Some reflections on the Olympics:
- Who wants to watch 14-year-old Romanians do tumbling runs to Miami Sound Machine when you can see "All-Star" cheerleading competitions on ESPN? The NY Times offers this in-depth look at All-Star cheering, which is in some ways the avant garde branch of cheerleading. "The days of Go! Fight! Win! are completely archaic these days," says the head of an All-Star school. He went on to declare that God is dead, and Hell is other people, and ceci n'est pas une pipe, too. In case you're wondering, the vanguard is differentiated from traditionalist, reactionary cheering because "All-stars wear short skirts and always have our tummies uncovered. ... We'd wear glitter and wild makeup." Ah.
- Who wants to see that pouty Svetlana Khorkina flailing her legs around when you could be following the National Scrabble Championship? This article on Slate is essentially a follow-up to Steven Fatsis's Word Freak. The author, Dan Wachtell, tells of an intimate moment:
Once, in bed with a girlfriend, I asked her out of the blue, "What's a poultice? Is it like a compress or something?"
"Yes," she laughed. And then, understandably, asked: "Why in God's name are you thinking about poultices right now?"
"Change the I in POULTICE to an A," I said, "and you've got COPULATE."
UPDATE: "Word Wars," a documentary on four top-ranked Scrabble players, will air on the Discovery Channel on Thursday night!
- Why aren't more people interested in men's gymnastics??? I mean, have you seen what these guys can do? Of course not, because there's no coverage to be found (episode #160 of Diff'rent Strokes excepted, of course). Do American audiences really find singlets that offputting? Oh, by the way, they won a silver medal today too in case you hadn't heard. Even the USA Gymnastics site's link to their own article on this topic is broken. So sad.
- Let's get started on the freak sports already! Alas, Rhythmic Gymnastics, in which ladies contort themselves around ropes, hoops, balls, clubs, ribbons and candlesticks in the Conservatory, doesn't begin for another week. In the meantime we have Trampoline Gymnastics to amuse us.
- And finally, enough about Michael Phelps. Ian Thorpe has his own line of underwear.
As the hour is too late to be reliving parking trauma, I'm off to bed with "Camino del Sol", a very entertaining album of Brazilian/French synth pop from Antena. The good folks at Numero Group have compiled these tracks, which were done ~1980, from a variety of sources for a beautiful re-release. So far they're only selling direct off their website, as far as I can tell.
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