Coverage Day One (Olympic Day 5)

Welcome to My Olympic Diaries. Frankly, these reports are in here because I am bitter that someone like Rosie O'Donnell didn't invite me to cover the Olympics at their expense, from Nagano. So I'll just do it here. It's not even that I am a huge fan of the Olympics, or any of these winter sports (I found out on the official CBS Olympic website that there are other sports in the Olympics besides Ice Skating and Skiing) but the Olympic tv watching thing is so deeply internalized that I am like the Olympic tv zombie with the channel changer.

Not that I really watch it. Actually last night, according to the multiple teasers I saw while i was giving tax advice to my friend Marvin on the phone, there was going to be a really big race with this super hunky guy (that's what this am's Chronicle called him) from Marin and a really good skiier from France.) And it was at the same time as NYPD Blue and i watched that instead. This was a big deal because his entire family was there and he had an extremely cute kind of Todd Oldham looking faux fur hat. He was going to do freestyle skiing, which is not anything like freestyle dancing which i associate with the grateful dead, it means you ski down a really bumpy ski run of moguls (not Disney executives laying face down in the snow but just big lumps of snow) and do prescribed jumps that i guess are supposed to show how wacky skiing can really be. But i watched Detectives Siphowitz and Smits solve crimes instead.

Anyways, in the guise of good reporting, that guy won. He has fan clubs in Japan.

And snowboarders would apparently argue that skiiers can be wacky because they think they all have sticks up their butts and made bad snowboarding rules for the first snowboarding in the Olympics ever. Snowboarders are even taking skiiers to court over it. That should be exciting. And a Canadian snowboarder got kicked out of the Olympics for smoking pot. And not that this has anything to do with it, but the other rainy night i got into my car after i had left it parked, unlocked, downtown where they do the needle exchange (duh) and some damp person had used it for a nice dry place to smoke pot.

Anyways, some other good things that were on was a speed skater that looked like Satan in a tight shiny red suit go careening out of bounds (marked on the ice by little red balls!) into another skater just like at stock car races! My friend Anthony thinks the red suited guy is way hunky but frankly, his thighs scare me. And there were lots of previews of the adorable US skaters practicing in non skating dresses-I got to see Tara Lipinski in a black leotard. Because that's where the big bucks are right now, merchandising skaters. I don't think they let Oxana sell stuff though because she's gotten chunky off of too many Long Island Ice teas and gets DUI's.

There are lots of really good skating ads on now though. The child porn soup one who's subtext is these prepubescent babes are so hot they melt the ice. (And then you can order the same mug as the girls have from the Campbell's soup website.) I don't know if they've had the snowlets skate around yet, but those have got to be the merchandising pinnalce of cuteness but, the longer you look at them the scarier they get so i'm kind of worried there might be a sort of covert plot in there somewhere to scare little girls into demanding skating lessons? Soon there will be ice skating rinks popping up in ever city?

Not to dredge up the ghost of skating past, but I can't help it-I missed the Tonya and Nancy face off the first time it was on tv, but luckily they play really quality programming over and over and i was able to catch it on the replay just by randomly tuning into fox, who i guess is bitter than they don't have the olympic coverage, too. That was really boring and they both looked like they were paid to sit there and look really dumb, at least Tonya worked on acting, she has had a lot of practice as a drama queen but Nancy just sat there and had trouble reading her cue cards and bit her lip alot. They showed Tonya in the stylists chair getting ready to come on, and you know that they did her bangs like that on purpose. And gave her a line dancing pantsuit while Nancy got to wear some little navy blue sailor number that accentuated her capped teeth.

So keep tuning in and I'll try to update this sort of frequently. Email me, too, if you want to contribute to the report.