Olympic Snippets

A good 35 minutes into opening night comprehensive Olympic coverage, NBC was interviewing a tennis player and talking about sour cream, because "context" or something.

Read in the Orlando Sentinel, "The event's creative director, Konstanin Ernst, dismissed the significance of the malfunction (of the unfolding Olympic rings): 'No normal person would get distracted by one snowflake that did not open.'" Sorry, Konstantin. It was one of the Olympic rings. We all noticed, normal or not. I also noticed the classic leftist snark, "No normal person." Right. If you don't agree with the correct position, you are not normal. You are stupid, reactionary, behind the times, a hater. In Soviet Russia, ring open you. 

Admit it, you wouldn't have been all that surprised if Putin had carried the torch into the arena, shirtless and riding on a bear.


Apparently, it is now a requirement for opening ceremonies to include at least one flying child.

NBC's introductory coverage: blah blah blah blah Obama blah blah blah blah. Riveting.

 This line in the NBC narration made my eyebrows pop up: "Through every stage of {Russia's} story, it’s resisted any notion of limitation." Um, yeah, that would be the problem. In other words, "They just have to try to take over the world."

But I have to admit the dancing and stuff was quite dramatic, artistically impressive. You could almost forget the Ukraine famine and the Stalinist purges and the Berlin wall and the gulags and the Christians thrown into insane asylums. Almost.

My fevered brain kept adding words to the ceremony's music. The bit from Borodin's Polovetsian Dances that goes, you know, da da daaaaa, dada da dada dadadaaaa demands that I hear "Take my haaaand, I'm a stranger in paradiiiise." From a 1953 musical called Kismet, that song was all over my youth. And the Russian national anthem, which apparently is to be sung only by large groups of manly men who ride in on bears, was parodied on talk radio: "Obama, Obama, our savior, Obama..." Glenn Beck says he couldn't get any active professional singer to record it and wound up with a retired man who didn't mind parodying the prez. Ah, America. 

You realize, of course, that skate commentators could be making up those terms as they go along and just faking us out with the earnestness of their expression. I mean, really, can you tell the difference between a Triple Clavicle and a Wrenching Maddow? OOHHH, look at that Truncated Toe Lop!

In response to the two-seater toilet stall photo from the men's biathlon center, someone posted a pic of a group toilet room at another event. Four toilets in a room. No stalls, no walls, no curtains. And, I bet, no users. Are you kidding me? This is the stuff of nightmares. Just remember not to flush any stray dogs.