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Which boobs are we afraid of?

My first real glimpse of eternity came sometime during kindergarten or first grade.
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My first real glimpse of eternity came sometime during kindergarten or first grade. I'd had a previous brush with the concept on an earlier Sunday morning when the hard oak surface of a church pew threatened to forever flatten my backside and the little voice inside my head kept screaming, "Will this never end?" But it was my introduction to numbers that truly revealed the open-ended nature of infinity and stopped me in my tracks.

Having learned the linear string of 1 through 9 and the repetitive magic of base 10 counting, my teacher, who in retrospect I imagine simply wanted some quiet time to slip away to the teachers' lounge for a cup of coffee, told us all to take out a piece of paper and start writing down numbers in sequential order. "You can stop when you run out of numbers," she said, barely containing her mirth.

I set about the task with gusto, quickly establishing the rules of an imaginary game involving patterns and time. My page began to fill quickly, if messily, with columns of numbers. Somewhere north of 300 I stopped cold, frozen by what I saw. I was, I realized a few years later after tumbling off my bike and hitting my head hard enough to see stars, stunned, totally disoriented.

"They never end!" Numbers never, ever end. No matter how big they get, the simple, day-one arithmetic lesson of adding 1+1 means they never end; there's always a number one number larger than the biggest one you can think of and there'll always be an even larger number than that. It was a five-year-old's window into the Big Bang and ever-expanding universe. How elegant. How infinite. How mind-boggling. Carumba!

When the teacher came back into the room, everyone was beavering away, scrawling down numbers. Everyone except me. I was staring off numbly into space. "Stuck?" she said.

Snapping out of my haze, I looked up at her and said, "They never end, you know. The numbers never end. There's always a larger one."

I don't think it was the pointlessness of the exercise that made me lose interest. I imagine, based on her reaction, a kind of grin suggesting victory, I'd grasped the point of her exercise. It was just too big a reality to comprehend.

As we slide past the event horizon of the Olympics and finally feel ourselves actually sucked and stretched into the vortex of the black hole, I'm finding a lot of people experiencing a similar aha moment. The physical reality of the Games coming to town has always seemed as abstract as an infinite string of numbers but unlike numbers, the end is near. It's really happening and the gaping chasm of understanding of what it means to actually hold an Olympics in a town as small as Whistler is beginning to sink in.

So I'd like to pass on this one bit of friendly advice: STOP BITCHING ABOUT IT!

Where were all you whiners seven years ago when your protestations might have meant something? Where were you when it was impossible to get more than 20 people to sign a letter complaining about the total and complete lack of public input into whether we wanted to be part of the bid or not? Where were you when I was taking official heat for writing about the obvious consequences of holding an Olympics in Tiny Town? You were pretty quiet then so why don't you just continue in that vein; your voices are way too late.

For all of you who suddenly realized this weekend you wouldn't be able to drive to the ski hill and park anywhere closer than Mons - and nowhere for free - what cabbage patch have you been living in for the past several years? Buy a bus pass. The roads are reserved exclusively for the over-privileged members of the Olympic Family, Very Imposing People, the masses of event junkies riding busses and the rest of us reacquainting ourselves with public transportation. And unless you're one of the first two groups, nothing's free. No free shuttles, no free parking, no free meals, no hookers, no blow; you're on your own so get over it. You're not important, you're not special and you'll be surrounded by people who are... except of course for the other unimportant people on the bus with you.

Thank you, I feel better now.

As we enter the era of all Olympics all the time, I'm both surprised and saddened municipal council decided there was one more vital piece of business they had to finish. With council and Parliament suspended until after the Games, I was hoping both would simply be background noise, the kind of minor annoyance a distant barking dog somewhere in the neighbourhood constitutes. Unfortunately, there was some unfinished business.

Ten years ago, council of the day was shocked, shocked to find out someone other than The Boot - moment of silence - wanted to hold the occasional peeler night in the village. With all the urgency of a puritanical town meeting, they drafted legislation banning titty bars in the village. The threat of bare bosoms passed on and the bylaw never received final reading.

But now, with all the escorts ramping up to supply the Olympic demand, one of the local clubs decided to join the flesh trade, sparking the Boys in the Hall to dust off the bare naked bylaw and ram it through in a special meeting. Oh the humanity.

While I'm not a fan of peeler bars, I'd personally rather see strippers than any member of the IOC plying their trade on the mean streets of Whistler. Strippers sell an honest - silicon notwithstanding - product to willing buyers. No organized group of strippers has ever given the boot to a charity committed to bringing the joy of play to children of war-torn countries just because one of the charity's sponsors is different from their sponsors. The IOC and VANOC have.

No strippers have ever strong-armed municipal governments into passing bylaws suspending your civil rights to protest or allowing agents of those governments to enter your home and remove signs they find offensive. The IOC and VANOC have.

Strippers would never demand you get off the road so they can have exclusive use of it. But you know who has.

So, you've got to ask yourself, which boobs would you rather have in town? And maybe after you've pondered that expansive question you might want to wonder about the boobs we have running the town.

Grow up, boys.