The thinly-disguised ruse came to a head in 1988, when pressure from the 2/3rds of the world that isn’t even invited to the Whiter Olympics forced the token inclusion of the Jamaican bobsled team during the Calgary games. Predictably, the Jamaican team was unfairly penalized for attempting to push their bobsled up the run in record time, a perfectly reasonable misunderstanding of the event’s rules for anyone not born in Norway.

Bulshitzkizu neighbor Upper Scamistan also took gold medals this week in curling and other white man cold-weather hobbies too silly to name. Experts on white people agree that U.S. is likewise heavily favored in the upcoming ice farming competitions and the always popular 400-meter skin bleach.

Network executives for NBC have been bitching and moaning all week about the poor ratings for their cherished little white sports love-in, which has rated even lower than reruns of old black-and-white television shows like Leave it to Beaver. Or, as they would be more accurately known, old white-and-white television shows. The Olympic ratings have suffered due in no small part to the network’s staunch refusal to dye any of their preciously white Olympic snow brown to make audiences of color more comfortable with the proceedings.

Though it hardly qualifies as news, no black athletes have yet been spotted in Torino, the closest being American downhill skier Bode Miller, who once accidentally kissed a black chick in the dark at a party. Though event organizers are said to have been divided over the decision to invite the racially-mixed United States to the Olympic Games, arrangements were made to ensure that the only American entrants would be from the black-free states of Minnesota and Vermont.

In a desperate last-ditch effort to boost ratings, NBC has begun to refer to Australians as the “honorary black people” of the 2006 Olympics, due to their poor showing and the arid climate of their home land. But word on the street is that the network originally wanted to save that designation for Chechnya, had the embattled Russian province been able to take a break from getting screwed over long enough to field their own Olympic team.

Cheney Vows to Stay Course: Will Shoot Hunting Partner Again

Mardi Gras, Gonorrhea to Return to New Orleans

Aides Urge Bush to Stop Referring to Iraqi Majority as “Shits”

Sheryl Crow Takes Cancer in Lance Armstrong Split

That said, I had already agreed to volunteer at the schools and couldn’t get out of it by this point. Ginger and I offered our help with Health Awareness Day or some such thing. Ginger, being a real estate broker, gave an inspiring lecture about buying property in economically depressed areas, and then sitting on them until the zoning changed to really clean up. Turns out this has nothing to do with health. I wanted to teach the kids about the value of being under-tall, but was directed instead to assist in checking the kids for health problems.

I was assigned to examine the male children for back problems, specifically, a condition called scoliosis. No, I thought it was a new wave British pop band, too, but apparently it’s some sort of back condition that comes from forcing kids to sit in cheap rigid chairs for hours at a time. I don’t know about you, but looking at boys naked from the waist up too closely all day isn’t the kind of charity I had in mind. It’s nice to know such jobs exist, though, if you’re someone who’s been recently turned away from the priesthood. Still, for me, it was dullsville city. And I didn’t want to ask to be transferred to the girls’ division either. Partly because I’m not a pedophile, but mostly because I would likely strangle the first child I saw with one of those ass crack tattoos that all the young people seem to be ruining their bodies with.

When I did request a transfer, those jokers in the Health Awareness Day Assignment Committee really showed their spots. I was assigned to the Headlice Check—me, Rok Finger! I tried to remind them I’m practically a celebrity (college kids know my name, I promise you that), but there’s no special treatment for anyone at Martin Van Buren Elementary, I guess. Or so they say in the school song, which I believe is sung to the tune of Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumper.” But I bet if Ralph Waite showed up and asked for a job, he wouldn’t be fingering the scalps of greasy little kids looking for bugs.

I tried to speed up the process, streamline it, the same thing I do here at the commune when I hand in somebody else’s old columns to run as my own. But the school didn’t appreciate my new policy, which was to have the kids who think they have lice to wear red hats, while those who didn’t think they had lice wore blue hats. I can tell you this, though, in my short amount of time I learned that kids have no idea whether they have lice or not. Virtually every one of them was wrong. It didn’t help that we only had two blue hats and three red hats, and had to pass them around frequently.

Still, volunteering wasn’t quite as unpleasant as I believed it would be. I did get a free lunch out of the ordeal (pizza square, green beans, tater tots, corn bread, and my choice of milk). And more than that, I got the feeling of being a positive influence in my community. A tax-deductible expenditure of my work hours in my community.

º Last Column: Riding the Crime Wave
º more columns

Some Chinese places deliver, which is handy, but nobody’s come up with the brilliant idea yet for a service that will run to the ATM and get some cash for you so you can pay for Chinese food, and so you end up having to barter housewares with some guy who learned English from watching Iron Chef.

After about a week the mailman stops trying to cram any more crap into your jam-packed mailbox, and you begin to run the risk of your lingerie catalogs getting ruined by the snow. What happened to the days when mailmen went door to door, dropping your mail right into your nice warm house through a slot? Now that was convenience! Not that I was alive back then. But now those lazy fuckers can’t even be bothered to lean out of the truck a little to stack your mail in a neat little Jenga tower on top of the box. I think that says something about society but I’d rather not go into it right now.

So then you have to train some starving neighborhood dog to go fetch your mail from the box, because your own dog is too smart to fall for any of those tricks. And you’ve got to do it all without going outside or letting a possibly-insane dog into your house. That involves a lot of clever gestures from the window, and most importantly, a Supersoaker full of bacon grease.

By week two you find out what kind of survivalist you are, hunting for wild game from the upstairs bathroom window and heating your home by burning yesterday’s fashions. Both go hand in hand more than you’d expect, since polyester fumes are a powerful appetite suppressant. That’s what the Native Americans used to use before they had Dexatrim.

Of course all of this hasn’t even scratched the surface of one of the biggest challenges of winter living: getting paid without going to work. Sick days eventually run out, even if you’ve managed, through a cornucopia of fake voices and accents, to weave a complexly plausible web of lies explaining why you haven’t been to work in three weeks. Then it comes time to elevate your game to the next level, which involves convincing people that you’re actually calling from work, but have been quarantined to your office and won’t be coming out possibly until spring. If you can find a patsy to stencil-paint QUARANTINE on your office door without peeking inside, you’re home free. Your mileage may vary in your own place of work, but personally I’d recommend working for the commune in that regard: this place is like a patsy farm.

Bricks out.

º Last Column: Eat Shit, New Year’s
º more columns