“Bread and Circuses”

Due to advances in technology, there is now renewed interest in manned space flight. I hope I’m not alone in asking, “What’s the point?” For extraterrestrial scientific discovery, robots do a much better job at a significantly lower cost.

Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, laid it all out. Sending astronauts up into space, during the Cold War, was a return to the medieval practice of single warrior combat. Rather than having whole swarms of fighters slashing and bludgeoning each other, the two opposing forces would, on occasion, send only their best champions to fight, one on one, while the rest would just watch and await a symbolic victory.

The Cold War, however, is over.

One of the most persistent myths about taxpayer investments in sports is that pumping public money into stadiums and arenas or hosting big international events generates enormous economic returns for communities. We got another repeat of that fairytale recently, when mayors and governors around the country touted the benefits that the World Cup would bring if soccer’s international governing body named them as host cities for the 2026 North American tournament. The fantastical sums thrown about—at a time when NFL franchises are asking cities to pony up for the next generation of subsidized stadiums—are a reminder that the public purse is never off-limits to popular pursuits like sports.

There’s a century home on Water Street in Peterborough that was, until recently, an affordable place to rent — about $1,000 apiece for a three-bedroom or a four-bedroom unit.

For more than a decade, it was owned by a family who rented it to university students and others. But over the years, the house wore down — and the owners decided to sell.

In came the Avanew Single Family Rental company, the only bidder, who snapped up the home for close to $550,000. They put in new hardwood floors and spruced up the dated kitchens. When it was put back on the rental market, one of the units was listed for $2,500 — more than double the original rate.

This seems grotesque. It probably is.

Vancouver, Toronto among host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup

Vancouver and Toronto have been announced as among the hosts of the 2026 FIFA World Cup with venues hosting matches across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

Three Canadian cities were on the shortlist to earn a spot hosting matches for the next World Cup.

Vancouver will be hosting matches at BC Place, which hosted several FIFA Women’s World Cup matches in 2015. It has a capacity of around 54,000 and has an artificial surface.

… Lead author Martin Mueller and his colleagues looked at the costs and revenues from 14 Summer Olympic Games, 15 Winter Olympics and 14 World Cups held between 1964 and 2018.

With combined costs of more than $120 billion US and combined revenue from broadcast rights, tickets and sponsorships of nearly $70 billion US, the average return on investments was a loss of 38 per cent.

“Are the Olympics and the football World Cup profitable for the IOC and FIFA (who own the rights to these events)? Yes, very much so,” they write.

“Are they profitable for the organizing committees that need to put them on? Sometimes, but not very often. For the host city and government? Hardly ever.”

I will join the charge should the day come when the Leafs or Blue Jays etc demand tax payers subsidize a new venue.

… The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees’ endorsement on Tuesday of an as-yet theoretical Vancouver bid for the outing in eight years’ time hits all the usual notes. It’ll bring us all together. It’ll convince average yobs to get off the couch and take up the monobob. It’ll solve our historic inequities through the healing power of many, many official statements.

Some of these things might even be true. But what goes unsaid is that what another Games will do most of all is give a few, already important people a chance to feel even more important. It’s the world’s most expensive photo opportunity, paid for by you, but not featuring you. Cool trick.

The Olympics are a scam.

Go incognito.

OTTAWA — As grocery prices continue to rise, the price of bacon in Canada reached an all-time high last month, according to data from Statistics Canada.​

In August 2021, the average price of a 500-gram pack was $8.24, exceeding the $8 mark for the first time ever.

Never have so many won so many accolades for so few real achievements on the world stage. That about sums up the Olympics 2021 — or, as I call them, the O-limp-ics 2021. Indeed, the time has come to retire the hallowed motto of the Games: “Faster, Higher, Stronger.”

In our modern age, it’s: “Woker, Weaker, Loser.”

Well, the Olympics television viewership ratings are in for NBC and, boy, are they ugly:

NBC’s primetime coverage of the Tokyo Olympics on July 26 averaged 14.7 million viewers — for a 49% drop compared to the equivalent night from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and 53% less than the 2012 London Olympics. The opening ceremonies saw their lowest viewership since 1988.

The participation of openly gay, lesbian and transgender athletes in the Tokyo Olympics has led to an upsurge in anti-LGBT commentary on Russian state TV.

Extremely offensive language, some of which appears in this article, was used by the hosts and guests on talk shows aired by the country’s two most popular television channels.

Even though the Kremlin has tended to not publicly support anti-LGBT sentiment, it fits in with the state ideology of defending Russia’s “traditional values” against the West.

The state-run channels dedicated several of their talk shows to speak disparagingly about LGBT athletes at the Games, using words like “abomination” and “perversion”.