In keeping with the Olympic fever (there’s only one cure — more cowbell!) sweeping our fine Nation, ‘Puter rushes in where angels fear to tread. That’s right, boys and girls, it’s time to set straight, once and for all, which events are sports and which are desperate cries for help masquerading as sports.

These web folks define “sport” as “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.” Fools and incompetent morons.

Sure, sport involves athleticism, at least to some minor degree, and competition, but this definition falls short. What sport really requires is an objective measure of performance. If your event is “judged” or “scored,” you’re probably living in denial that you’re participating in a sport, regardless of the athletic demands of the event.

So, to provide some examples of sports: soccer, shooting, tae kwon do, baseball, bowling, curling, miniature golf, track and field events, horse racing and race walking.

Living in denial: figure skating (particularly ice dancing), synchronized swimming, cheerleading, gymnastics (particularly the rhythmic sort), surfing and diving (especially the synchronized kind).

“But ‘Puter,” I hear the collective moan, “Ice dancing is totally athletic, and, like, really, really hard!” No doubt, replies ‘Puter, but if you have to rely on the East German judge to win, you’ve already lost. If a clock, a goal line or a target are involved, there can be no argument as to the outcome. If Claudette, the Gitanes-smoking, brie-scarfing, Beaujolais-guzzling French woman (I use that term loosely), gets to decide how pretty your outfit is, and you get to win based on her assessment, you end up with Salt Lake City all over again.

To recap: Luge=sport. Freestyle Anything=Not A Sport.

On this, there can be no debate.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.