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."

arents’ groups and otologists alike are up in arms over Nokia’s latest entry into the increasingly cutthroat cell phone market, the Nokia BLADE, an innovative new cell-phone/pocket knife combination that offers users with limited pocket space the best of both gadgets in one sleek package.

“We think the BLADE will be a hit with consumers who are tired of carrying a cell phone and a big, bulky knife everywhere they go,� explained Nokia spokesperson Dalton Hughes. “Or also with people who are sick of having to switch hands to go between talking and cutting tasks.�

“This phone is da bomb!� gushed teen Roger Salmong, bleeding profusely from the ear. “When I’m not hollering with my homies, I can cut shit!�

In spite of a generally positive reaction among consumers, the new phone has raised the ire of parents’ groups who had a hard enough time getting their kids off the phone for family time even before it became a handy cutting implement.

“I thought it was hard to keep Stacey from bringing her cell phone to the dinner table before,� lamented housewife Greta Thomas. “But now she says she needs it to cut her pork chops. What do you say to that?�

Otologists, or “ear doctors� to the unwashed masses, also take issue with the new phone, citing a sharp spike in the rate of ear contusions being reported in hospital emergency rooms since the phone’s release last month.

“It really is a serious problem,� explained a bashful Dr. Dennis Loham, sporting a large white bandage covering his left ear. “You think you’d have to be stupid to forget to retract the phone’s folding blade before trying to take an incoming call, but it really is easy to space out on it. In my office alone, we’ve seen—hold on, I have to take this. Hel—oh sweet fucking Jesus, not again!�

The rise of multipurpose phones in recent years has concerned parents nationwide to varying degrees, having a large impact on concerned parents, yet hardly any at all on alcoholics or other individuals who give less than a shit about their children. For concerned parents, however, the thought of their children carrying a telephone, web browser, video game console, digital camera, personal data organizer and MP3 player around in their pockets has unsettling ramifications. Some even remained concerned after the commune explained that all of these functionalities were packed into a single small cell phone, not a large assortment of bulky devices likely to damage a child’s expensive church slacks. Others needed an explanation of what an MP3 was, or wanted to know if their phone at home could take pictures.

The small handful of parents who understand both the technology and its ramifications share concerns about giving children and teens unsupervised access to the Internet, violent video games, or scary futuristic Herbie Hancock music via their cell phones. Now that a sharp, ridged blade has been added to their list of concerns, many parents are considering drastic measures. The most appealing of these involves sending their children to military school, where they’ll at least learn to handle a knife/phone, and will stop carving “FART� into the banister out in the hallway.

The Nokia BLADE retails for $149 and is available in blood-masking red, surgical silver and camouflage.

I would like to take this opportunity to express to the world my view about Yuppies. I hate them. Bottom line. Thanks for listening.

Yuppies would be our idea of cool if we lived in a world Bill Gates had farted out of his ass. That's what he dreams about at night, a bizarre-o world where he has a chance with chicks, and the hideous byproducts of his eugenics experiments roam through mini-malls across the land. Holy shit, it happened already? Wake me up when the screaming gets too loud for you.

No real human being actually thinks they're being hip when dressed like one of these faggoty, middle-aged losers. You know what I'm talking about. All those forty-ish, peppered gray, khaki wearing, polo shirted, overweight, laptop carrying, SUV driving, laugh out loud at jokes they read in Dilbert wussy bitches! These are the kind of people who thanked their lucky fuckin' stars when computers were invented, because if it weren't for computers, natural selection would have had its way with these gimps like a 350 pound inmate named "Tiny."

Yuppies make my scrotum shrivel up like a raisin in the microwave. Just the sight of one is enough to send me into an incoherent, Yuppie-beating rage, as the security guys at CompUSA can attest.

I had the acute displeasure of sitting next to one of these zombie clones on a three-hour flight last week, after a long night of tweaking. Thank God I had stashed Nevil in my carry-on baggage, giving me the option of releasing him on that fucking swine at a moment's notice. Damned if they aren't a lot of maintenance, but owning a midget can be the difference between mirth and madness when the chips are down. They should put that on an inspirational calendar somewhere.

As soon as that Yuppie sat down next to me I could feel the bile in the back of my throat start to bubble. Watching him squeeze his fat ass into that narrow coach seat, as the perspiration built up inside his precious little round glasses and he started to sweat through his Banana Republic Yuppie fatigues, I could feel my hands twitching at the drawstring of my midget satchel, ready to unleash this poor fucker's tiny, apeshit doom.

Since I already knew you can't throw a fire extinguisher on a plane without hitting a Yuppie, I made sure Nevil was prepared for the flight through a strict regiment of starvation and randomly lighting my lighter underneath him to fuel his fire. If you're going to go to the trouble and social embarrassment of flinging a midget onto a grown man in public, you have to at least make sure that midget's in a particularly foul mood, so you get your money's worth.

But just when I was about to open the bag and take cover behind the Chinese woman sitting to my left, something infinitely more entertaining than siccing a starved and half-crazed midget on this unsuspecting fucker suddenly dawned on me. Holy shit, this Yuppie was scared of flying! I had no choice but to use this to my advantage.

While we were sitting on the runway, I took the liberty of calling the flight attendant over several times to point out the window and ask if they were completely sure that cardboard patch on the wing was really going to hold after takeoff. Then when the time for takeoff finally came, I unbuckled my seatbelt and screamed at the top of my lungs that I was feeling a breeze coming from the emergency exit door. Have you ever seen a man reflexively suck sweat back into his pores? Awesome. Then to polish the poor bastard off, periodically throughout the rest of the flight I would open my window blind just enough to look outside, then start crying. When he tried to sneak a peek I would slam it shut and moan in a trembling voice "Just ignore it! Maybe it will be OK if we pretend we don't know anything!"

By the time we landed, tons of fun had worked himself into a big puddle of sweaty hysterics. And when the flight attendants brought out the restraints to cart his ass off the plane and into that rubber van, nobody acted more surprised than me. Did you see how that guy started freaking out when we landed? Jesus. He thought my stewardess-call button was an emergency ignition switch for the plane's engines! Crazy, crazy shit.

"That's what you get, you fucking clone," I thought to myself.

No question that piece of work blew a microchip or two, either during the flight or while the orderlies were beating him silly with rubber bitch-sticks on the way to the booby barn. And I got his laptop, which makes for a bitchin' dartboard. These are the small, quiet victories I ponder in spare moments, when reminiscing about my war with the Yuppies.

º Last Column: Midgets Aren't All They're Cracked Up to Be
º more columns