geekosystem

Yes, those are what you think they are. Although the Icelandic Men's Olympic Handball Team was eliminated yesterday, a few of its members can make a claim that few other professional handball players can. Guðjón Valur Sigurðsson, Ingimundur Ingimundarson, and the rest of the 2008 silver-medalists can say that they are featured in the Icelandic Phallological Museum. So, I guess handball is kind of a big deal in Iceland, huh?

We turn on our TVs to see them, standing on podiums with medals around their necks and their national hymns playing solemnly. What we forget is that these men and women are people too; they pee in the pool. According to Carly Geehr, a former swimmer on the U.S. National Swimming Team, Olympic swimmers relieve themselves right there in the pool. Whether or not you want to think about it, there it is, medal-winning Olympians swim in a pool full of pee.

The London 2012 Olympics have officially begun! Whenever the Olympics come around, people tend to get excited. They also tend to upload unauthorized footage to websites like YouTube. That's when the International Olympic Committee puts their collective foot down. It's clearly wrong to share an event designed to celebrate multiculturalism and encourage global cooperation -- outside the properly paying channels, of course.

The one and only croquet competition ever held in the Olympic Games took place during the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris. Apparently, only one man came to watch the games, so maybe they iced it because no one was paying to see it.

This isn't exactly breaking news, but since the London 2012 Summer Olympics begins tomorrow, we thought we'd impart some knowledge in case it hasn't yet been imparted. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee, was awarded a gold medal in 1912 Summer Olympics for his poem Ode Au Sport. Yes, they used to give out medals for poems, and yes, the guy who revived the Games won one. And yes, that's his facial hair.

If you have a difficult time doing a handful of pushups, it's time to get yourself in shape, because now even busses can do them. Not even the regular, thin, empirically attractive busses, but the heavy double-decker busses that prowl the English city streets. Don't worry, busses haven't become sentient and worried about their body image just yet, this one is just doing pushups in the name of art.

By this point, you are no doubt aware that the U.K. Ministry of Defence is installing surface-to-air missiles around London as a deterrent against would-be airplane hijackers during the Olympics. As you can imagine, some people are unhappy about the idea of having heavy weapons next door. Popular street artist Banksy doesn't seem too happy about it either.

Just to break up the cavalcade of good news and patriotic celebration today, word is that the U.K. Ministry of Defence (or "defense," depending on which side of the Atlantic you hang out on) is going ahead with their plans to install missile launchers at key positions throughout London during the Olympics. Hopefully, the arguments over whether or not their presence is gross intrusion or a security necessity will remain entirely academic.

Because there is nearly a LEGO set for every situation, there will now be a set of minifigures devoted to the Great Britain Olympic team. The set of nine will be available starting in July -- only in the United Kingdom. So if, like Pokémon, you've got to catch 'em all, it looks like you will have to pay international shipping if you don't live in an area where they're available. If not, it'll just be nine pieces missing from your otherwise perfect set. If you can stand it.

Like many of you, I use a stop watch to time all of my hugs. Emese Nagy from the U.K.'s University of Dundee is also interested in the duration of hugs, and decided to use the Olympic games as a testing ground. With the help of an independent observer, Nagy observed over 188 hugs during the 2008 Olympics. From this, she concluded that, on average, hugs last about three seconds. Apparently this fits a larger pattern, with three seconds as a "basic temporal unit." As surprising as this information is, it's apparently not all that new.

Some wag on imgur has captured the infamous on-ice collision between two Canadian players during last night's U.S.-Canada Olympic hockey match, in which the U.S. upset Canada, winning 5-3.
Watch the picture become moving pictures after the jump:

Twitter trackers are a dime a dozen nowadays, but NBC's Winter Olympics tweet tracker, "Olympic Pulse," is a cut above the rest for its fantastic, picture-heavy interface. It's not only pretty; it tells the story of what's currently going on at the Winter Olympics in in a way that a simple stream of Tweets can't.

The Department of Homeland Security will be monitoring Twitter, Google, and the blogs for up-to-the-minute information during the 2010 Winter Olympics. According to a statement recently released by the DHS, knowing what people are Tweeting, searching, and commenting about will "provide situational awareness" should terror or a disaster strike.