With all apologies to Bill Maher for brazenly ripping off his bit, it’s time for some new rules for the Olympics:

You don’t get to call them the most spectacular opening ceremonies ever when you chose to play the booger card.

Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens . . . and you went with Harry Potter and Mary Poppins?

If you are going to use the Industrial Revolution as a highlight of British history, then you need to give a nod to child slave labor and tuberculosis too.

a: Al Gore invented the internet, and
b: If “This is for everyone” why do I pay $50 a month for access?

Having a field full of minimum wage workers dressed in peasant outfits clear your set from the first act of the opening ceremony is irony that deserves a gold medal.

If your monarch gives grumpy face when forced to stay up past her bedtime, schedule your opening ceremonies earlier.

NBC does not need to explain why a country is appearing out of alphabetical order during the Parade of Nations. We’re Americans – we can’t spell and have never heard of that country anyway.

Ralph Lauren has not been happening in over a decade. Next time have Sean Combs design the US uniforms.

The stylings of Divine were never intended to be copied by pre-teen girls in leotards.

Giving a hug to the Olympian you just booted off the podium because your coach whined you were not judged fairly is not good sportsmanship.

It’s time to stop assuming all male gymnasts are gay, they aren’t. But all male divers are.

Someone needs to tell that bitch that calls the diving that there is no such thing as ‘almost’ a belly flop.

Tom Daley is only 18. I did not need to know he always dresses to the left.

After lovingly panning over Nick McCrory’s massive bulge again and again, it is unnecessary to tell us Kristian Ipsen selected him as his roommate.

We do not need a splash meter to show us how big the splash was we just watched a diver make.

If you can not refrain from wearing a T-shirt with a picture of your Olympian kid on it, at least pop for the extra $10 and have it done professionally.

If we can land a rover on Mars we can do better than an octogenarian holding up a ‘it’s good’ white flag on every long jump and triple jump attempt.

Decathletes need to quit whining about how gruelling the ten event two days sport is or the last event needs to be switched to the triathalon.

It’s been 100 years since the King of Sweden said that gold medal winning decathlete Jim Thorpe was the world’s greatest athlete; we can stop using that title now. None of the decathlon medal winner’s scores and/or times would even qualify them for the finals in the individual events.

In one year we’ve seen planking, photobombing, and owling. Winners biting their medal is a photo op whose time is long past.

It doesn’t matter how much coverage you give BMX, it’s still a bunch of almost 30-year-olds riding bikes the rest of us put in storage when we got our learner’s permit.

You have four years to prepare, you should come up with a better interview question for whoever won whatever than, “Tell us how you feel right now?”

When an Olympic rower gets major wood during the medal ceremony, the commentator needs to ask him, “Tell us how you feel right now?”

No one cares that the women beach volleyball players wear a bikini. Except the lesbians.

If it takes longer to introduce the competitors than it does to finish the event, don’t.

We have to admit it is not that black guys run faster than Caucasians – it’s just the white boys can’t compete with those bulges.

a: When you use childhood dyslexia as the adversity an Olympian overcame, you are trying too hard, and
b: No one will ever trump Oscar Pistorius’ overcoming adversity card, so it’s time to put that cheap attempt to pull the audience’s heartstrings to bed.

If you’ve been hyping the women’s 4 x 100m relay all night long, don’t cut away from the race to announce who Mitt Romney chose to share the silver medal with him come November.

After 17 days and a few thousand hours of television coverage, don’t be surprised if the Roseanne Barr Roast gets higher ratings than the closing ceremony.

British fashion is a lot like British food: bland and not popular even in the UK. Neither is worthy of designing your closing ceremony around. As for featuring a line-up of has been rock stars: Eric Clapton is glad he was not invited to the party.

[‘The XXX Games’ are a series of posts about hot Olympians, gay competitors – both present and past – and general articles about the 2012 London Olympics of interest to gay men. So, yeah, lots of hot male eye candy. Click the XXX Games graphic below for additional news, stories, and pictures.]