The Awesomest Event

Seriously, dude, curling is the best sport in the winter Olympics. Yup, curling. I have watched several hours worth of curling so far during this, the XXI'st winter games. And once I start watching it, I can't stop. It's ridiculously engaging. When you first put it on it's like, "this is so weird. They're sweeping the ice and there's a target and I just don't get it." But then as you watch it, everything comes into focus. It's actually sortof like if you put pool and darts together with air hockey, you would get curling. Someone was in a bar one day and came up with this sport.

It's basically just a spatial reasoning game. But then once you put together the strategy you have to go out and execute it. But it's not like the NFL where executing the strategy involves being more athletic than 99.5% of the people on Earth. You just gotta shoot yourself down the ice a little bit and gauge the strength of your shot correctly. I want to join a curling club. Do you think they have that at Chelsea Piers or something?

I know I'm not an Olympic level curler, so I guess I'm clearly wrong, but it seems to me that these teams take the wrong strategy a lot of the time. I seem to almost always disagree with the way the teams play particular shots. Also, the US sucks at curling. The men's and women's team are a combined 0-7 so far. And the captain of the men's team, who is 0-4, has missed 4 game winning shots to date. The womens team hasn't missed bad shots, but in the two of their games I've seen, they've suffered from one really super bad end in each game (the games are separated into 10 innings, except they're called ends instead of innings). They've ended up giving up like 3 points in a particular end in each of these games when the general wisdom of the game says that they should have scored one or two points instead. So both the teams have shot themselves in the foot. And at the same time I'm sitting on my couch having never curled in my life and I'm disagreeing with the strategy the whole way. And then I think to myself, "Yeah well you painted yourself into that corner and that's why you gave up 3 points," but the announcers seem to think it's just bad breaks, and I guess they know more than I do.

Anyhow, I haven't really been glued to this Olympics as I have in every other Olympics that I can think of, but I definitely love curling. I wish it wasn't only on every 4 years. Also I'm clearly drawn to the more technical sports, because the other sport I love to watch is speed skating. Regular speed skating, not that short track nonsense.

The Ghettoest Event

The Olympics will be over soon, so no need to worry about any more of my useless Olympic posts. For reals, though, the ghettoest event is race walking. It's like, go as fast as you can, but don't run, that would be silly. It's like having a bike race on a Nascar course. Why?

PS - The Bird's Nest stadium is pretty fucking cool.
PPS - I'm glad no one ran out on the course and tackled a marathoner this year. (If I were even capable of running a marathon, it would take me at least 6 hours. This guy just finished it in 2.)

The Most Apropos Name Of All Time

I don't recall being quite as dumbfounded ever watching a sporting event as I was when I watched Usain "Lightning" Bolt win the 100 meter dash (the Giants winning the Super Bowl is definitely 2nd place, though). He destroyed everyone in the race. Literally (not literally) destroyed. He stopped even trying after 70 meters and he still broke the world record. I was honestly astounded.

The only video I could find of it is mad grainy and the commentary is in Italian (I think it's Italian). I'm not sure you can really tell how far out in front of everyone else he is. Also notice how he starts celebrating before the race ends.



Then he came out and destroyed clowns in the 200 meters as well. This video is not of great quality either.



Wow.

CockBlogging: Mad Dog, Olympics, and Deep Thoughts

I have been a right bastard for not posting more recently and I apologize to those of you who may have noticed. I've been somewhat busy with random things recently and whatever. Bottom line, I'm a bastard. I'm even more of a bastard because the three things I have been intending to post about recently are about a) Mike and the Mad Dog, b) the Olympics, and c) some random thoughts. The last three posts by my compatriots have addressed those three topics, but solipsism waits for no man, so I will readdress them.

Mike and the Mad Dog - I watched the beginning of the show on the YES Network today. It doesn't sound like the reason Russo left was because of fighting between him and Mike. Both of them went out of their own ways to say that they weren't fighting at the moment and that Russo was leaving essentially to pursue other opportunities. I think I believe them, though I know that part of it was that Mike is too big of a personality and Russo wants to go and be the man somewhere.

The Olympics - I, unlike LJT have always loved the Olympics. I have, I'm not joking, spent at least an hour or two watching things like archery, judo, and badminton on the Korean and Chinese channels in the past few days.

By far the best event in the Olympics is trampoline. Look out for that in the next couple of days now that real gymnastics is over. Also diving is really dope. Synchronized diving is in some ways even cooler.

Look out for the track and field events coming up after swimming. That should be interesting. I think USA basketball will win the gold, though I'll tell you for sure after tomorrow's game with Spain.

It really pisses me off that the alternate Olympics channel, which has 24 hour coverage, uses literally 18 of those hours to cover boxing. That shit is always on boxing, which is why I have been watching other more interesting events on the Korean channel.

I would like to see a little more variety in the coverage, but I guess the primetime coverage of live swimming and gymnastics is just bread and butter type shit.

Why is it that the women's beach volleyball teams have to wear miniscule bikinis? The mens' teams wear tank tops and gym shorts and the women wear almost nothing. It's definitely degrading.

Squee Oop, dinner's ready. I'll save the random thoughts for later.

The Olympics

I generally haven't really cared much about The Olympics the last couple of times around and I didn't even really care much when they started.
This week, my girlfriend and I were dog sitting in Manhattan and we have found ourselves watching every night and I really have enjoyed it.
Actually, I've enjoyed most of it - some of it I don't give a fuck about and, because I know you're interested how I feel about it, in detail I shall award medals to the three most interesting stories so far:
The Gold: Michael Phelps. This guy is amazing. I think it's really fascinating to watch an all time great athlete in his prime. Phelps just blows away the competition. Sometimes he's sort of taking it easy and you think someone else may have a chance and then you find he was just fucking with you and blows by. Also, it's been fun watching his medal chase.

The Silver: Gymnastics. The shit they do is pretty crazy.

• The men's team (even though they're kids) bronze medal win was very exciting, although at the end these guys were trying to be, like, all hard-core into the camera. Shouting things like: "Yo, whatup kid representing America!" or "This is how we do!" or "Big ups, America". I sort of felt embarassed for them. Yes, it's a dope moment but, guys, you are: 5'4, white, a male gymnast and just came in third. You can probably leave the hard core thing in the locker room, thanks. His mouth is pretty fucked up or something but I'm sure he gets plenty of poontang anyway so I don't think we have to feel bad for him.
  
• The women's team. Unlike the men's team, they had a good shot at winning the gold. They were pretty bad ass for a while, but then that chick Alecia Sacramona fell off the balance beam and then the rest of them kind of fucked up too. I felt badly for her but right before hand she was looking pretty cocky while joking around and shit right before she missed the balance beam.
  
• The Chinese girls' team. You have to be sixteen to be a women's gymnastics olympian, apparently and there is no way those Chinese girls are sixteen. They look like they're nine.

The Bronze: Swimming in general. I guess racing is just fun and swimming is always so close it's just very entertaining. The girls are mad built by the way, they're backs are huge, it's a little weird looking.





For some reason I really could care less about volleyball. Someone apparently thinks I should, as it is on ALL THE FUCKING TIME but I just don't. Really. The women jumping around in bikinis is nice, though.

I'll watch boxing for a few minutes; softball for about one minute; and skeet shotting for maybe thirty seconds.