Princess Sparklefists

Brief update: It stopped snowing, finally. The city's still not really back to normal though. Also, after being cooped up with sick people for a week, I ended up with the flu and had to take an extra day off work. It's been a busy week and I'm beat!

Random question: Why does are all the figure skaters skating to Scheherazade? Don't get me wrong, I like the piece, but it's kind of repetitive—I heard it twice during pairs, and again now during men's. I don't know what the rules are about music, but everyone using the same classical repertoire is boring. It's an interesting contrast to the women's halfpipe competition, which was on just before this, where you could here the Black Eyed Peas playing in the background. (Fewer sequins in halfpipe too... but jumps and spins in both.)

New geek project: d4ni and I were texting last weekend and we decided to start a book club with chuunthor to re-read The Courtship of Princess Leia, our favorite Star Wars book. And blog about it. It's going to be awesome.

When did "to medal" become a verb?

It is tempting to say about a week ago - this ear-grating usage, as in "Romero is the only British woman to medal in two different sports", has disfigured the Beijing games - but, annoyingly, some dictionaries do accept "medal" as a verb, meaning "to decorate or honour with a medal" or "to receive a medal, esp. in a sporting event". It is, however, clearly an ugly Americanism - the earliest identified use of the word meaning to win a medal dates from 1966, in California, and the Washington Post was using it by 1979 - which needs to be stamped out. The sooner medal-obsessed Americans stop meddling with the English language the better.

Now while I agree that my countrymen do tend to be a bit medal obsessed, language change is just a fact of life, and should hardly be termed meddling. (Har, har, har. How very clever.) Verbing nouns--that is, creating a verb from an existing noun--is hardly a new phenomenon, and it's not going to stop just because the language pedants get all up in arms and "Wah, they're ruining our language!" about it.

Besides, who really wants to say "Michael Phelps was decorated with a medal eight times"? Sounds snotty and affected to me. But I'm just an ugly American.

Who cuts to commercial in the middle of a live race?!?! Okay, yes, the 800m freestyle is a long race... but it's not that long. They couldn't wait for it to end? ("What? There are no Americans in this race?" Cause the Olympics are all about America winning, yeah? Not about watching some really awesome athletes, whatever country they may come from.)

But yay for Rebecca Adlington, even if they keep cutting away from her world record to show commercials and talk about Michael Phelps. :D

I was reading yesterday about modern pentathlon. They shoot, fence, swim, ride, and run all in one day. A complicated points system determines who gets to start running first, and the person who crosses the finish line first wins the gold. This is all sounds kind of crazy and cool, so I hope they'll show it on TV. Which means they won't. Alas.

It's LOL Bush from The Guardian. Wow.

Today was a bad day to be a spider at my house. I'm hardly the cleanest person around, so it kind of says a lot about the state of our front porch that I assigned myself the task of cleaning it this afternoon. It was icky and gross with lots of cobwebs in the corners (and even on the mailbox) and dirt and leaves on the floor. After some fun with a broom and a garden hose, it looks much, much better. After that I was feeling so inspired that I cleared off the deck and swept the sidewalk around the garage too.

Sci-Fi had a Doctor Who marathon today, and despite my best intentions to be productive, I did get sucked in a couple times. I ended up seeing "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Army of Ghosts" and snatches of a couple others. (My brother came over for awhile while I was still working on the deck. He though the Absorbaloff in "Love and Monsters" was pretty funny.) I think I've probably seen "Army of Ghosts" more than any other episode. Every time there's a marathon, I always seem to catch that one, but then I don't see "Doomsday" because I have to go away and do things... like take the dog for a walk, return library books, or wash the car. (All of which, incidentally, I did this afternoon. Gosh, I feel so accomplished.)

This evening I watched the Olympic opening ceremony (on 12 hour tape delay for prime time) in it's entirety. I don't usually watch sports, but I do enjoy the Olympics. I remember back when I was eight years old I taped a lot of the events at the Lillehammer games because the prime time coverage didn't even start until my bedtime. (Looking back, I'm kind of amazed that I knew how to program the VCR when I was eight years old. Go me!) I really enjoyed the first part of the opening ceremony, which had some very cool performances. During the second half, the American commentators got pretty annoying. (I kind of wanted to go smack them every time they mentioned the "intersection of sports and politics" or they told us that the small African/Pacific Island nation had never won an Olympic medal. You mean countries with lots of moneys and 500 member teams win more medals than poor countries with 5 athletes? YOU DON'T SAY! Oh, wait. Yes you do. Repeatedly.) There were some fun and some crazy outfits though, and I did get a good laugh out of a bored looking George W. Bush tapping a mini US flag against his leg. How very dignified.

It's getting very late, but it's not as if I have a real schedule for tomorrow. For now, I can relish being a night owl, if only for a few days.