The Odd-Ball Olympics was a competition where open to any child under the age of 13 who could do a crazy stunt. Sally, celebrating girl power, desperately wanted a girl to win the event. Most of the girls kind of bombed their performances, except for Lindylou Duckworth.
Lindylou’s talent was “wrist-wrestling” anyone who challenged her while she stood on a banana peel. I’m not sure what wrist-wrestling is. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant arm wrestling. I guess we’re going with the assumption that banana peels are as slippery as they are portrayed to be in old-timey slapstick movies or Mario Cart games, so arm wrestling someone while standing on one would be extra difficult?
Lindylou was awarded nine points out of a possible ten for that trick, and she was the leader. That is, until Stinky Redmond came along.
The previous year, Stinky Redmond apparently imitated a blizzard by shaking dandruff out of his hair. I don’t know why a boy with a lot of dandruff would be considered a threat in this competition.
A lot of parents complained about Stinky’s stunt, so he had promised to do something cleaner the following year. His talent was going to be taking a shower in six seconds, but that got nixed because there were no showers in the park. That’s right, the problem wasn’t that no one thought it was inappropriate for a child to get naked in front of everyone for this competition. They would have been fine with the child nudity. The problem was that there were no showers in the park. So instead, Stinky’s talent was going to be killing fifty mosquitoes in an hour.
I guess that’s kind of a talent, because it also required luring mosquitoes. I would have to say that, for me, a red flag was the fact that Stinky insisted on performing without being observed by any of the judges. He claimed that he worked best alone. Sally voiced her concern that Stinky would possibly use the time away from the judges to cheat. Encyclopedia pointed out that the Odd-Ball Olympics were run on the honor code and that there was no cheating.
Seriously, Encyclopedia? We’re thirteen books deep into the series and there hasn’t been a single instance of some sort of competition taking place in Idaville that hasn’t been marked by someone trying to, or intent on, cheating. Encyclopedia had been in the middle of all of this cheating every single time. That fact that Encyclopedia isn’t suspicious of this “oh, I can’t do my talent if judges are watching me” shtick is a sure sign of either naivety or insanity on his part.
When the hour was up and judges checked on Stinky, he was lounging on a picnic table. He told everyone that he killed so many mosquitoes in the first twenty minutes that he took a nap. Surrounding the picnic table were a bunch of dead mosquitoes. So clearly, Stinky did what he said he was going to do. There was nothing fishy here.
Encyclopedia checked the area out and noticed an ant hill. The ants were crawling around the hill, just kind of chilling out. That’s when he knew shit was afoot.
If all of these mosquitoes had been killed in the area up to an hour earlier, the ants would have discovered all of these mosquito corpses near their hill and they would be hard at work bringing the food back to their colony. So, Encyclopedia knew that Stinky actually brought dead mosquitoes to the area and sprinkled them around the area right before the judges appeared.
And that’s why we never allow anyone to perform some feat in a competition without them being observed by judges.
With it being proven that Stinky cheated, he was disqualified and Lindylou was crowned the Odd-Ball Olympics champion.
If the name Lindylou Duckworth sounds familiar, it’s because she once sexually assaulted a boy because he was annoying her by jingling the change in his pocket.
