A Battle for All the Bulges

    The Summer Games ended a few days ago, and I barely watched any of it.  With the time difference, I already knew the results for most of the biggest events before I could watch, especially with me in a position where I couldn't really watch them live.  Still, I could talk about the athletic competition, the human interest stories, or even the controversies, some of which are still going on.  No, I will be discussing a certain meme-worthy moment.  Not the Australian breakdancer, nor the Turkish sharp-shooter, although I almost changed my mind about him when I found out he might be a rabbit lover.  No, I am going to talk about a certain French pole-vaulter, the one who failed to qualify for the medal round when his "third leg" bumped the bar.  A very noticeable "leg."  If you look at the entire footage, and not just that one prominent photograph, you will see that one of his actual legs hit the bar causing it to dislodge.  Now, I was never an athlete in school, but even I know enough that one needs extra support sometimes, just so that one's "participles" aren't "dangling" too much.  Yes, that is a grammar joke.  I have to justify having an English degree every now and then to prove I have one.  In fact, many of the male athletes seemed to be flaunting their bulges.  Not so much the US team, as most of the males seemed to have been able to keep their "packages, " well, packaged properly.  This brought back a memory from high school, when one of my jock friends related an incident that happened to them. (Yes, most of my closest male friends were athletes, on at least one team.  Some of the on two or more.  I was just so weird that I had almost circled back around just enough to be able to hang near the cool kids.  Didn't do that much with it, but I liked it.  I always considered myself just a little bit cooler than the other non-athlete guys, although that could just be opinion and not fact.) Anyway, he was on the baseball team.  While waiting for his turn, he managed to get a "pop up" in his uniform. Now, this normally happens randomly to teenage boys.  It is perfectly normal, if embarrassing.  Sometimes it lasts well into adulthood, where it can cause even more problems than pure embarrassment.  He wasn't wearing a cup or jock of any kind, so it was still fairly noticeable when he got to the plate.  So noticeable in fact, that the announcer gave him a nickname based on his "bat." I believe he struck out, or at least I hope he did, because running to first would have been hard, difficult and uncomfortable to run while in that condition. (And to think that baseball would have been the only sport offered at my school that I had half a shot at making the team.) 

    I had heard about the pole-vault incident a bit, but I didn't actually try to read about it, or see it until an article from a comic book/pop culture website I follow featured it on Facebook.  They used a giant croissant to cover the athlete's manhood on the thumbnail, but left it off for the main article.  I was actually going to use a croissant as the main pun in the title for this post, but no one might have gotten the reference.  Some of the alternate titles included "Why Yes, That Is a Croissant in My Unitard," "Would You Like to Share My Croissant," and "You Will Always Give Me a Croissant."  That last one is a very deep dive into the mid-90s MTV comedy show The State.  A man was singing about his girlfriend breaking up with him, but the thought of her would always put him into the same state as my high school friend, using the same five-letter word starting with "b" that the announcer used for my friend.  Strangely enough, one of the few sketches I remember from the show involved bulges.  It was from a spring break special.  The cast was trying to have a high-brow Shakespearean performance, in tights.  The first man out had a noticeable bulge, but the next one out had a larger one.  As each "member" came out, they were sporting more prominent, ridiculously placed bulges, until the end.  The cast's lone female member came on stage sporting the absolute largest, most meandering bulge imaginable.  Fairly funny, but I felt a little guilty watching it.  Anyway, after checking out a few more news stories about the "bulge," more news stories about athletes started to appear in my feed.  Mostly bodybuilding tips and giants fortunately, and very few bulges.  I'm hoping that the algorithm will return to normal now that the games are over with.  Otherwise, I might have to overload on cute bunny videos just to balance things out, not that I already see quite a bit of bunnies, but still.