Nude Olympics Draw Big Ratings

m-mmm! Sweet thing, the ratings turned upside down on the Olympic Games from Athens this week, when the IOC voted on new rules allowing contenders to compete nude. It bolstered a flabby start to the Olympics for NBC, and turned the games into a ratings giant as the week went on.

Upon seeing the dry audience response to the Athens games, NBC petitioned the committee for nude competition, anything to pull the crashing Olympics out of the fire. IOC President Jimmy Goldstein approved the decision right away.

"Now it's just like olden times," said Goldstein, straightening his thin tie. "Way back when, the Greeks used to do it nude. Hell, they did everything nude. Which is why I like the Greeks. But now the Olympics is finally the way it was always meant to be. Bare-ass naked."

Some Olympians were quick to reproach the decision, especially the chubby Eastern European weightlifters, but most came around for a shot at winning the much-sought Olympic gold. NBC has continued showing the Games, much to the chargin of the FCC, with the charge that the human body is a beautiful thing. Still, the Games have been shown on a five-minute delay, so that censors can blur or edit out anything that really, really isn't a beautiful thing. The network has already taken the liberty with such events as Olympic wrestling, when hairy German Gustav Werner pinned oily Italian Antonio DiScuza around his sweaty lower body.

"Sure, you get a little bored watching something like archery or sailing," said Pinewood, Minnesota Olympic viewer Sally Nedhurst, "and the shot put made me laugh until I was sick. But if you think I'm going to miss one minute of the swimming or gymnastics, you're out of your mind!"

Indeed the gymnastics, always a highlight of the games, were a ratings powerhouse for NBC. The network received record ratings as American Paul Gilbert executed a beautiful dismount to take the gold, and uneven parallel bars favorite on the Chinese team Hong-Chu Xy eliminated himself with a misfire that resulted in severe testicular damage when he banged the bar unexpectedly. Slow-motion clips of the tragedy were available, but no men at the network could bring themselves to air it.

It hasn't been all gold for the Americans, though, as 100-meter runner Isaac "Chubby" Walker was disqualified for living up to his namesake during the track and field event. It's also been a disappointing year for the American basketball "Dream Team," who seem particularly impressive every time they take the court, but find themselves limited in their dunking ability without the use of protective cups.

Conversely, it was a good year for the Brazilian women's softball team, who came from behind to bounce, bob, and claw their way up to the top ranks in the sport. In addition to winning the gold in the event, they've all also been romantically linked to Colin Farrell following their rise to stardom.

The IOC will benefit from America's favorable response to the nude Olympics as well, since the network has promised in advance to split revenue from a DVD release of the Olympic games, as well as a separate release, tentatively titled: "The Olympics: Too Hot for Primetime."

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May I be struck down by the ghost of Sid Caesar if I'm lying, but I swear I'm the only person who's paying attention any more in this crazy world. The latest example of thistruism happens to be the VCR repair business. Seems harmless enough of a topic, right? Wrong again, my friend! I may never loose those CIA dogs of my trail after this one.

I've become convinced that the VCR repair business is nothing but a front for criminal activity in all of it's grisly manifestations. A few years ago I was living down the street from this guy who claimed to be a VCR repair man. I even had him tinker with my betamax machine on several occaisions. Now I'm not saying he didn't fix the thing, but I knew something was up. Then one pleasant afternoon I was sitting on my porch when not unlike all the monkeys of hell descending from the sky at least a dozen police vehicles of every make and description, vans, trucks, cars and battering devices squealed onto my street, producing scores of heavily armed SWAT officers brandishing shotguns, gas masks and ferocious-looking dogs. Equipment and vehicles were scattered helter-skelter across the street, and all of these Virgina farmboys had but one intention in mind: Well, there's an outside chance that they wanted to have an old hi-fi deck looked at or something, and that it was all a coincidence, but deep down inside I think that they came there that day with the intention of kicking down my neighbor's door, dragging him out into the street in his underwear, and then removing large amounts of illegal drugs from his home before loading him into the back of one of their cars and driving away. Call it a hunch.

Naturally, anybody would be a little curious about "VCR Repair Men" after an episode like that. But it doesn't stop there. Just today on the way home I passed the friendly neighborhood porno theater and what did I see on the marquee (I mean, under "A Fistfull of Tits" and "Jug-Jambouree") but the simple words "VCR REPAIR UPSTAIRS". I should have suspected as much.

