Stuff

[shipperx]

Watching the Olympic Alpine Skiing. Damn. Those conditions clearly suck. Ice and slush and horrifying, death defying crashes. A bunch of death defying crashes. And Vonn was beyond thrilled to have won. Yay, her. It's hard to resist sobbing tears of joy. :)

Also, Relay Speed Skating? Freaky looking!

And, Dude, in snowboard half-pipe Shaun White's two runs were awesome!

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And EW has posted quotable quotes from Season 1 of Modern Family.

Cam: ''Mitchell's mother has a problem with me. Last Christmas for example, she gave me a piece of exercise equipment and a lettuce dryer. So to recap, I gave her a gorgeous pair of diamond earrings, and she gave me a hint."

Jay: ''I had a buddy, went to Woodstock, believed he could fly. It didn't end great. It's why hotel windows don't open anymore.''

Jay: ''When I heard Manny wanted to fence, I thought sure — uncoordinated kid, lethal weapon. How could this go wrong?''

Phil: ''I am brave. Roller coasters? I love 'em. Scary movies? I've seen Ghostbusters like seven times. And I regularly drive through neighborhoods that have only recently been gentrified. So yeah, I'm pretty much not afraid of anything... except clowns. Never shared that with the fam, so shhh! I have an image to maintain. (Beat) I'm not sure where the fear comes from. My mother said that it's because when I was a kid I found a dead clown in the woods. But who knows.''

Phil: ''That was hardly porn; it was a topless woman on a tractor. You know what they call that in Europe? A cereal commercial.''

Comments

[jerrymcl89.livejournal.com]

Either NBC really cherry-picked showing only the racers who crashed, or that was a really treacherous course. It was good for Vonn that she got the Gold, in the event that she isn't able to race in later events.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

It looked like they were showing the top 5 contenders and it just happened that at least 2 of them wiped out in truly horrifying fashion. (I think one of them looked really hurt). When one of them was skidding so far on her butt even after she'd basically recovered from the fall, it seemed that the course must be hella icy... except for the sun spots that caught two of them, which looked slushy. I'm not sure how anyone compensates for conditions like that. It would basically be, ski your ass off and pray.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

I watched it live, and yes, it really was that bad. Partly because they'd had a grand total of one training run - and even that had been cut into two legs, so nobody had had a chance to ski the whole course from start to finish...

But congrats to Vonn, that took guts.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Man, the weather has been murder on the skiiers. The biathalon folks were also suffering last weekend (in that case, due to rain!)

The weather gods decided to do a massive joke on us this year. The South and the East Coast gets more snow than they want or need and the Olympics... don't.

Still, it's been great fun to watch.

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

That was a horribly treacherous course. You could hear the skis chittering. Gah. That's just painful. And scary; I broke my arm on those kind of conditions. Nobody would be skiing that run at all if it wasn't the olympics!

Shawn White was just adorable! He looks frighteningly like one of my aunts (minus all her Stevie Nicks drapery and heavy silver jewelry) but he was just so excited!

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

It looked terrible. You could tell not only by the sound but by the way people skidded after they fell that a lot of it was pure ice. (You could hear it on the approach to the snowboard half-pipe too). And in alpine you could also see where one of the women crashed that there were slushy spots. Adjusting between those two conditions at 70mph is insane.

I went skiing at Whistler once a several years ago and it's much wetter snow than Colorado, Utah, or even the resorts near Calgary. For me it was "Whee! Not so dry! Fewer broken nails and no nose bleeds!" , but looking at the racing, it made for incredibly treacherous racing conditions.

Shaun White was damn impressive. He got crazy air and even beat himself on his victory lap. Wow.