Daily Briefs in Brief: The 2008 Sparkle Olympiad
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By CHRIS PACKHAM
Chariots of Fart: I don’t much believe in literary epiphanies. Nothing breaks the verisimilitude of a narrative faster than a passage that says, “As she gazed out of the window, suddenly, she realized her whole life had been leading up to her anal bleaching,” or whatever. And then I suddenly have my own epiphany that my whole life had led up to accidentally buying a book with a big pink ‘O’ on the cover. As it turns out, I’m as embarrassingly prone to real-life literary epiphanies as any character in books by Jacquelyn Mitchard, only most of mine are too filthy or disturbing to get me on twee public radio epiphanyfest This American Life — for example, the time I invented the medical sharps container of mystery, a terrifying guessing game for children. I try to plow all my epiphanies back into Daily Briefs, so here’s the one I had last night while driving my car to the Valero to pick up my carton of GPCs and a bucket of gas station chicken, and which nearly made me crash into a school bus: As I gazed out of the windshield of my Dodge Reliant, I realized that my whole entire life had led up to that moment of passionately not caring at all about the fucking Olympics.
“Wow!” I said to my girlfriend, pulling in to Valero. “I really, really don’t care one way or the other about the Olympics!”
“Big deal,” she said. “You have that epiphany every two years. Don’t forget my cherry blunts.”
Now that I’ve had that important and apparently biennial self-realization, I can go back to my regularly scheduled international-sports-related total incuriosity. After the jump, a pretty amazing tale of plagiarism. Click here, or on this artist’s concept of how Joe Biden may have decided to plagiarize British Labor Leader Neal Kinnock’s speech:
