SportsonBars.com

If I was a Web designer, I would have set up an Olympics countdown on my blog. To say I'm really excited for this year's Olympics would be a gross understatement.

I've been salivating to watch the competition, to get goosebumps during the medal ceremonies, to hear the "National Anthem," to witness surprise upsets and victorious underdogs, to see the splendor of the Water Cube, to feel the sweat and pain of sport, to laugh and to cry. I will live vicariously through the thousands of journalists covering the event and keep on top of friends who are Beijing-bound.

I've convinced two of these said friends to keep blogs of their adventures. Follow Activista here, (though her blog is still naked, even after much heckling on my part) and my friend G-man here.

This weekend is BackMan's last weekend in town and he asked me to pick a place for all of us to hang out on Saturday night. My gut reaction was Swift, Zum Schneider's or Horseshoe Bar. Then it hit me. I am not going out over the next two weeks unless it involves the Olympics. DVR-ing the Games is not going to cut it. And I work in news. I'm going to be avoiding our AP news alerts like the plague. There's nothing that peeves me more than to find out in the middle of the day that Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal without witnessing it first.

An e-mail I received from Pop Media came as a welcome and timely surprise. It alerted me to a new Web site, Sportsonbars.com, for all the Big Apple sports junkies looking to spice up their sports lives. It allows you to search for teams, cities, etc. to find which bar will be showing your preferred sporting event. I logged in to check it out. Gave them my name, e-mail address and a log-in, and after typing Olympics 2008 in the search field, a bunch of places came up. Score! The Parlour, Tequila Jacks, Stout, Down the Hatch, Becky's Bar, Suspender's Bar, Madhatter. I heard of a few, but not all, of the places. I will be checking them out and see if we can't pick one from the mix.

I just got an e-mail from Young'un:

As lame as this sounds, ESPN zone?

I hope my newfound toy Sportsonbars.com will help us come up with a more appealing option.