Friday Night Links 33

The 2016 Rio Olympics come to a close this Sunday, ending a Games filled with victories big and small, and defeats memorable and ripe for redemption at Tokyo 2020. NBC has been criticized for its US-centric and commercial-saturated coverage, but luckily it's 2016 and viewers can easily turn to the internet for a wider variety of Olympics news. Here are just a few:

The Olympics are supposed to transcend politics, but sometimes they influence them and are in turn influenced by them in unforeseen ways.

Before the Olympics begin (and long after they are over), the Games have an effect on the host city's most vulnerable citizens. (One of the reasons why I was cool with Chicago losing the 2016 bid.)

For all the winners at the Games, there have to be some losers as well.

It's not all bad - for US athletes, just being part of Team USA has benefits, regardless of medals.

And because we run the world, 18 golden moments of feminism.

XXII Olympic Winter Games

Let the Games begin! I don't know what the rest of the country (or world) has heard so far about Sochi, but in Chicago the Olympics seem like a joke--a tragic, dangerous joke.

I've heard of Chicagoans wondering how Sochi won the bid for the Olympics while Chicago didn't--especially since it's been as cold, if not colder, than Russia these past weeks. (It should be noted that Chicago lost to Rio for a Summer bid, not to Sochi for the Winter Games, so maybe it's best if we held off comparison/complaint until 2016.) 

Still, if the Olympics are supposed to highlight the good of the host country, if they are used as a platform to show progress and prosperity, then Russia and Putin are off the mark, at least pre-Opening Ceremony. I truly hope tomorrow's festivities (and the next two weeks') prove otherwise, because the Winter Olympics could use some credibility even without Sochi's shortcomings. With only 15 sports (for a total of 98 events, compared to Summer's 26 sports/over 300 events), they are like the JV Olympics to the Summer Games' Varsity-esque legacy.

I'll be tuning in (tonight, since the actual Games start before the Opening Ceremony), cheering for the underdogs, the human interest stories, and sometimes even the Americans. If Bob Costas has anything to do with it, I'm game to check it out.

UPDATE: Bob Costas has pink eye. You are failing me, Sochi.

FURTHER UPDATE: Uruguay doesn't care about the Olympics, at least as far as Bailey knows. They are only worried about the World Cup right now.

What I've been doing instead of writing

My laptop is officially out of commission, which has been okay for the summer. My iPod fills in for most of my electronic connection to the world and I've given up whatever isn't convenient: streaming tv, reading/getting lost on certain websites, paying bills...jk. Here's what I've been up to instead:

Arts and Crafts
Interior decorating
Taking weekend trips
Sweating/eating freeze pops
Learning how to front flip
Watching the Olympics

We even talk about Brett Favre during the Olympics.

I never really understood the pull of the Winter Olympics. I mean, yes, they are the Olympics, but in mid to late February, the last thing I want to see is snow. Still, Vancouver somehow managed to top American Idol in ratings, at least according to the segment Jimmy Fallon did last night with Bob Costas.

I did watch the end of the hockey game today, enough to see Team USA celebrate when they tied the game with 24 seconds to go and then to see Canada top that in overtime. I saw Yu-Na Kim and Joannie Rochette perform their own miracles on ice. I even followed Apolo Ohno's chase "to be to frozen water what Michael Phelps is to regular water." (Thank You, Jimmy Fallon, for making this witty comparison.) So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Winter Olympics are popular--I got sucked in by the human interest stories, the sibling and friend/rival dramas and the painful injuries.

Maybe it's not the snow and ice, the reminder of cold weather that I absolutely don't need, maybe my indifference or ambivalence towards the 2010 Winter Olympics comes from my relative lack of team spirit. I found myself cheering for underdogs, which generally meant not Americans. I cheered for the Italians, feeling a sense of weird camaraderie with them. I also found myself in several situations just not wanting the Americans to win...just because.

Even so, with the closing ceremonies underway, I do feel patriotic. It's hard not to with the emotional montages and music. I'm also feeling a little Green Knight pride with the triple victories of men's hockey and men's and women's basketball this weekend. I had nothing to do with those victories, but we all know what that's like--claiming teams as our own, saying things like "we won!" when really someone else owns them and the athletes and coaches did all the winning.

And speaking of sports pride, we all know we'll be tuning to Jay Leno this week to see our favorite Olympic stars, along with Brett Favre, whom some will claim with pride and others not so much.


There's probably a joke about the parallels between Leno and Favre lurking around here somewhere.

In the Gray

There are a few things I will never understand, like the costume design department for couples skating. Other things I don't necessarily understand, but I do obsessively think about and make commentary on them. So in honor of my eternal quest to understand humanity, here's another post on Interesting Things in My Life.

We had our first literal pairing in Film and Lit, simultaneously watching and reading The Maltese Falcon. As a noir film/book, I found it funny yet a little disturbing. As the preview states, Sam Spade makes "crime a career," and "ladies a hobby." I'm not about to soapbox on the topic of misogyny in pop culture, but masculinity and femininity do come into play in this story. Someone in class asked why Sam agrees to help Brigid in the first place, since she has no legitimate story. "Because she's sexy," was the matter-of-fact reply our professor gave.

The larger themes of black and white/shades of gray intrigued me during our class discussion. I know why: nearly everything I write uses light and dark.(See here and here.) I've always gravitated towards the idea that neither can exist without the other, yet when both are present...neither truly exist. As Jon Foreman sings it: "The shadow proves the sunshine." If you've known me for any amount of time, you know I tend towards theory, big picture, forest thinking--aka shadows and gray areas, themes and blendings--but I'm mysteriously drawn to practice, details, and tree thinking. A lot of times I wish for clear cut, a yes-and-no existence, one that an audience won't see in film noir (or real life), even when the guilty party is found out.

You've heard this from me before, so I won't go into it too much, but empathy and human emotion live in the gray areas. I found Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book on which Blade Runner is based, so I'm thinking and rethinking all about what makes a human and what makes an android.

Finally, we briefly discussed the death penalty in Criminology last week and our professor assigned a short paper on the four year moratorium on the death penalty from 1972-1976. If anything can serve as a symbol for what's not always so black and white, it's this country's views on the death penalty--not to mention the "guilt" of many on death row. Again, I didn't bring this up to soapbox (maybe I'll do that later, like next week during Death Penalty Awareness Week), but it is interesting to note that the US is one of only four industrialized nations to still have the death penalty.

I'm not sure how it got to be one in the morning; my sleep schedule is another one of those gray areas.