Game Of Parmistan Rhetorical Analysis

Every four years, the world's greatest athletes gather for the ultimate test of skill and strength: the Game of Parmistan. OK, no. They gather for the Summer Olympics. And, like some bizarre divorce settlement, every alternate even year provides us the Winter Olympics. An event which, no matter how much people (including myself) enjoy it, still has a "red-headed stepchild" quality to it. There's a little less fanfare, a little less promotion, and the athletes are a little less known (excluding "Flying Tomato" Shaun White, who really needs to cut his fucking hair now, OK?). However, this doesn't dampen my enjoyment of the games.

Firstly, why am I a fan of the Winter Olympics? I am not a sports-inclined guy at all; all I really know about

With other sports, you're in it for what, six months a year? I'm sorry, I can only lose so much time wondering which way Kobe's PPG average is going this season. But seventeen days I can do. It's the athletic equivalent of a short story anthology: characters are introduced, boiled down to one main conflict, they succeed or fail from there, and the story ends (for our purposes). Any necessary background is provided by the commentators, so you don't need to do the research. Lindsey Vonn is fighting against injury, Bode Miller came back from a hubristic fall, and Shaun White needs to cut his fucking hair. Sorry, but you get my

I am convinced that two-thirds of the events at the Winter Olympics were invented simply to fill out time there. The Summer Games have their share of oddities, but the Winter Games have curling and the biathlon. Curling is usually the go-to sport to ridicule as silly, since it's shuffleboard on ice with brooms. But the biathlon is amazing. If you don't know, the biathlon is a round of cross-country skiing, followed by a round of target shooting. With a gun. So you watch a bunch of guys in onesies and mirrored shades ski through a snow maze, then drop to the floor to shoot small targets with a rifle, then get up and repeat this procedure. It's the ravings of a lunatic made manifest. If it were the Summer Games, it would be Michael Phelps with a crossbow. In the Conservatory.

But, my wife and I watch them, and get really involved. Sunday, during the finals for biathlon, we watched one guy screw up on the shooting portion, and she said something like, "He's going too slow. He keeps messing up, he'll be too busy doing penalty laps to make it up." And I told her, "Fifteen minutes ago, you didn't know this sport existed! Who are you,