you, but let’s not dignify it by calling it a sport, much less an Olympic one; for me skating is as much a sport as is synchronized swimming, an activity also performed by scantily-clad young ladies throwing their legs into the air-must be a connection here. Speaking of synchronized swimming leads me into the main point, and that is to urge the powers-that-be to rethink the whole Olympic organization. Let us remember that the natural habitat for most of Homo sapiens is terra firma. The large majority of us do not live, work, propagate or expire in water, either the liquid variety or any of its solid manifestations, igloo-dwellers excepted. Given this, I believe that the Olympic body should decide to hold a terra firma meeting and a non-terra firma one. The terra firma one should comprise the games that are played on our natural habitat, viz., land, and will include the track and field and ball sports, i.e. the real ones. These could be the summer games. The liquid and solid water activities could be lumped together and held at some other time, preferably during long periods of TV blackout. I realize that the inclusion of the huge swimming and diving program into the frozen water events would cause scheduling problems, so I recommend that swimming events should be limited to one type of arm action, perhaps freestyle, the one that we used to call the crawl. After all, to have four stroke styles for every distance borders on the comical; imagine Usain Bolt running in four different styles in track, such as forwards, backwards, hopping and waving his arms in the air! I understand that limiting swimming to a single style would reduce the number of medals that the USA would win, but what the heck, they have been milking it for long enough. Speaking of the icy stuff, I would like to report that the weather here of late has been most non-Floridian. Since the turn of the year we have been having our very own mini-polar vortex and the temperatures during my sunrise walking spells have been in the mid-30s; decidedly chilly. However, it is hard to complain when I see that Tom K and my other chums in BG and the girls in the Windy City are down at 0F and less. My Yahoo weather app tells me that the daytime HIGH in BG next Tuesday will be -2F, definitely Siberian, and not for the likes of me, thank you.