Warning: Today’s public service involves personal preferences and silly prejudices.

Thus, although suitable for all ages and an excellent conversation-starter for the dinner table, it should not be considered a one-size-fits-all viewing guide for the Summer Olympics.

Consume at your own risk, although, as usual, I’m probably going to be right on all counts.

Face it. When it comes to the Olympics, you can’t watch it all. Nor would you want to.

There’s just way too much of it.

So how do your sort through it all?

You see, to me — and I may have mentioned this in the past — the litmus test for getting a sport put into the Olympics should be that the gold medal for it has to be the epitome of the sport.

That’s why Gymnastics, Track and parts of Field, sometimes Swimming, tend to be the biggest stars. Fairly well known sports that don’t have anything to compete with their Olympic competition.

But it’s even better if it’s a sport that, over the last four years, you plum forgot was even a sport.

Something like Canoe Slalom.

The rest is just filler.

That’s why the Winter Olympics, overall, is much better viewing — and, yes, we’re looking at you, Curling.

Point is, you want to choose something that will make you lean back, shake your head, and wonder, “Really? People actually train all their lives on a trampoline for this moment?”

Go for it. That’s the Olympic spirit.

Curiosity is going to get the best of me and I’ll have to check out Solo Synchronized Swimming— if only to find out how you can synchronize anything solo. I had trouble even putting those two words in the same sentence.

And while we’re at it, Where would I go to learn fencing and find a good coach, anyway?

For the first time this year you can watch sports climbing — the kind of rock climbing you might see in an upscale mall. And Skateboarding will be on loan from the X-Games.

With that in mind, conversely, let’s go ahead and send the golfers home right now. There are at least four, maybe five or six, golf tournaments higher up their bucket list, which doesn’t include the Ryder Cup. And they probably don’t have courtesy cars in Paris anyway.

Perhaps the networks don’t trust us to watch if LeBron isn’t involved, but does Paris really need basketball? Maybe the 3-on-3 hoops would be acceptable viewing.

There is football, but it’s the wrong kind of football. It’s the one that should be spelled “futbol” or, better yet, “soccer,” and, besides, it has the World Cup to dwarf anything that happens these next two weeks.

You get my drift?

To my way of thinking, the Olympics has not really been the same since 1920, which was the last year that Tug of War was contested as a sport.

That sport would fit another of my Olympic criteria in that it’s reminiscent of something from an elementary school Field Day, but done by adults.

There is still some organized Tug of War worldwide, although, sadly, there’s been no groundswell to get it back in the Olympics. Us Yanks apparently were never really a big factor when it was contested. North Ireland pretty well dominates it these days.

But I’m guessing we could round up an offensive line or two and make a real difference on what would have to be a sturdy medals podium.

As for obscure activities that are there …

You probably thought you knew what Handball was. I know I did.

We were both wrong.

It has nothing to do, apparently, with those cozy courts you might have seen on campus for squash or whatnot.

Though popular in Europe, Olympic Handball might better be described for American audiences as “team handball,” as it employs a half-dozen or more competitors per side in a space bigger than a basketball court.

The literature I’m reading says that it is “derivative of soccer, adapted for playing with hands instead of feet” — a suggestion for improving soccer that I’ve long championed, by the way — “and winds up looking like water polo without the water.”

See what you can learn here. All this time I thought handball was just racquet ball without the racquet.

I would close by suggesting that a good Hot Dog Eating competition would spice things up.

But the Fourth of July has that market cornered.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com