Another bronze medal performance.

I'm trying to figure out why it's necessary for woman volleyball players to wear those skimpy outfits. I can kind of buy into the beach thing, but the men don't wear bathing suits - they wear shirts and caps.

If it's the old "sex sells" routine, then maybe the woman basketball and indoor volleyball teams should wear bikinis too. Fair is fair.

What annoys me are the music clips they play between points. Would we suddenly lose interest if we didn't hear six seconds of Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll?" Maybe so. I think what it demonstrates is that the Chinese have become westernized. If you didn't already figure that out from the smog and lack of human compassion, the music thing should have put the exclamation point on it for you.

Maybe it's because the suits are so darned comfortable?

There are an awful lot of Olympic sports that I'm clueless about. The scoring system in gymnastics is dumbfounding to the point that they need computers to figure it out. Plus, I'm never able to figure out which routines are good and which are second best. I think if a sport is so heavily dependent on judging then maybe it's more entertainment than sport. There's no question that gymnasts are great athletes, but I find it strange that their great feats are so heavily dependent on what judges think. I suppose that in order to compete one has to resign oneself to the fact that the best routine will not necessarily win.

Swimming is odd too. The breaststroke? What's that? The next time you're at your local pool, try doing a few breaststroke laps and see how long it takes for the rest of the swimmers to push your head under the water until you stop. That and the butterfly look made-up. Maybe it's because they are. It would be like track athletes having a skipping competition or a race where they ran three steps, hopped up and down twice and walked four steps. Nobody swims like that and nobody walks like that.

Sports are weird.