A Glimpse at My Day

i watched miracle last night, about the 1980 olympics and the miracle on ice (when the us hockey team beat the soviets, for them what might not be familiar), so today i had to watch current olympics hockey because they reran the men's gold medal game this afternoon. us-canada, us gets the gold in overtime. very exciting. :D i love that one of the us players, his uncle played on the 1980 team and his grandfather played in 1960 (also a gold medal year). and not only was this the us men's first hockey gold since 1980, we won it on the same day. just, you know, forty-six years later.

(in 1980 i was in the denver airport and when the us team won the crowds of people standing around the gates watching the game on those tvs in the waiting areas lost their collective shit. it's hard to overstate how big a deal it was. i mean aside from the geopolitics the soviet team was highly trained and the us team was made up of college kids who'd only ever played college hockey against each other. which is not to discount their talent and hard work but just that they were trained under a very different system and expectations were very low.)

i'm kind of going to miss the olympics and to be honest i'm really going to miss the olympics themed ads. especally the little girl skating in the attic in front of all her stuffed animals, the other little girl who wants to skate so bad and falls the second she gets on the ice - and then you see her thumbs-up before she hauls herself upright again - and the "we're all on the same team" one. (all the folks in competing sports jerseys giving each other the stink-eye cracks me up.) i'm also going to miss curling being such a big part of the national conversation. and it would've been nice to get another curling medal but i'm not in any way complaining about the silver we did get.

in that vein, have a video about the weird-ass physics of curling stones (among other things). no one can figure out why they spin the way they do.

a farm in vermont has a tournament every year using cheese wheels as curling stones. no word on whether or not the winning team wins its own cheese wheel. if not, it should.

you can learn something from every sport. like that skeleton is the most terrifying sport in the winter olympics, second only to luge. either you go down an ice chute feet first or head first but both are extremely scary options.

so we're in for another storm around here and according to the french toast alert we're doomed. by which i mean A LOT of snow. curling was canceled tonight and tomorrow and the u is closed altho that just means campus is closed but if you can do your job remotely you still have to do it. one of my monday meetings was canceled anyway so we can, in the words of the pi, "enjoy the blizzard". i got food, i got a shovel, i got a metal ruler to measure how much snow lands on my car, i'm prepared. and i missed the last big storm on account of i was in florida so maybe mother nature thinks i'm owed one.

i hope the americans in the audience who had the day off had a relaxing and/or fun one, and that for everyone who didn't have the day off (or who doesn't live in the us...) it wasn't too monday a monday. i have watched almost no olympics but i did take myself out for lunch (steak tips! side salad! a pile of very good rice pilaf!) and, uh, bring a bunch of clothes to goodwill. and i read! an actual book! for once! which was very relaxing.

(i also got a rice pudding to go because i wanted it but i was too full after lunch. i got it with whipped cream which might have been a mistake because said whipped cream has totally lost its structural integrity in the fridge. rice pudding still looks good at least and will probably be breakfast tomorrow.)

canada finally won a couple gold medals - both kazakhstan (men's figure skating) and brazil (men's alpine skiing) beat them to gold - brazil got a gold altho the guy used to ski for norway (his mom is brazilian) so, y'know, he grew up in a winter-sports country - also his gold was the first winter olympics medal for any south american country ever which is pretty cool - anyway. canada set off a curling scandal! boopgate. which is evidently only partly about the fact that some of the men were touching the stone after throwing it, which is technically illegal but unevenly enforced (i think the whole thing started when sweden wanted some clarification on the rules over booping), and more about their very unsportsmanlike conduct. like, there was swearing. and lying. (a hint: if you're going to insist you didn't boop the stone and fuck you, sweden, for suggesting it, maybe first make sure there isn't video evidence of you doing that very thing.) (because one of the canadians was caught on tape very obviously booping the stone.) it's apparently a thing that happens - the booping, not the swearing, i mean curling is generally a pretty polite sport - and there's always the possibility someone booped the stone unconsciously, but did i mention the highly unsportsmanlike swearing? it seems to have snowballed a bit and caught the canadian women as well and now that everyone's so focused on the booping a bunch of other teams have been seen doing it.

curling, man.

the baby has a broom. SOCUTE.

i've seen mostly bits and pieces of other sports - a few ends of the women's curling (us vs china), some pairs skating, some women's monobob (not monoboob, self), some women's biathlon (i wanted to see the greenlandic biathlete but no luck), some men's figure skating. poor quad god. he fell twice and came in eighth and i felt so bad for him altho he sounded very mature and thoughtful and philosophical after his program when he got off the ice and some reporter stuck a mic in his face and basically asked "so how does it feel to have fucked up your chance at a gold medal?" so many of the guys fell tho. and he and the kazakh skater hugged and it looked like ilia congratulated him and it was very sweet.

