Woe, Canada

It is, really, kind of pathetic.

The Olympics were nearly halfway done by Friday morning, and Canada was pitching a medal shutout.

No bronze, no silver, no gold.

The Toronto Sun's medal chart told the sobering story: Michael Phelps 6, Canada 0.

Elsewhere, medals were being handed out like business cards.

Mongolia had won a gold. And India. Vietnam had a silver. Togo had taken bronze. Even a couple of the Stans had climbed the medal podium, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

"We're being trampled by Mongolians," Allan Maki, a columnist for The Globe and Mail of Toronto, sighed at the Water Cube pool.

"Fourth is the new bronze," lamented Rob Longley, a columnist for The Toronto Sun.

Canadians, as always, are pretty good on the passive-aggressive defense.

When's the last time Togo won an Olympic medal in ice hockey?

Don't hear much about that Tajik curling team either, do you?

It's too early to panic, the Canadian Olympic Committee cautioned. Medals could come over the weekend in sailing and rowing. Canada is a second-half team, officials promised.

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While we are on the subject - if you wonder why I have not been reporting more on the Olympics it is because of the bigotry of NBC in cahoots with the Evil Empire.

To see fantastic online video of the Olympics, go to NBCOlympics.com. But you'd better be on a PC or newer Mac and have Silverlight 2 onboard, because NBC and Microsoft have shut out some Mac and Linux users.

In a slap to the Olympic ideal of everyone playing by the same rules, NBC and Microsoft have essentially said to some Mac owners and Linux users: you can't play.

The L.A. Times Web Scout blog explains:

Apple computers more than a couple of years old -- including all iBooks and PowerBooks as well as some iMacs and Mac minis -- will not run Silverlight 2, the software underlying NBC's Olympics player. And computers running the Linux operating system -- an open-source alternative to Windows -- were also left out of the mix. When unlucky users try to fire up the video player to catch a few rounds of pingpong, they'll instead be greeted by a screenful of technical requirements that their computer doesn't meet.