Adieu, les Olympics

    The 2012 Summer Olympics are over.  Despite dire warnings by our Republican dimwit presidential candidate, London pulled the whole shebang off without any security issues.

    As expected, the US won - both on total medals count and number of gold medals.  China ended up in a worthy second place.  And the host country came in at a creditable fourth.

    For me, the Olympics are generally boring.  I tend to cheer for the underdogs, and the US is hardly ever in that position.  One can appreciate that Women's Beach Volleyball is played in underwear.  And I learned that the sport of Handball is now something totally different from what I used to play back in the 60's.  And who knew that there was such a thing as Men's Field Hockey?

    So now the athletes head home, and for most, it's a return to obscurity.  Which begs the queastion - was it worth it?  I mean, if you trained your whole life to be a star Water Polo player, and even if you won a Gold Medal in London, so what?  Will it get you any endorsement deals?

    Maybe the guy who draws Blondie felt the same way.  So above is his small tribute to Water Polo players all over the world.  May your face appear on the front of the box that Dagwood brought home.

I am he; he is me

    This happened to me once, albeit a long time ago.  I went up to the local Valley National Bank (that's what they were called in those days), at lunch to cash/deposit my paycheck.  I signed the back, and waited for my money.  The teller looked at me, looked at my signature, compared it to the one on my bank card (note : this was before your bank card had your pic on it), and declared that they didn't match, and that I wasn't me.

    Which raised the interesting question - how do you prove you are you?  For whatever reason, my Drivers License (which must've had my photo on it) didn't work.  She was convinced I had stolen poor Terry's paycheck and was now trying to purloin his hard-earned money.

    In fairness to her, my signature - even nowadays - tends to be a jumble of random scrawls, with each one being vastly different from the previous effort.  Which makes Travelers Checks a major challenge for me.  But hey, I really needed that money.

    I kept getting madder and madder; she kept getting stubborner and stubborner.  Finally, I demanded she call her superior over.  He looked at the signatures, looked at me, and told her to give me my money.  I don't think it was my handwriting that convinced him; I suspect he just fathomed that I was real ticked off, and that if I was a thief, that would not be my  posture.