Oh! Lympics - closing out

hey dudes. i apologize for my sparse existence recently, but for the last 18 days, my life has been olympics, olympics, cookies, olympics. from the opening ceremony on 8.8.08 through 8.25.08 (due to some days of working and the impressive amount of hours i ended up recording and watching, i did not finish out my olympic experience until late last night) i watched nothing but olympics. i recorded the regular shows i watch , but did not touch any of them until i watched the last of my olympic recordings. if you had an in person conversation with me in the last two weeks (which was probably rare), the chances that i brought the olympics up in conversation were probably at about 90%. i had nothing else to talk about, and therefore nothing much else to blog about. i even slacked on the Oh! Lympics posts, opting instead to keep a piece of paper in front of me, and scribbling notes down whilst i watched. so now, i present to you the final installment of Oh! Lympics Beijing 2008, which is really just a hodgepodge of random observations...

- During all the beach volleyball games, music was played between points to keep the crowd up. for the most part, it was a wildly random assortment of tunes, but the one that kept popping up in each match was gwen stefani's 'sweet escape'. not the whole song, just the call and repeat "Woo-oo!" "WOO-oo" parts. at first i thought it was cute how the audience would really get involved for this. then i got annoyed that they played it so much. then i went to a Brooklyn Cyclones game with my new workmates, and they did the same there. and it was hard to not repeat the WOO-oos. so i understand now.

- Softball, Round robin game vs. Chinese Taipei. The male commentator talks about the Chinese Taipei team having a lot of lefties. the former US Team member and current lady commentator (we've talked about her before) sets up a possibly dirty joke: "You know what they say about us lefties!" awkward pause and then "We're special!" i want to shake her hand. her left hand.

- Watching a little bit of Trampoline got me started on collecting hilarious names...Cockburn (pronounced Coburn, but i think that part was just made up) and Dong Dong were both trampolinists (i may have made that word up)...a 10K runner was graced with the name Mahboob. and a brazilian volleyball player had the first name of Fofao, which really tickled me for some reason.

- the amount of frustrated swearing by the athletes and coaches that occurred (and would obviously go uncensored, but also unacknowledged by commentators hoping their channel would not get fined by the FCC) was AWESOME! i love a good swear.

- mcdonald's commercial advertising the 'breakfast chicken sandwich'. i'm noting this because a) gross and b) they advertise the "homemade-tasting bun". nice qualification there, micky d's. also, does anyone really believe that the athletes endorsing mcdonald's really ever eat there???

- has anyone else noticed that, while athletes usually look super hottt in their athletic gear, whenever there is video or photographs of them in normal clothes, for the most part they look really awkward?

- i got really annoyed by the story repetition. i realize it's not normal to watch all the playoff games of team sports and prelim and quarterfinal rounds of individual sports, but seriously, you do not need to mention three or four separate times that laura berg likes to make chalk handprints or that beach volleyball gold medalist Phil Dalhausser hated his parents when he went bald in his 20's or how many scars that one scary looking diver has.

- what the hell is a steeple chase and why are people hurdling into water? is wile e. coyote behind this?

- annoying me more than story repetition was the mispronouncing of names. i can only officially get a rise out of the latino names because those are the only ones i can be certain about, though i did have some question about their pronunciation of some of the japanese names, and i think i have some knowledge of those. but when they kept pronouncing "Mari" as "Marie", and "Jimenez" as "Himmenez" (this one particularly angered me because the mispronunciation is similar to how my surname often gets mangled) i wanted to call up nbc and set them straight. also, i thought female volleyball player Danielle Scott-Arruda's name was actually Scott-Ahuda until i saw it on the screen. both dudes repeatedly wimped out of the double r's by subbing an h in there.

and last, but certainly not least:

- synchronized swimming. um, synchronized swimming is crazy and absolutely amazing. how have i not known it's pure awesomeness until now? seriously, we need to stop making fun of it, because it is genius.

alright guys. i can't explain why i went so olympic crazy this year, but hopefully you won't have to hear me utter another word about them until february 2010.