Olympic Wrap Up

The Closing Ceremony is always the saddest and lamest night. Sad, because it'll be two and a half years until Beijing - what do I do now? Go back to my dumb boring life? And lame, because it's incredibly boring and stupid. The athletes romp around in a party to which I am not invited - but NBC helpfully televises it. At some point, I realized that I was sitting at home alone watching (on tape delay, mind) other people have a good time. It was almost as shocking and life-reevaluating a moment as when, a week or so earlier, I realized that I was a heterosexual man sitting at home alone watching men's figure skating.

Anyway. Let's say goodbye to our Olympic pals, shall we?

NBC Crew: Costas, you're always awesome. Tim Ryan and Todd Brooker, way to call out Bode for being so lame. Button & Bezic, I'll never be able to hurt you the way you hurt me, but at least I don't have to hear you for four years.

Sasha: I have this vague suspicion that you're hotter than I think you are. I'm not sure what that means, either, but it's worth looking into.

Shani & Chad: You know what, maybe I overreacted and you guys aren't all that bad after all. What do I know?

Fenson & Co.: Will your bronze lead to an explosion of interest in curling throughout the USA? I have no idea. But good luck to my friends at the Philadelphia Curling Club all the same.

Joey Cheek: If you actually get Americans interested in helping starving kids, then I think an argument could be made that you're the greatest athlete who ever lived. You rock, dude.

Bode: Look, if you don't care about winning and just want to drive around in an RV and ski, that's cool. Go ahead and be a dirty hippie. But please understand that you can't then take lots of endorsement dollars from Nike and make us all watch your stupid commercials. You have a lot of soul-searching to do, young man.

Forsberg, Niitty, and Joni: Nice work, boys. How about a Stanley Cup to go along with those medals?

And finally, before I sign off on Olympic matters until '08, I'd like to point you in the direction of Cassie's site. Check out the comments section, where dudes across the country are proposing marriage to the girls, and they're not even kidding either, they're really leaving their email addresses. Sheesh, have you ever seen anything so lame and pathetic?

On an unrelated matter... Irina Slutskaya, I notice that you're visiting the Wachovia Center on Easter Sunday with the Champions on Ice tour. You know, Philly can be a pretty intimidating and confusing town, so if you need someone to show you around...

In defense of the Games

Yet more belittling of the Games from the Inquirer today. Aldridge calls them boring, Ford uncreatively makes fun of curling. Blah blah blah. I've stopped being bothered by this. I've realized, first of all, that the Inquirer's sports writers, with the possible exception of Phil Sheridan, just simply aren't all that good (check out Jim Salisbury's asinine, unprofessional article about Bobby Abreu from earlier this week for proof). So the opinions of these guys have become less and less meaningful to me as the years go by. But more importantly, I've conceded that the Olympics just simply aren't for everyone. It's a bit much to ask Americans to watch two weeks of bobsleigh and downhill skiing and short track - by and large, we're just simply not into these sports like Germans and Norwegians and Austrians are. And that's okay - I certainly won't fault the American taste in sports, being, as I am, a rabid baseball and football fan (in fact, I've been known to write a blog about baseball on occasion).

And I've heard, of course, all the news about the low ratings this year. NBC interrupted the Olympics for the Daytona 500 this year, and I didn't mind. They'd already shown 10,000 hours of Olympics by then, a few hours of cars going in a circle weren't going to hurt anyone. (I myself can't even begin to conceive of an alternate, Sliders-like reality where I would ever watch auto racing for even a minute, but there it is.) And it's getting beaten in the ratings by American Idol and Gray's Anatomy and the like. Again, I concede that there's not much you can do about that - people are just into that stuff.

It's all subjective. I like the Olympics, but some people think they're boring. That's fine. That's their right. Just as it's my right to find American Idol and Skating With Celebrities to be loathsome, wretched, unwatchable garbage, and their viewers to be idiots. (I say this fully aware that my friends and family might be watching this stuff. People that I love and respect. I wish them no harm and hope they enjoy their vile shows in good health; I ask only that they please try not to mention them in my presence, or, if possible, touch me.)

I've never felt so disconnected from American pop culture as I have the past few years, as I've seen how popular American Idol has become, and how its viewers can discuss it endlessly, just like Andrew and I can spend multiple hours bickering about the Phillies. I try to understand it, and try to understand how those people can't be caught up in the excitement and fun of the little world of the Olympics. But they don't, and I just have to accept it, and Olympic fans like me have to continually explain and apologize for our obsession.

