This meant I could spend my last two weeks of glorious summer freedom glued to the television set.

“Glued,” is a wild and dangerous understatement.

I forged a nice groove on the couch, bombarded with Michael Phelps and Paul Hamm, serves and volleys, flips and tucks, ping and pong. Yet, despite it all, there are still a number of things that confuse me about the Olympic Games.

If a sport is so precise that the scoring goes into the thousandths of a point (gymnastics), how is it possible for there to be a four-way tie for third place, as was the case in the men’s parallel bars?

Four men received a 9.762, with China’s Xiaopeng Li taking the bronze in a tiebreaker that would confuse the IRS.

I thought Belarusian Ivan Ivankov deserved a 9.764—9.763 at the very least—for his routine, but clearly I’m not cut out to be a gymnastics judge.

Why are Olympic Gymnastics officials demanding that Paul Hamm give back his gold medal? They screwed up, and now they have to deal with the mistakes they made.

It would be an absolute travesty if Hamm were forced to give back his medal after being taken to the highest high, atop the podium.

Luckily, Hamm is sticking to his guns (and the advice of the U.S. Olympic Committee) and is refusing to give the medal back. It would seem as if the judges’ decision to tally the scoring on abacuses for that “Ancient Greek feel” was a bad idea.

Are some people actually disappointed with the performance of USA men’s basketball? No Shaq, no Kobe, no KG, no T-Mac, and no outside shooters to speak of.

In the international game, where zone defenses abound and the three-point line is shorter, the best the USOC could come up with was a team of drive-a-few-steps-then-jump-up-and-go-from-there players?

After watching shot after shot clang off the rim, I started to wonder: Where’s Ray Allen? Michael Redd? Michael Finley? Brent Barry? All things considered, this team was lucky to garner a bronze.

Are people disappointed with Michael Phelps’s performance? With media member after media member hyping up Phelps quest for eight gold and Spitzian glory, he was built up to impossibly large proportions.

When he came in third in two of his first three events, the very same media were unfairly bandying about words like ‘choke’ and ‘failure.’

Phelps responded by winning gold in his next four events, then giving up his spot in a medley relay to allow a countryman a shot at gold.

When the relay team set a world record en route to a victory, Phelps still claimed gold for participating in qualifiers. He finished with eight medals, six of them gold, in eight events, tying the medal record for a single Olympics.

Not bad for a kid who is younger than three-fourths of the RPI student body.

Eight golds was an unreasonable and unrealistic expectation, especially for Phelps—who was weak in two events—and especially for a swimmer.

Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals in 1972 will likely never be duplicated, and it’s even more impressive considering he did it with a shaggy mop and a Snidely Whiplash mustache.

Of course, with four years until the next Olympics, Phelps has plenty of time to grow out his hair.