Olympics post, take one

I love the Olympics. Love love love the Olympics. I am happy enough with the Summer Olympics, but the Winter Olympics are the really good ones. In the last few days, I've tried a new-to-me restaurant, gone to two orchestra concerts, spent time with loved ones, cooked, and read books. But never mind that! Olympics!

Unfortunately I had the chance to use my rallying cry ("Shut up, Bob Costas!") within the first half-hour of watching coverage. I also thought it was really tacky that they called in Tom Brokaw to try to get Bode Miller to pay penance for not displaying enough emotion at the previous Olympics. Shut up, Bob Costas! Shut up, Tom Brokaw! Also, shut up, Bob Costas's moire-y sport coat! Shut up, Bob Costas's Hufflepuff Vikings fan tie!

And also, a memo to Carnival cruise lines: we have lots of boats here in Minnesota, so we are familiar with come-ons of various kinds that start, "Come on my boat and...." Very familiar. And let me tell you, "Come on my boat and get a wedgie," is not one that has been tested out as a winner. Really not. Mostly people hear that and go on someone else's boat. Just FYI. markgritter was out of the room getting a snack, so he thought timprov and I were joking based on the type of water slide they were showing or the expression on someone's face. No: actual ad boiling down to, "Come on our boat and get a wedgie." No thanks. Really, I'm good here.

And also, where are my ads for apple pie? I don't want boughten apple pie anyway, but there are ads for America and ads for, no kidding, mom. Blatant, in-your-face, subtlety-is-for-wusses ads for mom. So if we've got mom and America, where is apple pie? Advertisers owe me this.

I wouldn't have been watching these ads at all if the Slovakians had not sent their women's Mites team to the Olympics. What, were the PeeWees busy, Slovakians? What was that? In one of our brief interludes of watching the hockey game instead of the main channel with luge and moguls and short track, timprov said, "Those girls don't even look like they're used to skating near other people." My alma mater was not a hockey powerhouse (we saved that for physics and tennis), but I tell you what, we'd have been ashamed to put a team like that on the ice. To take a page from Dr. Zoidberg's book, your hockey is bad, and you should feel bad!

It just offends me that these countries that have good men's teams cannot be arsed to actually teach their women hockey. Little girls are good at hockey if you let them be. They are tough and fierce and make awesome stubborn jaw-jutting little girl faces around their mouth guards when they are small enough that their goalie pads outweigh them by a factor of two. Their brothers there in Slovakia are playing decent hockey. Let the girls on the ice. Tell them it's good to be fierce and even better to be good enough that you don't lose, here, let me check since we turned back to other things...

...18-0? EIGHTEEN? TO ZERO? Come on, Slovakia. Come on. Your girls deserve better than this. Not that I don't like to see North American teams victorious. I do. I just like to feel like they would have had to have their heads in the game at least a little bit to get there.

Uff da Sam. 18-0. I can't even make a Bull Durham joke here. It's just too depressing. I will hope for better hockey soon. Very soon.