That's why I propose that NBC put all future Games entirely on cable - use MSNBC and CNBC all night (nobody's watching that stuff anyway), and set up another channel or two for everything else. Get really hardcore, and show hours and hours of stuff you'd never put on the network in prime time, the stuff that gets us Olympic geeks salivating. Free up the network to really compete with American Idol if you must, and show entire nights of Deal or No Deal or whatever other flavor-of-the-week nonsense that's currently captivating the infant-like attention spans of your brain-dead viewers. I wouldn't mind at all.

My biggest fear is that NBC will be scared off by their ratings this year, and they'll scale back on the coverage for future Games, and that's no good. I want nonstop Olympics! I want to wake up on the weekends and watch entire mornings of biathlon. I want, during the Summer Games, the comfort of knowing that I might be able to watch a field hockey game or table tennis match that afternoon. I'm an American too, damn it, and I have as much of a right to cool TV as any American Idol or NASCAR fan! Olympics fans, it's time for us to unite: we have rights, we have a voice, so let's get out there and make ourselves heard! LUGE FOR ALL!

USA Curling Bronze!

Not to be confused with Helen Gurley Brown. Yes, our boys won the first US medal in curling. I'm so proud! Pete, Shawn, Joe, John: you guys rule. Cassie, Jamie, Jessica and Maureen: you're goddesses. You'll get 'em in Vancouver.

Two Olympic complaints:

1. Nothing is lamer than NBC's attempts to turn Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis into huge stars. As I type this, tonight's broadcast is trying to hype up Hedrick's upcoming 10000m race. I don't know why they don't know what the rest of us have figured out: Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis are dicks. They're completely unlikeable jackasses, and their bitch-slappity bickering on national TV is just embarrassing. (I mean, look. We've got it bad enough with Bode Miller sucking, Jacobellis throwing away her gold by being a showboating idiot, and the hockey team being boring and bad. Now, I admit to being a pinko liberal, and I believe that our president is an illiterate sociopath who should be behind bars, but even so, I'm reasonably fond of and proud of my home and I'd like to see the US team do well. But it's really hard to root for these morons when they're acting like rich girls on "My Sweet Sixteen". That's why I'm grateful for classy, humble dudes like the curlers, or that quiet, easy grace unique to snowboarding stoners.) Anyway, somebody needs to take these two guys aside and say, "Listen, you idiots. You're speedskaters. Speedskaters. Nobody cares. Nobody will remember you guys a week from now. Next month you'll be driving a forklift at Home Depot. Just shut up and try to enjoy your Olympic experience, okay?" God, I hate stupid people.

2. Dick Button is a jerk.

Slutskaya: Cute or not?

So much to tell, so much to discuss. I'll get to it all eventually, plus I will tell the alarming news about how I spent last Saturday, but first I'm going to bed. Just a few comments before I go. Sad day for curling, but our boys curl for bronze on Friday. Sadder days for hockey: we sucked. We need a real team. We should not be tying Latvia. Get it together, losers.

Anyway, join in on the debate. I've spent the last 24 hours puzzling over this. Is she cute or not? I'm leaning towards yes. I'm like 80% sure. I'm not a Sasha guy, and Kimmie is a little girl. Hughes is cute, just like her sister. Girl from Finland is kinda cute. But Irina... I want so badly to find her wicked hot, but I'm not there yet.

I need new hobbies.

Shifting gears slightly, Crystal wants you to feel the power of Weir.

Olympic Notes

What is it about these esoteric, Europe-y sports that turns me into a TV-addicted middle-aged woman? Seriously, I'm sitting up at 11:00 each night huddled under a quilt. I should be eating from a box of bon-bons or something. I don't know. All I know: I can't stop. I really can't get enough! The schedule for the weekend is making me drool: non-stop hockey and curling during the mornings and afternoons. Nordic combined! Bobsleigh! You know, sometimes I'm afraid that maybe I don't love the Olympics enough. And I get scared, because maybe they might get taken away from me. But then some biathlon comes on, and all is right with the world again. Best week of my life, people.

