Just Doing Her Job

A cleaning lady at an Italian art gallery threw away two pieces of modern art, valued at roughly $15,000 because they looked like garbage.

I don't blame her at all. That's not art. It's garbage.

It was designed to make people reconsider their views about the environment. Instead it has made people rethink their views about art.

Idea for the 2034 Winter Olympics

Prior to Sunday night's closing ceremonies, NBC ran a 90-minute documentary, "Tonya and Nancy", revisiting the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, 20 years after it happened.
Prior to the 2012 London Olympics Closing Ceremony, NBC aired a documentary on the Dream Team.
If NBC keeps this trend of 90-minute examinations of the most fascinating event at the Games 20 years earlier, surely in 2034 we will be treated to "Bob Costas's Eye Infection: What the Fuck Was That?"

Mrs. Poop is the one agitating for this, she has become obsessed with finding out the real cause. She doesn't think a run of the mill eye infection can last for two weeks with proper medical treatment.
When this documentary airs Mrs. Poop demands that Costas release his medical records.
I hope it includes a retrospective of this great quip delivered by Matt Lauer.



And I want Al Roker to explain why he walked in front of the camera, a television no-no.
They may have to make this thing 3 hours.

Song of the Week

"Karma" - Lloyd Banks featuring Avant
"My heart is colder than sandwich meat."

"Your sex appeal is remarkable, you make a G wanna walk around in the park with you."

The chick in this video is the incredibly hot KD Aubert.

Lloyd Banks's real name is Christopher Lloyd. Great scott! He probably would have had a better career had he used the pseudonym, Doc Brown.



Note: if you like samples as much as I do please listen to Natalie Cole's "Inseparable" and you will see what a great job the producer, Greg "Ginx" Doby, did in taking something old but cool, and turning it into something even cooler and appropriate for this genre.

Couldn't Happen To A Nicer Guy

Normally when people say "couldn't happen to a nicer guy" they mean it sarcastically. I don't. The following horrific story could not have happened to a nicer guy because none exist.

My former colleague Miles O'Brien suffered a freak injury when a case of TV equipment fell on his left forearm.

Here's what happened next, according to the post about the incident that Miles wrote on his blog:

"The doctor recommended an emergency fasciotomy to relieve the pressure. This is a gruesome enough procedure on its own, but the he was clear that the problem was progressing rapidly and there was a clear and present threat to my limb.
It was getting real. Of course I wasn’t awake for the action but I was told later that things tanked even further once I was on the table. And when I lost blood pressure during the surgery due to the complications of compartment syndrome, the doctor made a real-time call and amputated my arm just above the elbow. He later told me it all boiled down to a choice…between a life and a limb."

Let Them Play

Great news for those of you who watched Saturday's Syracuse-Duke rematch hoping to see Tony Greene officiate.

Bad news for the rest of us who were hoping the players would be the ones to determine which team would win the game.

Maybe Damino is just a more gracious loser, but he and I both agreed after the last game that it's better for the refs not to call questionable fouls.

But I am sure he won't be complaining about being the beneficiary of the very controversial call that decided this game.

I have watched this play many times and I can come to only one conclusion: no call should have been made. While I agree that Hood had his feet set, but his body was still moving into Fair's path after Fair began the act of shooting.



So that's the technical explanation, the more correct one is this: as Mama Poop used to say, if you all (us kids) think someone else is my favorite, then I must be fair.

If no foul is called on that play, both coaches probably go nuts, meaning no call would be the fairest adjudication.

But the foul was called and Boeheim went nuts.



Obviously, the best thing for the team would be for Boeheim to have reacted in a less demonstrative way, preserving at least a small opportunity to win the game. But, I also think, after an atrocious call like that, the ref should have given Boeheim infinite leeway to express his displeasure, since the ball was out of play at that moment anyway.

But if nothing else, the incident provided some great fodder for our tag "pictures of Jim Boeheim making stupid faces."

