Feb. 18: More Olympic fever

My obsession with this year’s Winter Olympics continues, and I confess it’s gotten even worse since I saw Shaun White’s gold medal performance on the halfpipe last night. Holler with me: Wow!

Stephen Colbert appeared with Bob Costas-bot and gave a hilarious interview. Be sure you watch until the very end, when Stephen gets out of his chair. Funny guy.

Twice, so far, they’ve played the Canadian national anthem at awards ceremonies. It’s hard to believe Canada had never won a gold medal on its own soil before this year, seeing as they’ve hosted twice before and usually have a pretty high number of athletes competing. That made it even more thrilling to watch the medals ceremony for moguls (Canadian Alexandre Bilodeau won gold). I don’t know all the words to the Canadian anthem, but I sang along anyway, bursting with pride on Canada’s behalf. If you’re interested, here’s the medal count.

And speaking of medals, I hadn’t gotten a close look but they seemed a little odd from afar, warped even. Here’s a good article about their design. It’s always interesting to me to hear about how the medal style is chosen for each Olympics, especially when they end up being mocked. Another thing I wondered about is what’s in the bouquets they’re giving the medal winners this year—they don’t look all that pretty (IMO) but I figured they must be some kind of Canadian flora. Not so, according to this long, detailed explanation of how the bouquet elements were chosen. Instead, they are made up of greenhouse-grown green spider chrysanthemums, green hypericum berries and green aspidistra leaves. Maybe they’re prettier close-up than they look on TV??? I sure hope so. They seem a little blah.

Something else I’ve found interesting to read are editorials and blogs posted at The Vancouver Sun’s web site. They cover all sorts of Olympics-related topics. I like reading the locals’ opinions; they’re probably a lot more truthful than some of NBC’s reports on all things Canada. I keep waiting for posts about how they hate all the tourists or the hype or that stupid Americans all of a sudden wish they were Canadian (Jen wanders away, looking innocent…). Here are blogs written by Olympics insiders, which are also fun to read.

This video is for my Sunshine Girl—Michael Bublé (currently my fave Canadian who I don’t know personally) taking Matt Lauer on a tour of Vancouver.

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Lastly (for now), I want to say that no matter how big my Olympics addiction may be this year, it doesn’t compare to April’s in the 90’s, which I had forgotten about until she commented on my Olympics post from the other day. That naughty, naughty April—an unemployed newlywed, I believe—went and replaced their old TV with a new big one while Jim was away on business, just to have something decent on which to watch the Olympics. The poor girl was bored! Welcome home, honey! And, um, surprise! I emptied our bank account! She totally wins. Ha.