bleodswean

i watched miracle last night, about the 1980 olympics and the miracle on ice (when the us hockey team beat the soviets, for them what might not be familiar), so today i had to watch current olympics hockey because they reran the men's gold medal game this afternoon. us-canada, us gets the gold in overtime. very exciting. :D i love that one of the us players, his uncle played on the 1980 team and his grandfather played in 1960 (also a gold medal year). and not only was this the us men's first hockey gold since 1980, we won it on the same day. just, you know, forty-six years later.

(in 1980 i was in the denver airport and when the us team won the crowds of people standing around the gates watching the game on those tvs in the waiting areas lost their collective shit. it's hard to overstate how big a deal it was. i mean aside from the geopolitics the soviet team was highly trained and the us team was made up of college kids who'd only ever played college hockey against each other. which is not to discount their talent and hard work but just that they were trained under a very different system and expectations were very low.)

i'm kind of going to miss the olympics and to be honest i'm really going to miss the olympics themed ads. especally the little girl skating in the attic in front of all her stuffed animals, the other little girl who wants to skate so bad and falls the second she gets on the ice - and then you see her thumbs-up before she hauls herself upright again - and the "we're all on the same team" one. (all the folks in competing sports jerseys giving each other the stink-eye cracks me up.) i'm also going to miss curling being such a big part of the national conversation. and it would've been nice to get another curling medal but i'm not in any way complaining about the silver we did get.

in that vein, have a video about the weird-ass physics of curling stones (among other things). no one can figure out why they spin the way they do.

a farm in vermont has a tournament every year using cheese wheels as curling stones. no word on whether or not the winning team wins its own cheese wheel. if not, it should.

you can learn something from every sport. like that skeleton is the most terrifying sport in the winter olympics, second only to luge. either you go down an ice chute feet first or head first but both are extremely scary options.

so we're in for another storm around here and according to the french toast alert we're doomed. by which i mean A LOT of snow. curling was canceled tonight and tomorrow and the u is closed altho that just means campus is closed but if you can do your job remotely you still have to do it. one of my monday meetings was canceled anyway so we can, in the words of the pi, "enjoy the blizzard". i got food, i got a shovel, i got a metal ruler to measure how much snow lands on my car, i'm prepared. and i missed the last big storm on account of i was in florida so maybe mother nature thinks i'm owed one.