It's very interesting that there's a schoolyard metaphor at the end of this piece.

See, I'm very nostalgic about the issue of the so-called "Dream Team," which got its ass handed to it by Puerto Rico yesterday. As it happens, my life as a writer, in its current form, dates back to my observations about the 1992 "Dream Team."

I was between my junior and senior years in college, and one of my favorite things was the Bulletin Board column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I read it faithfully every day, and it was reliably funny and goofy and entertaining, and I sort of thought from time to time about submitting something to it, but I didn't get around to it until that summer, when I built up a head of steam about the Olympics. I sat down and dashed off a rant about how much I hated the flag-waving and the preening, and I called it in, and it was in the paper. There used to be a teaser on the front page of the section in the upper right hand corner that gave some hint of what the BB was talking about that day, and for years, I had the teaser that said "The bullies (and boneheads) of Barcelona" tacked to my wall. I think my parents had that column on their refrigerator for about eight years, until it turned yellow and fell apart.

I don't have a copy of it anymore, unfortunately, but I remember that I talked about how the whole thing reminded me of . . . I think it was a "sweaty, brooding, pimply tenth-grader going down to the playground to beat up a little kid with the sniffles." Something like that. So I was all over the high school metaphors, too.

Anyway, I sent stuff to Bulletin Board for years -- I even called from college to report certain things, including reflections on the 1992 presidential election coverage in which Dan Rather kept saying it was a "ding-dong race" and so on; wrote extensively about my life as an office temp, including my deep and abiding hatred of office music, which resulted in my very first mad clash with obsessive fandom in the form of a bunch of pissed-off Rod Stewart fans (no, really); suggested the all-infomercial channel in which food dehydrators could go head-to-head with juicers in battles to the death; and gave my favorite ten pieces of advice for kids, in response to that really obnoxious list that runs in various places from time to time that basically says, "Screw you, your life isn't important, get used to it."

Writing for Bulletin Board begat writing movie reviews that I sent by email to a bunch of my friends, one of whom put them on his web site, which begat a site that was first called Ms. Linda's Is-It-Worth-It Movie Reviews and later Popcorn Lobby, which begat writing obsessively about pop culture in general, which begat TWoP, which begat F&D, which brings you up to date.

So as you can see, Puerto Rico whipping the United States gives me lots of very warm feelings about how neat the last twelve years have been.