Other thoughts:
1. I had read that Johnny Weir was flamboyant, but... wow. I was NOT adequately prepared for that.
2. All these commercials, man. They're horrible. And what's up with "Conviction"? Does NBC seriously think we need more lawyer shows? My undying love for NBC for bringing me nonstop downhill skiing is in serious conflict with the fact that they're a terrible network and I hate them.
3. Hottest athletes: Hannah Kearney, that speedskater whose mom was a speedskater, all four US women curlers, the vice skip of the Japanese women curlers. And I would add that one snowboarder, but she was born in 1989, and I'm not quite that much of a sleazebag. Not yet, anyway.
4. Sixers on tonight. Gonna beat the Spurs by 30. I'm not insane. Sixers outrank Olympics (it's true!) so I'll be doing a lot of flipping. Also, I have a craving for a cheesesteak. You ever get that?

Represent the P

A brief Phillies note, and then it's all Olympics, all the time, for the next 2+ weeks... I am AMPED, man. Anyway: last weekend I decided that I needed some kind of slogan for this year's Phils, something I can write on a sign and hang in my window all season, something I can write in this blog a million times until you get sick of it. But I couldn't decide. I thought of "Believe in 2006", but it lacks a certain punch, and is basically the same as "Believe", which was their official slogan in (I think) 2001. I was leaning towards "Yes We Can", which was their slogan in the mid-70s and which Andrew and I were walking around saying last September.

But then, on Tuesday night, Comcast aired the 2005 Video Yearbook, and during the part about Abreu's adventure in the Home Run Derby, it cuts to Jimmy Rollins watching from the sidelines. "Let's go Bobby," Jimmy proclaims, "represent the P!"

We have a winner. It's perfect. It's everything a slogan should be: succinct, cool-sounding, kind of dumb but also brilliant. It embodies the team, the city, the concept of fandom... I love it so much, I was toying with the idea of even changing the blog's name to that, but I can't buck tradition in such a way. But anyway, prepare yourself for nine months of me saying that over and over again like a maniac.

It was a great video, by the way. There's two ways you can do the video yearbook: either just show the good parts and have it be a commercial for the team, or actually edit the season into a compelling storyline. And even though this one lapses a little too often into a commercial for Citizens Bank Park (yes, I know all about the food in Ashburn Alley, guys, let it go) it was a surprisingly honest look at the season. They actually showed them losing to the Astros, over and over again. They actually show the moment where the Phils are watching the Astros beat the Cubs on the last day: the actual, literal moment where they were eliminated, and the shocked, awkward silence is truly dramatic. Such a fun, baffling, frustrating year. Have I mentioned lately how much I like baseball?

Super stuff

Here's my wildly irrational, somewhat uncharacteristic rant of the week: I think it's disgusting and obnoxious that people get so excited about Super Bowl commercials. Think about it. Millions of Americans are going to sit down tonight thinking, "Wow, I can't wait for massive corporations like Anheiser-Busch and Mastercard to sell me things!" And it's not like they're even that good. People always say they're funny and exciting, but really, they're just commercials, no more or less stupid than commercials throughout the year, only they use more special effects and pointless celebrity cameos. I hate commercials. Commercials aren't funny or clever, they're asinine, and they should all be shot into space. Also, if I see another "Ted Ferguson" commercial I swear to god I'm putting my forehead through a wall.

I have next to no memories of last year's commercials. I was too deep into an Eagle-induced haze - literally, I recall nothing but a kind of hyperenergetic blur. I seem to dimly recall one starring Burt Reynolds and a bear, and I definitely watched McCartney's halftime show. Beyond that, I only remember hyperventilating during the actual game, and when the game wasn't on I was staring off into space thinking, "Oh my god, the Eagles are in the Super Bowl and I can't handle it." By the third quarter, I was so hyper, so sick to my stomach, quivering so violently with misplaced energy, that I could no longer sit on the couch, and watched the rest of the game from the kitchen, pacing back and forth and pounding randomly on the countertop. (I remember after Greg Lewis' touchdown, letting out a primal roar that I am normally incapable of producing, then hurling myself across the room and jumping into the wall. It sounds insane, but you had to be there.)

Needless to say, tonight will be considerably less stressful. I think it'll be an interesting game, much better than people think. It's the first SB in recent memory where I wouldn't mind seeing either team win. Two long suffering fanbases. Two great coaches, two great QBs. What's not to like? Oh yeah, the horrible commercials. Something's always gotta ruin my day.

Last night's Flyers game was so nightmarishly ridiculous, I can't even talk about it. I'm literally pissed. More about those guys some other time, I'm too annoyed.

All right, I suppose I should come up with a pick. I think Steelers. I'm not all that convinced, but that's the best I can come up with. Also, I predict that the Rolling Stones will be very, very old.

By the way, have you ever been in a situation where you were supposed to act a certain way, but when you got there, you didn't know if you could go through with it?