Unsung heroes finally recognized

Are you as Olympiced out as I am? It's a good thing the games only come around every two years. One can only take so much drama, agony, triumph and Bob Costas before going into overload.

There were 86 gold medals awarded, but I think there should at least have been 87. I would have given Proctor and Gamble one for their series of commercials honoring the mothers of the athletes. In one of them the camera caught a mother mutely hollering, "That's my baby." I couldn't care less if it was staged or not, it represented what the Olympics are all about.

The commercials subtly stressed the family support the athletes receive. Consider for a moment the one mother, in an NBC interview, not a commercial, who said that she and her husband had mortgaged their house four times to get their Olympian prepared to compete in Vancouver.

Recognizing that the families of the Olympians are making sacrifices for their children, Proctor and Gamble started the "Thanks mom" program. And they had engaged Kristi Yamaguchi to help kick the program off.

"The 'Thanks Mom' program with P and G is incredible," the gold medal figure skater said. "This is really the first time this has been done for an Olympics, where every mom of an [American] Olympian has the opportunity for P and G to help them defray the cost of accommodations, of travel, to be here to cheer their child on at the Olympic Games, and to really just share that moment with them."

The program was so successful for these winter Olympics that the company is planning to continue it through the 2012 London Summer Games.

Hey. What about dads?

Well to editorialize a bit on what Yamaguchi said back when she was competing, "they're the ones working at home paying the bills."

All your eggs are where?

Now is the time to get off the snow and ice and return to the non-athletic world.

So let's consider the fate of one Mr. Henry Bemis who loved reading books more than anything: This hapless character was played by Burgess Meredith in a 1959 episode of 'The Twilight Zone' titled, 'Time Enough at Last.'

When an H-bomb annihilated everyone on earth Henry, a teller, was in the subterranean bank vault reading and soon discovered he was the last person on earth. The meek little man who was bullied by everyone because of his bookish ways finally had time enough to read all he wanted.

The sad irony to the story was that as the poorly sighted Henry began to settled down and read the first of his carefully selected books he stumbled causing his glasses to fall off and shatter. He learns, sadly, that life is not fair.

What brought this story to mind is the current administration's drive to computerize all of our health records, which ain't such a bad idea. I've seen the system work where one of my primary care let's-see-if-we-can-find-out-what's-wrong-with-you doctors has sent my records to a specialist with the click of a keyboard. I've also been a victim of "the system is down" syndrome, which is a bit frightening.

Imagine if you will a not too distant future e-Henry Bemis.com, who like his fictional namesake is a meek little avid reader taunted by his peers because he prefers to read than engage in social networking? One day through some cosmic catastrophe he finds himself alone on earth. He has escaped the stress of having to multi-task and remain in constant communications with half the population of the planet. He can now read to his heart's content. Of course by then all books are digitized, but Kindle-type reading devices are plentiful.

However the very catastrophe that has freed e-Henry from the burdens of a technological society has neutralized all of earth's electricity.

As the sole survivor realizes the impact of this planetary plight he laments tearfully, as the original Henry Bemis did, "It's not fair."

Overheard

Overheard at the checkout counter: If the enablers want us all to accept Spanish as a second language why don't they pay us to learn it?