Coverage Day Five (Olympic Day 9) | |
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Thank god for Karl who can cover the olympics with the best of them, when i go slacking off from the computer for days at a time. And it's also good because he will watch the hockey, which to me is right up there with all televised team sports and just flits right through my already minimal attention span, although I suspect Karl also sleeps through hockey and all of his coverage is soundbites he absorbs through sleep osmosis. I spent all of yesterday in a car driving around an east bay town which will have to go unnamed here because it contains the motherlode of all thrift stores and I am a selfish, selfish girl. Anyways, car radio is a great way to hear the olympics because of the time lapse thing. I got all the scores and wins of everything, so that Saturday night's big fun wouldn't be a surprise to me. So I came home Saturday night, also known as valentines day, which is apparently celebrated at my house by eating pizza and candy from Thrifty's (at least it came in a red heart shaped box) and watching the olympics with my boyfriend's 12 year old skating expert and 18 year old everything expert. I was pretty sure that this year I had trained said boyfriend well enough to expect, if not jewelry or a new car, a dinner out, but instead I got the afore mentioned celebration and grumpy discourse about crass commercialism and the politics of consumption and an obscene card. Anyways, I was the only one who knew already who was winning men's figure skating that night, and at least could sit there smugly knowing that of couse, it would be the well dressed russian (see daytwo for any skating outfit comments since I am really trying to be over that and am not going to say a thing about the pirate outfit) and that the US guys had no prayer. I learned alot about bobsled last night from the 18 year old olympic expert, who was probably making it all up, and who was also aghast at the curling that came on for a little while. All his years of progressive, multicultural schooling in many different Santa Cruz schools haven't paid off a whole lot. He was pretty impressed by the Ergo Man graphics on how to do a quadruple toe loop, in case anyone really wanted to know. I was pretty impressed by the cross country skiing drama about Bjorn from Norway. This was accompanied by voiced over commentary (using phrases like Big Kahuna) that was even more poorly written than my pretty pathetic attempts at writing, which made me even more smug, knowing that I could probably get a job at cbs if my dad knew someone that worked there or something. But this is kind of a cool sport, because the person that won the day before starts the race out, and then they let all the losers after him in hot pursuit, and he has to not only race as fast as he can but be completely paranoid the whole time that they're going to catch him and possibly kill him, i guess, although i didn't see evidence of that and kind of just made it up. Bjorn from Norway is a big hero there, i guess kind of like the Michael Jordan of cross country skiing. He even has his own show on the fishing channel there, which Michael Jordan doesn't, as far as I know. I could be wrong because I watch fishing about as much as basketball. Anyways, this was great to watch as soon as i turned the sound down, because this other guy, also from Norway, was after him and it was really scarey. It kind of reminded me of most scenes from The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Harrison Bjorn was skiing as fast as his legs would go, and he looked like a crazy bird in a zoo, with all these people standing there watching him. And they had to keep going around and around the same 9 mile course, the whole time thinking that the bad guys were just behind him ready to kill him or take him to jail. When the bad guy finally caught up, he just skiied right behind him, knowing full well that he had him, until they came to the final stretch and he just kind of storked on out ahead, winning the gold medal. At least he didn't kill him, because all these people were watching. But it was very dramatic and kind of sad.
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