I just gotta ask...

Meters swum today: None. Day off.
Playing in the background: Olympic gymnastics. Over and over and over.

As coverage of sporting events goes, this Olympics rocks. Three thousand hours of coverage. Six channels. Online video feeds. Featurettes, "meet the athlete" flashbacks, cool graphics that explain exactly why Michael Phelps is God's gift to the 50-meter pool. But they forgot one feature. So this is my open letter to NBC:

GUYS, WHERE'S MY COMMENTATOR MUTE BUTTON?!

Look, sometimes it's halfway entertaining to have these idiots nattering in the foreground. Sometimes they even have decent information, like, "What is curling and where did it get started?" But, once the event starts, could they please just shut the hell up? Please? Pretty please? There'll be plenty of time to yammer on about the finer points of knee action and double half pikes (whatever those are) during the lengthy series of instant replays that somehow end up taking three times as long as the actual event.

The gymnastics commentators are the worst. Dear God, don't get me started. Oops, I already did. Here are five statements that need to be immediately banned from competition commentary, upon pain of a severe wedgie:

"That was huge!"
"That's a mandatory .8 deduction under the new scoring system."
"She just can't stick the landing here."
"He's left the door wide open for (insert third world nation that's never won a medal)."
"Oh, that's too bad."

Thank you. NOT. Enough!

Seriously, I want a commentator mute button. Since these has-been psuedo-experts can't shut up about the stuff they were wrong about ten years ago, NBC needs to provide each of us with a specialized remote. One tap of the blue button and Tim Daggett falls silent. I'd pay good money for this. I think most people would.

There's only one proviso. The commentator mute button would not work on Bela Karolyi. Frankly, I'm not sure anything would, short of a sledgehammer.