February 23, 2006

Afraid?

Are you like me: afraid to click on anything, lest you read who won in women's skating? I guess this is your big chance to muck up the comments, because I'm afraid to look. Won't some mean bastard reveal the outcome? So you might as well go in there and denounce me about all manner of things. Because I'm not looking at anything until it's over!

14 comments:

Pat Patterson said...

Ice skating?

LoafingOaf said...

I was trying to block new out as well. Silly me - I even REALLY tried to get into the Olympics by watching Sweden vs. Switzerland in the women's curling gold medal match. And what did I get for being so open-minded as to watching one of the sillier Olympic sports? A CNBC news update where some fast-talker spilled the beans before I knew what hit me. Well, not all the beans - he merely stated **POTENTIAL SPOILER** that two skaters DIDN'T win the gold -- which still made it obvious who probably did. I won't double check this on Google News...so I can pretend there's still some suspense. But I'm now 90% sure I know the winner, thanks to CNBC!

So that's what you get for watching NBC's coverage on their cable channels.

Alcibiades said...

Don't look at the NYTimes. I looked at it hours ago and there it was.

Jen Bradford said...

I did the same thing, and am still really annoyed.

Why don't they at least make you take the step of clicking for the result? Argh!

Kurt said...

Of course, out here on the west coast, where you can even learn the results of reality shows by reading the internet, I frankly find it a bit of a relief to be able to know the answer to questions like this in advance. I can find out the results (if I want), and if I want to watch, I'll still watch, and if I don't care whether or not I watch, then I don't have to. Having read the post about American Idol above, I know I don't have to watch that, for instance.

Icepick said...

LoafingOaf, I bet you were wrong on your Gold medal choice!

chuck b. said...

I'm afraid of the the Da Vinci Code. They just showed the movie trailer on TV. With Tom Hanks sporting entirely new, scary hair. Snippets of wooden utterances meant to seem portentious making me laugh. (People think he's a good actor..?) What could be the No, I don't even want to know. Next.

Eli Blake said...

My problem with figure skating is that it's hard (absent Tonya Harding) to really root against somebody. Even if you want someone else to win, you feel bad when one of them stumbles. You end up liking all of them. I much prefer sports like football where when someone on the team you're rooting against makes a bonehead play, you can yell at him for being a big stupid ox.

bob_minn: Actually, there is no need for Ann or anyone else to address our failure in Iraq if they don't want to. Pretty soon we will see a bunch of stories about the three year anniversary of the start of the war, and when we do, the fact that we are still fighting there three years later will say far more than any blogger could about the dead end the war will take.

michael farris said...

"My problem with figure skating is that it's hard (absent Tonya Harding) to really root against somebody. Even if you want someone else to win, you feel bad when one of them stumbles."

It used to be easy to root against Cohen, she had a definite Bad Attitude a few years ago (dissing opponents and trying to get all in Michelle Kwan's face at one memorable nationals warm up - Kwan did not deign to notice). She's matured a lot since then though, fortunately (maybe unfortunately from your point of view).

LoafingOaf said...

Icepick: LoafingOaf, I bet you were wrong on your Gold medal choice!

No, I was right! What the CNBC update guy said in the middle of a commercial break from the curling coverage was that neither Sasha Cohen or the Russian won the gold. Because I'd been following the Olympics, I knew the Japanese skater was probably the winner then. What really ticked me off, though, was that they said Cohen didn't win the gold. I thought the one place on the TV dial I'd be protected from spoilers was the coverage of other Olympic events!!

LoafingOaf said...

P.S. The Swiss skater was my fave. Best outfit anyway. :)

goesh said...

-too many commercials, I loathe them

XWL said...

Earlier jvg1249 posed this question, "can a woman be a "mean bastard"?".

Having perused the definitions for the word at dictionary.com I'd note that none of the definitions indicate gender in anyway.

Any child born to unmarried parents is a bastard. (Which given current trends is a significant portion of the population both in the U.S. and in Europe)

Also, from the department of redundacy department, the slang definition for bastard is A person, especially one who is held to be mean or disagreeable so it would seem that when Prof. Althouse modified bastard with mean, that was overkill.

As far as skating goes Shizuka Arakawa deserves her gold, though I still like Miki Ando better (spectacular flameouts are more fun).

And here is the only link I found with a photo of Sarah Meier of Switzerland in the stylish unitard Prof. Althouse favored.

TMF2 said...

Ann:

Ever since my kids met Sasha Cohen at a firm retreat some years ago (her father is my former partner), we have followed her. And as a result, I went through the same thing. I started visiting only "safe" sites, and then avoided the internet altogether.

I then had to suffer through a call from my mother-in-law, who at least asked first before blurting something out. So I was left wondering, did she call because Sasha won? Or was it another Sasha disaster?

Then my daughter, away at college without a TV, decided to check the results. I told her approx. when the last group of skaters would be skating east coast time (I am on the west coast), and when I noticed that she did not put up an "away" message at the appointed time, I began to suspect that the results were not good. Otherwise she could have gone to watch in the TV lounge.

I guess the lesson is, life was much simpler before all this fancy electronic stuff was around.