Monthly Archives: February 2006

Here’s a list of my personal highlights from the first 10 days of the games in Turin. Note that all these highlights are taken from stuff I’ve watched on tivolympics and I haven’t been taping everything so there very well may be cool stuff that I’ve missed.

• The ‘team motivator’ for the US men’s ski team. He’s the guy you hear yelling like Randy Macho Man Savage before each US skier busts out of the start house. HAMMER DOWN, BODE MILLER, HAMMER DOWN!! Stuff like that. It makes me laugh every time. Think how mint it’d be to have one of those guys in my cube at work. CURLY BRACE AND A SEMICOLON, DAVE, CURLY BRACE!! I bet it’d do wonders for my productivity.
• The team NBC assigned to skeleton and bobsled and luge and whatnot is amazing. Every trip down the track is the like biggest event in the history of the sport. The one analyst dude gets so excited I swear he interrupts himself sometimes. Fun stuff.
• Shaun White going all misty-eyed after winning the half pipe would probably be my sappy highlight from the first week. Especially after he acknowledged how much bigger of a deal it was to win the gold than he thought it would be. In follow-up interviews all he did was smile and smile. He’s such a good kid.
• Ice dancing. Ha. Just kidding. It sucks.
• If I could go meta for a minute, the coverage of the coverage has also been a personal highlight for me as well. How many stories have you seen talking about how there “isn’t a story” in Turin? More than one, that’s for sure. And in reality, all that really means is that there isn’t an American Star they can market the crap out of. So instead we sit around and talk about there’s nothing to talk about while we watch a bunch of foreigners win medals. For the record, I’d take that over 25 Michelle Kwan updates any day of the week.

The lowlight of the first week would have to be that idiot NBC has in the studio doing the nightly ‘spotlight’ features. More specifically, after that Jacobellis chick fell after showboating off the last jump in snowboardsupercross, he did a whole feature that labeled her move “the biggest gaffe in the history of sports”. Gimmie a break. Ass.
I think that’s everything. Bring on the figure skating saturation coverage.

For those of you still waiting on the edge of your radio to hear if me and Huna landed the gig as The Greatest New Radio Show On Earth, you should probably take off your headphones and find somewhere to sit down, because I have some disturbing news to deliver.
We didn’t win.
I know, I wasn’t surprised, either.
As you more loyal readers may remember, our show somehow managed to squeak into the final 4 runoff spectacular that took place in January. I think we both felt like the last show we did was probably our best. I say that because a) we focused on topics that interested both us and the demographic we were arguing would listen to our show and b) we gave up pretending we could be serious for more than 5 minutes and cracked a few jokes. That translated to two hours of radio that was fun for me, but apparently wasn’t any good for anyone else. Funny how that works. Short story shorter: we didn’t make the cut.
The ‘finals’ took place on superbowl Sunday in the form of a pseudo-head-to-head face-off between the two remaining shows, back-to-back, one hour each. For the first time ever, I tuned in to listen to what our ‘competition’ sounded like. Go figure, it was all the clich