FLORGSZ, Freedonia. “The weasel, when he senses weakness, he attacks,” says Norgovrad Sliezsciwz, Chairman of this country’s newly-formed Olympics Committee as he flips through materials submitted by Boston, Massachusetts, in support of its bid to host the 2024 Summer Games. “Boston, she is weak city of folk songs!” he notes as he throws a CD by James Taylor into a wastebasket. “Freedonia is strong–strong like bull!”
Boston’s snow mound: “It’ll be gone by 2024–promise!”
Sliezsciwz is referring to the disarray into which Boston’s Olympic bid has fallen, with the sudden replacement of its executive director and the dismal efforts by city government to remove snow that fell in the record winter of 2014-2015. “Their mound of snow and debris is still two stories high, they are so incompetent,” Sliezsciwz says with contempt. “In Freedonia, we have a mound of snow and debris that is FOUR stories high!”
If Freedonia succeeds it would mark the first time the land-locked nation, which was formed out of disputed areas of Moldavia, Paramus, New Jersey, and Disneyland at the end of World War II, has hosted the games. “It would be quite a feather in our cap,” says Dolba Nurogrebnik, who hopes to open a snack bar serving deep-fried weasel on a stick, a national delicacy, near the proposed site of the hop-step-and-jump arena. “We should begin to weave a zlotsky, our national cap, to hold this feather.”
Despite its stumbles Boston business leaders say they are prepared to re-double their efforts in order to retain what they say is their “first-mover advantage” that gives them the “inside track” on the 2024 Games, which they say they need to host in order to become a “world-class” city where people do not use quotation marks indiscriminately. “There is no way we’re going to roll over for a Third World dump like Freedonia,” says Marty Halloran, a pipefitter who sees what would be the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad as boosting construction jobs in the region. “Those guys have never even been to the Super Bowl.”
I grew up near Paramus, NJ and I had no idea of its ties to Freedonia!