Blogging My Life

Not only did our idiot vice-president shoot his hunting companion, HE WAS POACHING!

Michelle Kwan. The most beautiful skater ever. Too bad we won’t get to see her skate this year.
Is this the first Olympics that luge sliders are wearing booties with separate toes? Isn’t that cute? They should dye them different colors.
The Winter Olympic ads have been way better than the Super Bowl ads. I’m laughing my head off at so many of them.
Note to self: don’t change your skis twice in the last twenty-four hours before a big downhill race.
Another great name in sports: Antti Autti. Miraculous is that there are enough Europeans interested in the halfpipe to be “podiuming” with the Americans in this crappy sport.
Is it just me, or do the names of the half-pipe moves all sound like the latest slang terms for maijuana?
Felix Gillette wrote Friday in Slate that one of four ways Americans have traditionally won lots of medals in the Winter Olympics is by inventing new sports nobody else cares about. (The other three are hosting the games, changing the rules, and keeping the Russians out.)

Liked the cross country pursuit today and the ski jumping. I would like to try jumping someday. Kind of like flying.
I like that NBC is showing sports with no Americans in them.
Ok, so maybe this is the first appearance of a real generation gap for me: half-pipe. At the Olympics. I can’t stop laughing. It’s no different from any other sport I guess, but to hear the names of these moves and the lingo of snowboarding uttered with Olympics drama. I’m sorry, it’s like Olympic skateboarding. “Back to back 10-80s and a front-side 7-20.” Huh? You mean when they spin around?
What will it mean when Americans cease to dominate our goofy, made-up sport of snowboarding half-pipe?
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“Podium” is now a verb, as in, “he’ll need a better run than that to podium here.”

I was hiking most of the day today, but I did watch a little Women’s Hockey during breakfast (Sweden x Russia, the fifteen minutes I saw looked like late-night intramurals at Cornell…). Came home and saw a little more while fixing supper. Beautiful pair skating. I turned on just in time to see the first ever Olympic thrown triple axel by Rena Inoue and John Baldwin, which put a little lump in my throat. I would turn down the volume for figure skating except that I wouldn’t hear the music. There is no sport commentating that so detracts from my enjoyment of the sport as in figure skating, no matter who is doing it. I thought that under the famously new rules for scoring, I would never have to hear “uh-oh, there’ll be a deduction for that!”. Right. Now it’s, “uh-oh, under the old rules there would have been a deduction for that. Under the new rules they won’t get as many points for….” I watched a nice program by Chinese Zhang and Zhang duo set to Led Zeppelin (!) that Dick Button nickeled and dimed throughout only to see them take the lead.
Moguls. I hate to ski them, hate to watch people ski them. In an ideal winter world they wouldn’t exist. Not even the breathless medal-race hype can make this event interesting. Ok, well, Kari Traa can. (Have you seen those photos? Did I say I really hope to visit Norway some day?) Great name. Kari Traa. Ok, ’nuff said ’bout that. She got silver.
Some of the NBC announcers are saying “Torino” as opposed to “Turin” and the website does too.

A lawyer friend of mine defended a guy last year who has a farm in upstate New York. Some rich folks from the city built a big house next to his and then tried to get his farm shut down. He won (New York has a right-to-farm law), but now the city has passed a special law with very high penalties for straying livestock. An amusing article from the local paper of record is here.

“The Chryslers, who have struggled with the unwelcome fowl for a year and a half, attended the meeting and were not happy with those unable to appreciate the necessity for the law.”

Leda left for six weeks in Brazil yesterday, and she took our baby with her! I miss ’em already
I was expecting to wake up at night in a panic about where the baby was (my dad reports frequent such experiences until my siblings and I were moved into our cribs), but I didn’t. Slept like a baby myself, in fact. Way better than a baby, actually; ever slept with a baby? That expression, meaning “well” or “peacefully” makes absolutely no sense!

Here’s a teaser headline from today’s Los Angeles Times that I had to read several times:

O.C. Animal Shelter Official is Arrested
The supervisor is accused of having sex with female inmates who were there to shave time off their sentences.

Whaa?! With female whats?
Aside from the potentially misplaced modifier (to shave time off their sentences: being at the Animal Shelter or having sex with the supervisor for this purpose?), I was missing an important word in three subsequent readings:

O.C. Animal Shelter Official is Arrested
The supervisor is accused of having sex with female inmates who were working there to shave time off their sentences.

Maybe my misreading was an effect of the discussion of bestiality and the Internet that came up in my class this week.

Just in the last week, J.O. can push himself up a little bit when on his belly, hold his head upright when held sitting or upright, suck his fingers like crazy, sort of howl along when I sing to him, and bat the toys that hang in front of him in his vibrator chair.
At this week’s two-month appointment, he weighed 13 lbs. 5 oz. and measured 24 3/4 in.

I set an alarm to rouse me from a nap to watch The Simpsons tonight, only to make the rude discovery that the show was preëmpted by that overwrought, overacted, and totally underwhelming (we agreed to tape a couple of episodes for some friends one time) 24 crap. Guess I hadn’t been paying much attention to the details of the ever more overwrought Fox advertising! My life has no more meaning for the rest of the day. Damn!