Rio’s ‘Danger Games’

The Danger Gamea are over for another four years. The 2016 dystopian series is set in Rio, aka The Poor Universe, because they just don't have enough crap to deal with. 

While the posh bit of Rio is flush with vast material wealth, millions and millions and millions of synthetic Rio2016 banners, thousands and thousands of people just doing it (don't sue me, Nike or Durex), and not thousands and thousands but a vast array of impossibly dim swimmers, the majority of the other bit is flush with disease, sickness, poverty and dying that is covered up during the televised event in favour of trendy, bouncy adverts for Coca Cola.

The two-week series follows the terrifying journeys of about 12,000 young participants who have been selected by merit or not so much by merit (depending on what floats each country's selection process boat) to compete in a quadrennial pageant called the Danger Games. 

The purpose of the Games is to provide entertainment for the Western masses and to remind The Poor Universe how the hell are they going to cope with this floorshow with all the other shit that’s going down in their patch?

During the Games, participants are strongly enticed to fight to the death in dangerous public arenas through the allurement of shiny, heavy circular objects. 

Even more modern pentathlon

The winning participant is rewarded with the shiniest of the shiny objects and the solemn promise of relentless scrutiny from obsessed media outlets and general busybodies pertaining to their being an overrated twat and that their whole existence is a massive waste of taxpayer’s money. Sometimes they also get diarrhea.

The allure of shiny things makes the participants do just about anything really, including going to that shithole in the first place. 

While Rio has given the masses dodgy infrastructure, incomplete accommodation, often shambolic logistics, questionable security, curiouser and curiouser water quality, petty, violent crime, and hourly armed holdups, the Games also brought us “the dumbest bell that ever rang”, possibly the greatest catchphrase of all time.

A special mention to the niche sport of modern pentathlon, that nobody knew or cared about until the Australian participant won the highest medallion in this discipline in an all-day Danger Games fiesta of freestyle swimmin', cross country runnin’, pistol shootin’, and, weirdly, show jumping and epee fencing, skills important to all modern day knights of all shaped tables. Eat your heart out, Katnis Everdeen.

The Hollywood Laundromat

Once upon a time there was a girl who went to West Hollywood with a dream. That dream was to find a coin-operated laundromat that had a lower crazy people to washing machine ratio than just about anywhere else on that strip. For some inexplicable reason it just made the hour she had to sit there waiting for her clothes to endlessly dry and dry not quite as insufferable as it could have been.

It's 5pm on a Monday afternoon and I'm at a laundromat on Santa Monica Boulevard doing my laundry, much like Marilym Monroe probably did in the 1950s. It's all glitz and glamour, this Hollywood life.

I can just see Marilyn doing her laundry here. She would have perched herself atop one of the washers, purring out stain removal instructions and tips to any man who entered the establishment. It's also probably why none of her clothes ever fitted; they shrank in the dryer. Poor Marilyn.

This laundromat is very typical of what happened to Marilyn in Hollywood. She got spun around, pulled in all directions, and then left out to dry and presumably turned into a spiritually shrunken version of herself. I guess I just compared Marilyn Monroe to a spin cycle.

Marilyn spent a lot of time in this area. My Hollywood Things map tells me she lived here when she met Jo DiMaggio. She lived in another house around here too with a girlfriend and shared everything from minks to men. My map says that.

At another house nearby, Joe DiMaggio had a private investigator break down a door where he thought she was cheating on him. It was the wrong house, but it's just around the corner, thus exciting. And about 200m down the road is where Janis Joplin spent her last night drinking up a storm before ODing at her hotel.

Ho hum, my washing''s done!