recently and not so recently on the blog:
(it's been a while since we've rounded up, but it makes us look more prolific!)
- rogue pony told wife who told me to yearbook myself (who told brother...). hilarity ensued for ages and then the rest of the big time blogs caught on.
- i got a serious case of olympic fever, and turned my millions of hours of viewings into some astute observations, starting with the inaugural Oh! Lympics 2008 post. from there, i came across some hilarious wording, made sure China knew i was onto them, had a psychic dream, and then slacked for a little bit, but made up for it with a jam-packed closing post
in non-olympics news
- becca cracks the case on how children get into grabber machines
- i wrote a love letter to my post office
- i got a part-time job and learned the dirty inbred secrets of the coffee family
- a note on pants
- and another on spam
- a subway spotlight i wish i'd seen
- and finally, the the 90's are back in a big way!!
Showing posts with label beijing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beijing. Show all posts
Friday, August 29, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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.
- 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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Inaugural Oh! Lympics*
The fortuitous convergence of complete control over my television watching (yay for solo living!) and an enormous amount of free time has resulted in me really enthusiastically throwing myself into the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I've always loved the olympics, both winter and summer. i remember when i was a little kid, i would pretend to skate around on a mattress pad while the competition was going on. however, this is the first year that i've REALLY gotten into it. thanks to dvr and my penchant for making complicated schedules, i've mapped out everything that i want to watch and when it's on. i started by watching the full opening ceremony (okay, i ff'd through a few countries i never heard of, but i paused for the hottt ones. serbia, anyone?), and the next day tentatively stuck my toe in uncharted waters. I started out on saturday by only watching the main nbc channel, and it was then that i would discover i apparently enjoy watching volleyball. interesting, since it's one of my least favorite sports to play. from that, i moved on to beach volleyball---there was comfort in familiarity but still the intrigue of something new. after this, i had an epiphany-- if it turns out that i like watching volleyball (and apparently football), how many other sports that i brushed off would i be able to get into?
a lot, it turns out. i went to the nbc olympics website and looked at all my different sports options. i knocked out ones that i figured would be boring to watch (sorry rowers and archers) and then checked out when my chosen ones would air and on which channel. then i set my dvr in blocks to record everything that i might be into, prelim matches and heats included. I DO THIS EVERY DAY NOW. i am up to my ears in glorious olympics and i feel so in the know!
so here's my point - there are some really hilarious things that happen when you watch hours and hours of olympics all day every day, and most of them have to do with the commentators. there was a period of time i considered live blogging what i was watching, but i figured that would just be too extravagant and unnecessary. so i decided to feature comments every once in a while that really tickle me.
There were quite a few from the past two days, but I only remember a couple, so we'll kick this feature off with double the fun:
#1 - Finals, Women's 30m platform Synchronized Diving. China is kicking ass with their amazing (read: robot) synchro divers. these girls are tiny little carbon copies of each other, and when they enter the water, there is barely any splash. canada comes up to dive, and one of their girls is a little thicker than the rest. she is definitely not chunky, definitely not fat, but she is noticeably bigger. through two jumps, the female commentator is like, subtly calling her a fat ass! after they dove, she mentioned that it's harder for them to avoid making a splash because the "Chinese are so slight". After the Canadians' last dive, which was not great, the commentator described the splash the bigger girl made as a tidal wave.
bold.
#2 - Prelim Softball USA vs. Venezuela. Another lady commentator, talking about a specific player who is fond of pranking. apparently, when this player has chalk on her hand, she likes to put the hand print on as many backs as possible, once even doing it on President Bush. With the following quote, she was demonstrating that the player had done this to her many times, but when you take how she worded it, how she said it (man i wish everyone else had heard this because it doesn't have the same effect in written form) and the stereotype of softball players (Team USA wouldn't win all the softball gold medals if Lesbinonia had a team, ifyouknowwhatimean), it makes for an amazing exchange:
** i didn't really know the proper punctuation to convey the feeling of this sentence, but basically after each phrase, she was trying to correct herself, but it just kept getting worse
so, lady commentator is talking about how she's not realized that pranky player has handed her until later, when she finds the hand prints on "all different areas--all different shirts--on the back--oh god"
SHE LITERALLY SAID OH GOD AT THE END OF THAT RAMBLY SENTENCE!!!!
go america.
*thanks to CtS family member Bill, who won the title contest!
a lot, it turns out. i went to the nbc olympics website and looked at all my different sports options. i knocked out ones that i figured would be boring to watch (sorry rowers and archers) and then checked out when my chosen ones would air and on which channel. then i set my dvr in blocks to record everything that i might be into, prelim matches and heats included. I DO THIS EVERY DAY NOW. i am up to my ears in glorious olympics and i feel so in the know!
so here's my point - there are some really hilarious things that happen when you watch hours and hours of olympics all day every day, and most of them have to do with the commentators. there was a period of time i considered live blogging what i was watching, but i figured that would just be too extravagant and unnecessary. so i decided to feature comments every once in a while that really tickle me.
There were quite a few from the past two days, but I only remember a couple, so we'll kick this feature off with double the fun:
#1 - Finals, Women's 30m platform Synchronized Diving. China is kicking ass with their amazing (read: robot) synchro divers. these girls are tiny little carbon copies of each other, and when they enter the water, there is barely any splash. canada comes up to dive, and one of their girls is a little thicker than the rest. she is definitely not chunky, definitely not fat, but she is noticeably bigger. through two jumps, the female commentator is like, subtly calling her a fat ass! after they dove, she mentioned that it's harder for them to avoid making a splash because the "Chinese are so slight". After the Canadians' last dive, which was not great, the commentator described the splash the bigger girl made as a tidal wave.
bold.
#2 - Prelim Softball USA vs. Venezuela. Another lady commentator, talking about a specific player who is fond of pranking. apparently, when this player has chalk on her hand, she likes to put the hand print on as many backs as possible, once even doing it on President Bush. With the following quote, she was demonstrating that the player had done this to her many times, but when you take how she worded it, how she said it (man i wish everyone else had heard this because it doesn't have the same effect in written form) and the stereotype of softball players (Team USA wouldn't win all the softball gold medals if Lesbinonia had a team, ifyouknowwhatimean), it makes for an amazing exchange:
** i didn't really know the proper punctuation to convey the feeling of this sentence, but basically after each phrase, she was trying to correct herself, but it just kept getting worse
so, lady commentator is talking about how she's not realized that pranky player has handed her until later, when she finds the hand prints on "all different areas--all different shirts--on the back--oh god"
SHE LITERALLY SAID OH GOD AT THE END OF THAT RAMBLY SENTENCE!!!!
go america.
*thanks to CtS family member Bill, who won the title contest!
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