olympics

August 2, 2021

Corona Virus Thoughts: The Olympic Games

I hadn’t intended to write about the corona virus anymore, but the spectacle of staging the Olympic Games during a pandemic is so insane that I find myself compelled to comment.

Consider this:

1/6 of the American athletes who traveled to Tokyo were unvaccinated.

President Biden didn’t mandate vaccination for all Americans participating in the Olympic Games. Embrace conspiracy and no shot? Then stay home and watch the nonsense on television. Biden certainly had the power. Jimmy Carter exercised it in 1980 by banning American participation in the Moscow games after the USSR invaded Afghanistan.

The IOC didn’t mandate vaccines for everyone traveling to Tokyo to participate in the games.

People actually flew halfway around the world during a pandemic to fence, skateboard, trap shoot and play water polo.

Horses for the equestrian events flew halfway around the world so humans could ride them in the equestrian events

Japanese people (service workers) will certainly die as a result of staging the games and there should have been a binding national referendum on holding the event. (It would been 70 percent in opposition.)

Many in the American media worship this phony spectacle as some sort of morally uplifting story. Sure, it’s so uplifting to read how American athletes are subsidized by corporations to train and then perform activities that produce almost nothing to better American society outside of that athlete and corporation’s bottom line. What does it really do for the world if someone wins the pole vault or balance beam competition.

I wasted several minutes of my life watching a BMX bike race and saw a crash that almost killed an adult American rider. Imagine dying as an adult riding a BMX bike in a race (and there were no fans!).

The major America media apparently does not have a single major broadcaster or writer who questioned the very insane idea of staging the games during a pandemic in a country with a pitifully low vaccination rate and also in a country where 70-percent of its citizens that didn’t want the games to be staged at all.

That’s enough for now. The Olympic Games should have ended decades ago. What they have wrought upon countries, especially the poorer ones dumb enough to pay for the rights to host them, is criminal.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.