i'll have a slice of your mother

I managed to wake up at ten this morning, despite the fact that I stayed up until four a.m. watching the Olympics and playing Nintendo. I was v. lazy in the morning, then did some desultory shopping (fueled mostly by my desire for orange chicken at Panda Express) before coming back to my apartment in time for primetime Olympics coverage. Tammy came over, of course, and so we've amused ourselves by criticizing the ice dancers' costumes while we both attempted to do the work we should have done this weekend.

Some highlights from today's coverage (since I feel that I can't spoil it for anyone, unless I have unknown fans in Hawaii and Alaska who are on a longer tape delay than the west coast is):

1) Bode Miller failed to medal again. He's 0/4 for the races that he's already skiied, and he only has one more race to go in the Olympics. Given that he only spent eleven minutes of his hour-long inspection time on the course, and looked like he wasn't conditioned well enough to complete the race well, it appears that he isn't taking the whole thing very seriously. I noticed that the announcers have stopped saying 'that's just Bode being Bode'; if he doesn't medal in his fifth race, I wonder what that will do to his sponsorship. I can't imagine that Nike is pleased right now...but that's what they get for sponsoring someone who doesn't even wear their shoes in competition.

2) Some Ukrainian chick wore tasselled pasties in the ice dance competition. It was frightening. Tracy Wilson (the only commentator who actually seems to care about ice dance, since she was an ice dancer back in the day) said that there's some rule that costumes must be athletic in nature, even if they are designed to evoke the style of the program. I've never seen an 'athletic' costume that contained pasties, but maybe I'm watching the wrong programs. I'm sure I could find something on pay-per-view where the Ukrainian ice dancer would fit right in.

3) Dick Button still rocks. He was giving out personal medals right and left tonight, when he wasn't saying that he was bored and that the programs were terrible. When Dick Button says something is bad, it's really bad--usually he's very warm and forgiving.

In other news, I'm v. mad at NBC. They showed about five minutes of men's aerial qualifiers--and almost all of them were the Americans, even though most of them didn't qualify for the final. So, we saw a bunch of sub-par jumps (and even sub-par, they're still amazing, since the athletes twist while free-falling 50 feet, and then have to stick the landing completely--I don't understand how they don't break their legs doing this, since that's like jumping off a five-story building). We only saw a couple of people who actually advanced to the final. And then, we saw about sixteen ice dance finals, even though it was clear that only four or five of them had a shot at a medal, and even though is program is four excruciating minutes. It's a good thing they ended when they did, or else I might have stabbed my eyes out with the handle of my teaspoon. Now they're done for another four years, though, and tomorrow promises to be great--women's figure skating, the crazy 1500m speed skating race with four American gold medalists competing in the same event, women's aerials, etc., etc. Yay!

Now it's time for bed, since I have a conference call at 7:30am. Ugh. Goodnight!