After the 2000 Spanish paralympics basketball team faked intellectual disability to abet fundraising for the National Federation for Mentally Handicapped Sports, my heart was too heavy to follow Olympic news for years.

Now I have something to relate to again.

(The emergence of these mascots was foreshadowed eerily in the original Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" in which asexually-reproducing midway carinival prizes overran the empire's flagship and tested Kirk to his manly limits.)

But Seth, I have to ask, Is there meaning in the descent of Olympic symbols from the sideshow magician's magic rings to these carny barkers' dashboard fauna?

What signal is being sent to the world through the imago of children with their brains on fire. shapeshifting to antelopes, pandas, surgeons and swallows? Is there a subtext of endagered species status grafted onto the neonate cariacatures of mindless social submission?

And lastly, I have to wonder how much further the fad of packing ethnographic field data into the semiotic flair of a meretricious nationalistic hysteria can go, beyond this.

No, really!

( I have hidden a semantic key in the post that, if solved and applied to the right sequence of consonants in the inappropriate vocabulary, will produce a product discount code good for 10% off all official Olympic purchases.)