I was thinking about the Beijing Olympics, and realized that the U.S. men’s basketball team had zero Clippers on it. But then, neither did the Vancouver Olympics. Have any Clippers on the U.S. team.

Though clipper ships presumably sailed to Vancouver, but not Beijing, it being too far from the ocean. Hong Kong? Sure. But not Beijing. The Clippers being named after clipper ships, fast and handy, the container ships of their time.

Which also brought to mind …

Bacon!

Living in the UAE, bacon just disappears out of your life. Unless you really work at it. And I don’t.

I recall having bacon at the Beijing Olympics, where I wrote about drugs a time or three. In fact, the most-read item on this blog, which is up to more than 1,250 separate entries … is about the Beijing Olympics and drugs. Didn’t see that coming.

Anyway, an item I wrote at the Beijing Olympics, suggesting that something fishy was up, is No. 1 all-time here. Not the Usain Bolt item, though I did write about the Jamaican sprinter who tore chunks off the world records in the 100 and 200, which is always a red flag for performance-enhancing drugs. Obliterating records that usually are set in tiny increments.

No, the most-read item ever on this blog was something I did on China’s 2008 Olympic weightlifters, in which I noted that when one country dominates weight lifting like that, we owe it to ourselves to be skeptical that everything is on the up and up.

That slug has been more popular than … bacon. People still keep coming back to it, and two years later I still get comments from people arguing back and forth. “Of course the Chinese were cheating.” “No, the Chinese didn’t cheat; they just worked harder, and how dare you cast aspersions on that?”

The last time I made that many people mad it probably had to do with motor racing. Maybe even the Long Beach street race, though it more likely was the race at Fontana.

For a long time, several of the most-read items on the blog were parts of the Seasons in The Sun series, which I intended to be 31-parts long … but I got to only about 20 and around 1996 or so before I ran of energy.

If you stuck with me this far, I am even harder to follow than usual because I tried a gimmick here. Of the 40-some “categories” I use for entries, I just ticked the boxes of the 13 that I have gone the longest without using. They are listed up at the top of this item, under the headline, and of the 13 there, I have already mentioned 12.

And the 13th? Landon Donovan. Yes, my soccer pal. Probably a hundred items in this blog mention him. But not lately. Not in months. Just shows that categories, like shoes and haircuts, go in and out of style.

And how ’bout those Clippers?