WE'RE ALL GOING TO WEST EDMONTON MALL!!!

and because you cannot have a hockey party without a mountie...

Yay, Sports!

I am resistant to NBC's deliberate attempts to pull at my heartstrings with all its dead-mothers, handicapped-siblings, return-from-injury Olympic backstories, but here's a story I can't resist: this guy, Muhammad Abbas, is the best.

why would i blog about anything else?

holy shit, y'all, could it get more dramatic than last night's women's figure skating final? seemed like each of the medal winners had her own reason to cry.
kim yu na cries with joy and relief.

mao asada cries with disappointment.

rochette, well, she made all of us cry.

some fun articles:
reaction in korea
real rivalry
reminds me of all that chatter about phelps and his extra-long arms, but somehow feels weirder to obsess over a woman's body, no?
now that figure skating is over, only two events of importance remain:
- men's hockey and the canadians kicking some ass
- wiping that smirk off of apolo anton ohno's face

no pressure

i know, it's so predictable to be into women's figure skating. honestly, i don't think i've paid this much attention since the nancy kerrigan/tonya harding days. kim yu na is totally adorable!

ps do you think brian orser is out in korea?

pps so kim yu na and my fave johnny weir are besties. girl has good taste.

ppps for an entertaining documentary of kim, go here. it's mostly in korean, fyi.

sunday sunday sunday!!!

730PM EST, you know what i'll be doing. i can't even deal.


so in my junior year in college i had what i still consider to be the most fun internship ever when i worked on the first iteration of nbcolympics.com. my job mostly involved transcribing interviews between my producers and athletes. yeah, that sounds terribly dull, but two important things: 1. olympic athletes almost never have predictable life stories. (case in point, check this one about bilodeau, the first canadian to win a gold medal on home soil). i'd be sitting there with headphones on, typing like crazy, and most likely crying a little. 2. it actually helped a lot in law school! so there you go, my unsolicited piece of advice for the day: best way to prepare for law school? transcription.

anyway, too many things with the olympics, so a few thoughts.
1. ohno is a whiner and even when he's trying to be gracious he can't help but needle.
2. that video ad up top really drives me nuts bc nobody in it actually lives in vancouver anymore. maybe except sarah mclachlan, but you get the point.
3. shaun white is freaking hilarious, despite being carrot top's identical twin.
4. johnny weir! he's awesome.

finally, who's got the best olympic coverage in my opinion? the wall street journal! maybe since there is no good news in the financial sector they've decided to channel their energies elsewhere. whatever the reason, i'm glad bc where else will you discover that a lot of ice dancing pairs are siblings? and for those of you who wonder how the eff do you get into bobsledding? by going broke, that's how. they also rank olympics parties!

ps i've also been partial to aileen gallagher's coverage for new york magazine.

and here it is, my favorite scene so far from the olympics

(that bouquet he's holding? the white roses spell "J." just when you thought your craft project was embarrassing).

The Clownface Is the Window to the Soul

The Olympics are such a weird combination of ridiculous atheleticism; obsessive dedication to things that seem like they might be fun, but not if you're doing them hours at a time almost everyday for the past four years (e.g., luge); minute differences in speed that have to be within the margin of reasonable error and are otherwise undetectable to the human eye (long-track speed skating); post-Cold-War nationalism; and bizarre theatricality.

Also, the Olympics are one of those things that people don't care about at all for years on end, but then for two weeks they care about them a lot. I am not immune to this sentiment myself:  I don't like Apolo Anton Ohno. I don't know why, but I really, really like Hannah Teter. What's weird though is that I have not thought about either of these two humans since 2006, and this week I was made to remember they exist and respectively started hating and loving them again.

So, the Olympics are a weird thing is what I am saying. And I know they're E's beat, and I should end this post, but the weirdest thing about the Olympics is that humanity never allows two people to be as ridiculous as Sevchenko and Szolkowy (pictured above), but the Olympics does, and gives them bronze medals. In life if you open your routine with the old miming clown popping out of the window thing, aren't you automatically disqualified? Anyway, immediately after writing this, I am going to forget that they exist, and then when they pop up again in Sochi dressed like disco era Martians in blackface, I'm going to be what is up with those two? All over again.

is wayne gretzky going to have to choke a bitch?

i know none of you watched it so here' s a recap.

the opening ceremonies went fairly well, although it would have been quite awesome if broken social scene had performed instead of (yikes) bryan adams. kd lang was great.

but lest we canadians get too big for our pear-shaped mountie breeches, what should have been the highlight--the lighting of the torch by 4 people, not just one, including canadian hero and man in motion rick hanson--fell rather embarrassingly short. although the rest of the torchbearers quite literally grinned and beared waiting for the mechanical malfunction to be resolved, wayne gretzky was just not having any of it.

so yeah, good for vancouver for incorporating the first nations people into the ceremony, although kind of cruel for making them dance for like an hour with those heavy costumes. also, we can feature a gang of fiddling tapdancers but no asians? and no love for mr. hockey?

ps that photo is for all you americans who couldn't care less about anything not american, i.e., all americans.

own the podium

yes! we're finally coming upon the the convergence of two things nobody cares about (except moi, of course)--winter sports and canada.

the winter olympics are here, starting on friday. woohoo! the downside is that i have to rely on nbc's typically schmaltzy and american exceptionalism-y coverage. i remember back in college i ran into a professor of mine in the elevator. the sydney games had just ended and he had returned from a stint in london. the two of us grumbled about american olympic coverage and lauded the bbc. yes my friends, i can bring down the level of discourse on virtually any occasion. instead of asking relevant questions about reconstruction or lincoln with the premier scholar on these subjects, we talked about bob costas.

anyway, check out this inadvertently hilarious article from the times on canada's desperate efforts to win a gold medal on home soil. apparently canada spent several million dollars to study these Important Matters:

- super-low-friction bases for snowboards and whether curling brooms really melt the ice. (They don’t, but they warm it enough to reduce surface friction, especially if the broom is dry.)

- Scientists used a missile guidance system to track skiers, and built a giant catapult, a human slingshot, to hurl speedskaters into a turn to practice cornering.

oh well. just don't get adam gopnik or michael ignatieff involved. those guys ruin everything. (oops, too late).

btw, also check out this video introducing the olympics mascots. my bro-in-law composed the music!

mo'lympics

i enjoy the olympics in a very unironic way. yeah, i'm pretty sure everyone is drugged up and the chinese have infants on their women's gymnastics team or whatever, but still.

anyway, i do feel conflicted every 4 years. where do my loyalties lie? (un?)fortunately, the canadian olympic team seems unable to win a medal in a single event, so i guess i'm going to go with korea. i am sure we will sit comfortably in third until all the track and field events begin. what happened to canada? we used to win a medal or two in the summer olympics. [update: korea is now behind germany in the medal count. boo...]

i find it somewhat amusing that all of my not very patriotic friends get seriously peeved when i don't cheer for the USA. there also was this ridiculous new york times article expressing incredulity over the fact that the chinese are (gasp!) uninterested in michael phelps. yeah, guess what? not everyone cares about america. deal with it.

btw, did anyone happen to read this david brooks op-ed? is he accusing americans of "whining" over katrina? why did he wait until the final sentence to state his thesis?