There are several schools of thought on the subject. Some have suggested to me that those living on the fringes of our society's culture, the unwashed and rarely shaven, those apt to deal in drugs or products of the flesh, may themselves be frequent users of porno videocassettes. And that the frequent playing of these tapes, in cahoots with frequent high-speed rewinding and heavy use of the slow-motion feature, may be apt to damage the average video cassette recorder. And that these individuals, rather than pay the high price of electronics repair or replacement, might take up with screwdriver in hand (and some kind of tool with which to open the VCR in the non-drinking hand) and learn the fine art of VCR repair themselves through trial and error. And that such experience might give them a way to supplement the income received from their illegal and barely-legal activities.

A sound enough theory to most ears. But I think it's bullshit. I think VCR repair people are all inherently evil, and most likely they are from Milwaukee. I know, sometimes the truth hurts. I'll be in touch.

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Ever since we heard Eddie Albert scream out "Dutch Whores!" at the beginning of TV's Green Acres, we've all been curious about hidden messages in popular songs. From the suburban teen getting a much needed self-esteem boost from Ozzy Ozborne's Suicide Solution to the congressman who desperately needs to figure out the lyrics to Louie, Louie before a press conference, nobody wants to be the last kid on the block to know what a song really means. But it's not always easy, between forgetful vocalists garbling their lyrics and clever rockers mixing backward paeans to Satan into their love songs.

The first known instance of a backwards message in a pop song is widely agreed to be Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' 1960 hit Shakin' All Over, which contained the phrase "Listen you tit, the tape's gone in backways" playing in reverse during the chorus.

But it was the Beatles who were the King Tut of hidden backwards lyrics, and they pulled off their ultimate coup in 1968, when they released The White Album, which was actually an entire Laurence Welk album played backwards. The world might never have been the wiser if it weren't for some meddling acid casualties who somehow managed to play the record backwards after dropping the record player into their bathtub in an attempt to hear what the album would sound like to fish.

But regardless, the word got out and before long drug people with serious welfare connections were rigging up elaborate backwards-playing record players by mounting one record player upside-down above another normal record player, then using the second player's needle to listen to a record spinning upside-down on the first.

For reasons unknown this led to a brief resurgence of popularity for the Dave Clark Five, but the main effect was that years of backwards-recording shenanigans were finally exposed. An evangelist from Ohio discovered that when he played the theme song from the TV show Mr. Ed backwards, the lyrics sang as "The source is Satan," and the theme song from the children's cartoon Scoobie Doo hid the back-masked message "Give your dog a doobie too." That same evangelist later discovered that when you play disco music backwards, nobody ever comes to your parties again, and backwards Slim Whitman is more than enough to get you evicted from your apartment building. He was later arrested during an album-burning ceremony when his supporters shot a horse wearing a baseball cap that said Mr. Ed.

Scandal raged for the next twenty years as religious figures from terminally boring states discovered further examples of back-masking tomfoolery. Sales of Queen's dance hit Another One Bites the Dust more than tripled after word got out that the chorus played as "It's fun to smoke marijuana" when run backwards, and there was a brief national shortage of chocolate chip cookies. Religious leaders single-handedly fueled sales of several Pink Floyd albums in the seventies, and were thanked individually in the liner notes for most of Judas Priest's 1980's releases. By the mid-eighties, it became tough to sell a heavy metal album without help from some kind of back-masking scandal, and some innovative groups had their records pressed backwards to minimize damage to their fans' turntables. By the late 80's, record companies were major campaign contributors for all representatives from southern states who advocated boycotts of their satanic recording artists.

The holy grail of all backwards Satan-possessed pop songs, however, has always been Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. Fans have known for years that the song only really makes sense when you play it backwards, at which point the lyrics come together as:

A horse is a horse
Of course of course
And no one can talk to a horse
Of course
That is, of course
Unless the horse
Is the famous Mister Ed!

Go right to the source
And ask the horse
He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse
He's always on a steady course
Talk to Mister Ed!

People yakkity-yak a streak
And waste your time of day
But Mister Ed will never speak
Unless he has something to say!

Oh, a horse is a horse
Of course, of course
And this one'll talk 'til his voice is hoarse
You never heard of a talking horse?


Well, listen to this:
". . . I am Mister Ed!"

So you can all stop sending me emails asking what the hell a wuzzle is doing in a hedgerow, okay?

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