During the opening ceremony of the Olympic games here in Utah, I noticed that NBC's coverage was saturated with corporate sponsors--er, I'm sorry they're no longer sponsors but rather "partners." That's such a friendly word: "partner." Makes me want to go out and buy a Coke and charge it on my Visa. But back to the NBC coverage, I noticed that one of the partners of the event was Viagra. A company which produces a pill which gives guys chubbies. Very fitting. I can't think of anything more appropriate to symbolize years of hard work and dedication than a guy with a boner. Maybe next time Trojan will get in on the act with figure skating condoms dancing to a John Williams overture if he can get off of his Star Wars high long enough to compose something original.

There was a scene during the opening ceremonies in which representatives of every nation participating in the Olympics walked out on stage waving their nation's flag. Thanks to NBC, I can now rest assured that the world only consists of America, France and Germany, because nearly every time a lesser known nation was about to come out NBC cut to a commercial. Luckily NBC aired a Nike commercial instead of Kazakhstan and Bulgaria's presence, because during the 5 minutes since the last commercial they aired, I had a mental lapse and forgot that I needed some shoes. Thankfully the good folks at NBC and Nike even went through the trouble of reminding me which brand of shoe I should buy because I can't think for myself.

So how were the venues? Well, half because of sheer boredom and half because of curiosity, I decided to check out the Olympic square/ice village that warranted shutting down our city for two weeks. It was essentially an area of about two city blocks fenced off and filled with tents put up by various corporations: Visa, Coca-Cola, Samsung, Qwest, AT&T, Kodak, etc. One tent in particular caught my attention, as it was probably the biggest and garnered the largest number of Olympic patrons: the Olympic Superstore. Inside the tent was filled with buttons, pins, jackets and various over-priced collectibles that you'll be able to find on ebay in a couple of weeks for three times what they're worth (in other words, for the price they were originally sold).

However, what was most interesting about the Olympic Superstore was their purchase policy. There were signs posted all around the store that read "In recognition of Visa's Olympic sponsorship, we are proud to only accept Visa cards." That's interesting, because I didn't know that an act of recognizing Olympic sponsorship was inextricably linked to making purchases with a specific type of credit card. Why are they "proud to only accept Visa cards" anyway? Is that something to be proud of? While they're at it, why don't they just come clean and change the phrase to "because Visa paid us a lot of money to inconvenience you by forcing you to use a Visa account, we only accept Visa cards"?

I know I may seem bitter about the games, especially in light of its supposed success, but I can't shake the feeling that we did the world in the ass on this one. After all, Utah deserved this success; we earned the games because we were the most qualified, right? It's not like the Salt Lake Organizing Committee coerced IOC judges into choosing Utah as the 2002 location with thousands of dollars in bribes and scholarship grants, right? Oh wait.

163,296 businesses in Salt Lake went bankrupt by trying to capitalize on Olympic revenue, failing to realize that the 300,000 visitors from other countries didn't come all this way to stuff their faces with 50 cent hot dogs.

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