Allow Me to Burden You With Weightlifting Facts (Dave Barry) LOL

ATHENS -- If you like confident women, defined as ''women who could pick up your refrigerator unassisted,'' you would love Olympic women's weightlifting.

Competitive weightlifting is hugely popular in Greece. This dates back to ancient times, when the Greeks had to be very strong because pretty much all their possessions were made of marble. A single salad fork could weigh 50 pounds. Just to get through a meal you needed biceps like basketballs.

Today, competitive weightlifting is not a big deal in the United States, where people mainly lift weights to be physically fit, by which I mean to look like either Brad Pitt or Demi Moore. But the rest of the world produces a lot of competitive weightlifters, including, at these Olympic Games, such names as (these are real names) Bartlomiej Bonk, Po Fu Chen, Zbynek Dub, Hripsime Khurshudyan, Namecrakpam Kunjarani, Samson Ndicka, Furkat Saidov, Ferit Sen, Gonghong Tang, Gert Trasha, Blessed Udah, Xiangxiang Zhang, and of course Deborah Lovely. I mention these names to illustrate the wide appeal of competitive weightlifting, not to suggest that they sound funny. It is wrong to make fun of people just because they're from a different culture, especially if they can break you in half like a strand of uncooked spaghetti.

The weightlifting competition I saw was the women's 63 kg class. I'm not sure whether this means the actual women weighed 63 kg or the weights they lifted weighed 63 kg. Or possibly the temperature in the weightlifting hall was 63 kg. There's no way to know for sure without finding out what a ''kg'' is, and my belief, as an American, is that if I have to start understanding the metric system, then the terrorists have won.

I can tell you this: The 63 kg women are not large. Most of them look like normal, even smallish, human women who do not have Demi Moore-style muscles bulging out in all directions. One by one, they'd walk out onto the weightlifting platform, and there, waiting for them, was Old Man Gravity, in the form of a steel bar with MAJOR weights at either end. Perhaps you're a guy reading this, and perhaps you think you're pretty strong. I'm telling you right now that, to lift the weight these women were dealing with, you'd need the help of at least two friends, and one of them would have to own a crane.

But these women would squat, grab the weight, pause for a moment, and then -- while emitting a grunt that was loud and yet at the same time distinctly feminine -- they'd hoist this massive thing OVER THEIR HEADS. As the crowd shouted encouragement, the lifters would hold the weight high, their faces red and contorted with strain, their bodies vibrating with effort, until the cathartic moment when their eyeballs were ejected into the crowd.

No, seriously, that only happened a couple of times. Usually the judges would signal that it was a good lift, and the lifter would bang the weight down with a thump detectable by seismic instruments in Iceland. As the crowd cheered, the lifter would stride off the stage, leaving Old Man Gravity lying on the ground, defeated, a victim of changing times. Sitting in the press section, I was inspired by these women; I lifted my ice cream bar to my mouth with renewed determination. That thing weighed at LEAST a kg.

More from Dave Barry:

I especially have a problem with modernistic sculptures, the kind where you, the layperson, cannot be sure whether you're looking at a work of art or a crashed alien spacecraft. My definition of a good sculpture is "a sculpture that looks at least vaguely like something.'' I'm talking about a sculpture like Michelangelo's David. You look at that, and there is no doubt about what the artist's message is. It is: "Here's a naked man the size of an oil derrick.''

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But here's my point: This specialty-coffee craze has gone too far. I say this in light of a letter I got recently from alert reader Bo Bishop. He sent me an invitation he received from a local company to a ``private tasting of the highly prized Luwak coffee,'' which ``at $300 a pound . . . is one of the most expensive drinks in the world.'' The invitation states that this coffee is named for the luwak, a ``member of the weasel family'' that lives on the Island of Java and eats coffee berries; as the berries pass through the luwak, a ``natural fermentation'' takes place, and the berry seeds -- the coffee beans -- come out of the luwak intact. The beans are then gathered, washed, roasted and sold to coffee connoisseurs.

The invitation states: ``We wish to pass along this once in a lifetime opportunity to taste such a rarity.''

Or, as Bo Bishop put it: ``They're selling processed weasel doodoo for $300 a pound.''

I first thought this was a clever hoax designed to ridicule the coffee craze. Tragically, it is not. There really is a Luwak coffee. I know because I bought some from a specialty-coffee company in Atlanta. I paid $37.50 for two ounces of beans. I was expecting the beans to look exotic, considering where they'd been, but they looked like regular coffee beans. In fact, for a moment I was afraid that they were just regular beans, and that I was being ripped off.

Then I thought: What kind of world is this when you worry that people might be ripping you off by selling you coffee that was NOT pooped out by a weasel?

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