Here's Coach Boeheim's postgame press conference:



I also want to make it very clear that I don't think the officials cost Syracuse the game. But I do think they cost Syracuse a chance to win the game. Even if it's tied 60-60 with 10 seconds left and Duke has the ball, Syracuse probably loses there 65 - 70% of the time. But I want to see the players have a chance to decide the game, not the officials.

Final Olympic Thoughts

NBC did a better job of making more events available live, not just on the internet but on the NBC Sports Network as well. There are some people who just want to watch one 3-hour show per night and see everything important. There are other people who are junkies and want to see everything live, now. It's a fine line, but there is a way to appease all those people.

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I only streamed one event live (Shaun White in the halfpipe) but I recorded almost everything I could find on the other networks and really enjoyed seeing events like the bobsled broadcast live and unedited.

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Thankfully there were no security problems. And though the stray dog extermination really distresses me, it's hard to know how widespread it really was. Same with the hotel problems, which were either isolated or temporary or the product of the whiny media's imagination. Maybe all 3. But before everyone pronounces the Sochi games a huge overwhelming success I should remind you that it was way too warm. All I heard all week during cross-country and alpine skiing as well as the sliding sports, was that warm weather was deteriorating the tracks and preventing athletes from performing at their best. I hope the IOC learns from this and picks colder cities.

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I hate people who claim something they don't like or understand (say skeleton) doesn't deserve to be an Olympic sport. But, the announcers at almost every sport spent so much time talking about all the ways the equipment (ski wax, luges, speed skating suits) make such a difference in time, that you get the impression that the athletes aren't competing, the equipment makers are.

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Yuna Kim is still the Queen. Take those same performances and have them occur anywhere else in the world (neutral ice), and she wins gold. I hope she sticks around 4 more years to win gold in her home country.

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Skier Tina Maze (mah-zay) is my choice for hottest successful Olympian. She has two gold medals and a nice rack to hang them between.

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I liked Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski but think he went a little too far with this outfits. I know this is who he wants to be and tries to be, but he was literally cross-dressing. I don't even mind that as much as the fact that he was doing it for attention, when he is there to comments on the events, not overshadow them with his pink blazer.

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I really enjoyed the Meryl and Charlie Show, even though they went to Michigan. But I get the impression she pines for him and has since they were 9 (when she was too shy to talk to him), but he's dating someone much hotter.

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NBC totally crossed the line with the death interviews. Skeletoner Katie Uhlaender was already in tears because she missed a bronze medal by four-hundreths of a second, and then Lewis Johnson asked her about her dead father whose baseball card she keeps with her. And when she apologized for not winning, instead of being sympathetic like any normal human being would have, Johnson coldly asked about her father.

And I know you have all seen the Bode Miller interview when he was pestered into tears about his dead brother.



But to me the worst was Noelle Pikus-Pace. She finished 4th in skeleton in Vancouver, retired from the sport and got pregnant. But when she lost the baby at 18 weeks she decided to get back into skeleton, which eventually led to her winning a silver medal. The interviewers basically implied that if she'd had the baby she wouldn't have the silver medal. Almost implying it was a good thing. And of course, Pikus-Pace cried, as did everyone else watching, except the NBC producers who were too busy cheering and high giving each other.

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The United States stinks at curling. 3-15 combined record for the men's and women's teams. I think next cycle the Curling Association needs to pick the players individually instead of sending the pre-formed team that does best at the trials. It also might help if our guys were in a little better shape. Look at the Canadian men who won the gold. They are ripped.

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Which reminds me of what the announcer said during the bobsled competition: "In the U.S. the biggest, strongest, fastest athletes are in the NFL. The biggest strongest athletes in Latvia are in this sled.

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Lindsey Jacobellis lost again, I feel horrible for her.

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Lolo Jones lost again. I don't feel badly at all.

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Peter Northug had a bad Olympics, a 17th, a failure to qualify for the sprint, two 4ths in the team events and then an 18th in the 50k race on the Olympics final day. He was also yanked (jerked?) from a race from coaches who doubted his fitness and focus. We know Northug plays poker, reportedly he was playing frequently during the Olympics, another contributing factor to the coaches' decision.

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All in all, it was a great, fun, successful games, and I am very sad they're over.