(no subject)
Mom and I sat up and watched the Olympics last night--I hadn't even turned on the TV once so far, but I'd read so much about the skaters on various journals that I kind of knew what was going on and I thought, well, I'll hang around to see Plushenko and Weir. In no way did I expect to totally fall in love with Snowboard Cross (I hear the women's tonight is going to be totally awesome. NO SPOILERS PLEASE) and/or Seth Wescott. (He's building a cabin in Maine from scratch, you know. He's raised all the timber from sapling trees and chewed them all down with his bare teeth.) Maddeningly, of course, NBC felt compelled to switch back and forth between snowboarding and skating, to the point where my mother would get antsy and flip back to Dancing with the Stars to see if "the blonde" was dancing (we'd already missed her), and we'd be sitting there watching commercials ON THE WRONG CHANNEL while I would be muttering over on the couch, "Snowboard? Snowboard! SNOWBOARD!"
And then I got sucked into the skating, too, and have pretty much decided to marry Evan Lysacek. My sister declared that he sucks because he "just gave up" after a bad fall on an earlier short program I didn't see: "You don't give up! YOU NEVER GIVE UP!" Of course, I'm kind of giving her a sidelong look, trying not to say anything about the fact that she dropped out of high school and got her GED instead and has threatened to drop out of cooking school umpteen times, but I find that if you bite your tongue hard enough, you can control the blurty urge. Anyhoo, by the time Lysacek entered my consciousness, it was to do nothing but pwn. Plushenko's long program was pretty limp in comparison, but you feel bad rooting against the guy after they show you the Heartwarming Back Story segment, in which the poor guy's like [subtitled from Russian]: "My parents gave up everything to send me to St. Petersburg to skate. Sometimes we dug in the trash for old shoes to boil into soup. My skates were made of tin cans and dead rats. Only my overlong bangs kept me from freezing to death when we couldn't afford coal. I LOVE YOU MOM AND DAD!" You end up feeling pretty bad that you have everything you have and you didn't cure cancer today. Hell, you feel pretty bad that you're sitting in a warm house watching this on a large TV, quite frankly.
And then there is... Johnny Weir. I had heard he was fey, flamboyant, feminine--all those things. I was not, however, prepared for his wit and wisdom: "I like nice things, and beautiful things, so if that is the only way people are determining that I swing one way or the other, then to me, that's sad. You can't judge a book by it's cover, ever. . . . I am who I am, and I don't need to justify anything to anyone."
"I was causing a stir because...I was wearing a chinchilla scarf that someone thought was a boa. First of all, boas are so out. Secondly, I would never wear a boa to a press conference."
And then, Johnny goes shopping: "Honey, I've got all day."
I played along and said, "You're such a diva!" Honest truth.
He giggled and said, "I am a princess."
From one princess to another: Shine on, Johnny Weir. Shine on.
RSS feeds: I finally got it into my head that I should look into this whole "RSS" and "news aggregator" thing, because the upshot would probably be that I could create a sort of friends list out of non-LJ blogs, and thereby stop forgetting to read half of them. (I'm going with the Google Reader at the moment because it's there and it looks easy.) I did discover, however, that you can aggregate Livejournals as well, so if anyone reading this who isn't so much into the LJ thing (and yes, I have talked to people who come from outside LJ), you can get a feed for any single user or community on LJ. Mine is http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/data/rss.
German Girl Rescued After Dropping Notes.
zikade: "Cleo, you need to see this: the 'correct' translation of those hieroglyphs in Lost. :)"
From sexion8: Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes. (Sample: "I can see why someone might convince themselves if would be funny to dress up as Indiana Jones and raid a Star Wars costume contest, I guess. What I don't get at all is why the Phantom of the Opera is there.")
Salon takes on the creepy Tom Fordified issue of Vanity Fair.
Oh, and today at dailydigestnews: Sean Bean to do American TV? Plus the new Bond girl and a film version of Love in the Time of Cholera. (Feed: http://community.livejournal.com/dailydigestnews/data/rss.)