i have yet to see any skiing. just moguls, no downhill.

local curling last night went better than last week - by which i mean no one fell and hurt themselves - and i made a couple good shots altho we lost anyway. and saturday for valentine's day i went to the dentist and got my comics (well, comic) and met my sister for dinner and a 40th anniversary showing of pretty in pink. pretty in pink is forty, good lord. it was never my favorite john hughes movie but jon cryer and annie potts remain extremely adorable. but the love story is kind of half-assed - like, why are these two kids interested in each other in the first place? - and for all the judging of blane being rich it's andie's hangup, not his. he seems legitimately earnest and sincere in his attraction to her and she second-guesses him because he has money and she doesn't. also i didn't like her remade prom dress the first time i saw the movie and i don't like it now. it's ugly and boring. but the soundtrack is still *chef's kiss*. whatever else you want to say about john hughes movies, they always had absolutely banging soundtracks.

for the heated rivalry fen in the audience, if you haven't seen it, have an interview with rachel reid. i keep wondering how many people are watching olympics hockey because of the show and/or books.

first important thing: the us mixed doubles won silver against sweden, which isn't as good as a gold but is the first us medal in that branch of curling so i'm not complaining too much. it was a good game too, very tense. (i may or may not have missed an admim meeting because i was watching it online at work. ahem.) and my curling club got a shoutout. :D

2 fast 2 curlious. hee.

(last night i watched some of the women us vs sweden and cory thiesse who was on the mixed doubles team is on the women's team and she must be so tired.)

second important thing: i got snowed on tuesday on the way home. :DDD it was very exciting.

other sports i've seen include some ski jump (looks both fun and absolutely terrifying), some speed skating (holy shit thighs), and some ice dancing (my favorite was the spanish couple who skated to the music from dune). i was briefly distracted by more norwegian drama, namely the biathlete who used his bronze-medal interview to admit he cheated on his girlfriend (she broke up with him) and then also admitted he hoped his public declaration of love would win her back. it did not. there's also drama in the figure skating but it sounds less like "guy did a stupid thing" drama and more like "everyone's covering for the rapist" drama and that is just way more serious.

i also randomly caught the gold medal run for women's snowboard cross which was won by an australian with a huge cheering section all wearing pink hats. so cute. the snowboarders all hugged each other after the run and that was also extremely adorable. now i'm watching the men's halfpipe and one of the japanese snowboarders is wearing pearly nail polish and how can you not love that? shaun white is there and his reactions to the tricks and the falls are fantastic.

now you're gonna get curling links because it's me and i only get to do this once every four years.

snoop dogg hangs with the curlers. korey dropkin's mom taught him about curling. (mom's name is shelly and while i don't know her i think she was president of the club at one point and was basically kind of a big deal. everything i've ever heard about her is positive.)

the oldest athlete at the games is a fifty-four-year-old lawyer on the us men's curling team. :D one of the other guys on the team, this lawyer curled with his dad. it's gotta be weird to be old enough to have fathered the other folks on your team but it sounds like they're all very cool about it.

i don't know what to call this. there are wrestlers. it's weird. also cute.

how about a curling stone cake?

and finally an article about my club, because god knows i've mentioned it enough. (that should be a non-paywalled link.)

couple more general olympics links:

meet one of only two greenlanders at the olympics. she's a biathlete there with her brother (also a biathlete) and if you saw people waving the greenlandic flag along the course? danish fans showing their support.

the olympic village ran out of condoms in THREE DAYS. someone seriously underestimated the amount of sex these attractive, athletic folks were going to be having.

speaking of curling i was way off my game on sunday altho the ice was quite weird but we had to call the game when someone on the other team slipped, fell, landed on her wrist, and had to get off the ice. her hubs took her to the er. they were ahead so we just gave them the win and ended it. i'm sure she's out for the rest of the season but i hope she's ok. i consequently did not see any of the super bowl or the halftime show which was kind of a bummer because i wanted to watch that.

and saturday for dinner i was really feeling it for hawaiian food and fortunately! there's a place not super far from me that can provide. i get there and the guy behind the counter asked me "you want some free food?" and i went "uh..." because on the one hand yes, who's going to turn down free dinner? but on the other, why were they giving it away?? because they were about to close. so i went home with my spam musubi and my mix plate and a random container of poke (yum), a random container of mac salad (yum), and a random container of pickled cucumbers (yum). a++, will order late from them again.

wednesday was the anniversary of the day the good voters of nevada passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting people who'd participated in a duel from voting or holding office. they voted on this in 1889. it may or may not still be on the books.

in honor of tomorrow being cheap chocolate eve valentine's day i need to share that angry orchard hard cider will take your ex's stuff and exchange it for cash. and then you exchange the cash for cider. everyone wins. :D

you can preorder squishable toilet paper. you know, if your life needs a toilet roll plushie in it.