Sunday, February 28, 2010

Seriously Chapter 75: Closing Ceremonies - All They are is Dust in the Wind


Let's get the beautiful out of the way before anybody digresses.

Beautiful: Miss Kim Yuna, Skating to the Gold for South Korea.

Thursday night's vision of perfection. If ever there were a girl put on this earth by God to be a figure skater, it's this lovely kid and I hope to have an interview with her soon, me dealing out my pigeon Korean. I actually, usually hire Korean translators for stories. I don't speak but a little. I can't tell you how much I love Kim Yuna's legs and hips and the way she spins without sounding creepy and inappropriate so let me be more like a sports ticker and move on.

Beautiful: The Sight of Bill Demong (US) Crossing the Finish Line and Winning Gold

An amazing, astonishing triumph of the spirit from Bill Demong, also on Thursday, as he won the nasty, grueling 10K Men's Nordic Combined. Talk about slobber! It was beautiful AND triumphant, a memory forever frozen in my brain, akin to the likes of what you'd see in books like The Family of Man and what-not. Just beautiful.

Beautiful: The Canadian Girls Celebrating With Stogies and Champagne on the Ice.

I thought it was beautiful, frankly. Didn't like that they beat my beloved Uncle Samettes for the Gold Medal but, what the hay? Girls, when get like that, they're great to be around. So what the hell is wrong with it? They left it all on the ice, why not party on the ice, yo? (Yeah, too old to talk like that) What in the eff is the I.O.C. looking into? Isn't NHL Comissioner Gary Bettman involved in it, even though it's women? Isn't he involved in everything right now? I think Gary Bettman's involved in my mortgage and that's beautiful.

Beautiful: Steve Holcomb Captains the US to First Four-Man Bobsled Gold in 62 Years

Nothing's more old-school than bobsledding and you know how Seriously loves his old-school events; so imagine my joy, Saturday, watching Old Glory take its first Gold Medal in the Four-Man Bobsled since St. Moritz in 1948. And then afterwards, the tears in the eyes of the coach as he tried to talk about the team's victory. That was some manly shit right there and it was beautiful.

Enough Beautiful - The Closing Ceremony, I Never Get It

Seriously's been dispatched to nine different Olympic games' in his career (Yeah, I was in Lake Placid and witnessed You-Know-What) and I've sat on my ass in a leather Barky Lounger watching every minute of those few Olympics that I didn't happen to cover. And yet - even with all those Olympic assignments, the thousands of hours of watchful analysis, the awkward wording and structure of this particular sentence - even with all that - I usually never ever watch the closing ceremonies. I get so busy putting our coverage to bed, even running the whole Olympic apparatus on my own this year, I usually miss out on the whole pomp and puffery of saying goodbye. Every now and then, a summer Olympic closing ceremony will put a grip on you because they'll have crippled people involved and that always breaks my heart, but it's usually just a mutual butt scratch. A self-congratulation festival. "Aren't we so great?! Look what we did!" At least that's what the ceremony's like behind the scenes when you're attending or covering it. Watching it on t.v., I see it as well. "Ooh, aren't we cool?"

Why Wait to the Very End to Bring Up Hockey?

Let's get it straight. I wanted Canada to lose the game because I love my country. Good for you, Canada, you happened to win this time. Take your Gold Medal, enjoy. And while we definitely want you to send our athletes back home, please make sure you don't send your health care system along with it. We don't want your Canadian-style, Socialist health care system here in America and I fear this victory by your hockey team will be seen (by some) as a vindication of your policy, what with the robustness of your athletes and all. 5 out of the 10 most livable cities in the world are in Canada, yes that's true, but I guarantee you it has nothing to do with Canada's health care system! Know this, America, because you won't read it in the "lamestream" media, trust me - I'm hearing countless stories from a variety of sources, countless stories of Canadians falling over dead in the street during these Olympics because of their national health care. Not only that, the same drugs the Socialists in Congress would have us import at cheaper rates, they're dealing out a daily dose of death to the tune of (I'm hearing) seven people per day, just in Vancouver alone! Imagine, thinking you're taking your Lipitor and you just fall over dead. It's happening all the time in Canada, you're just not hearing about it in the liberal media, and it'll happen down here if we import these deadly drugs made in the US by the likes of Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. We don't want your health care, you're longer life expectancy or your deadly drugs imported from here. We don't want it!!!!
My patient and wonderful readers; as you can tell, I'm still angry, heartbroken really, that we didn't win the hockey game. Consequently, I'm lashing out a little. For that, I apologize. I just wanted my guys to get that one last Gold.

Goodbye, Vancouver

I'm sure the closing ceremony was a moving experience, an enduring message of peace, and you obviously did a fine job of hosting the Winter Olympics on the whole. A lot of my friends in the industry are packing for home as we speak and they tell me they're impressed with the great show Vancouver put on. "Kudos to some nice people" is what they're saying. However - and my ma will scold me for saying this because she has a Canadian cousin - if I never hear O Canada ever again, it'll be way too damn soon. I'm normally more crude, far more crude than that; but my ma, I know, will be reading this.

Baseball and the NFL scouting combine are coming up so stay tuned and watch as I'll be handing out information and dealing with a big bunch of problems.

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