the 2012 Olympics

It was with mixed emotions I watched the Closing Ceremonies last night. I was constantly torn between conflicting feelings.  Happy that I will not have to avoid all media during the day for fear of prime time results being revealed.  Proud to see how phenomenally our athletes did at representing us, their families, and their years of dedication.  Concern because we are about to resume the nightly battles regarding what we were going to watch on the boob tube tonight.

It was an awesome spectacle, and having been to London once before it was also massively cool, and apparently a bit annoying to the husband, to excitedly call out "ooo I've been there!" with every awesome pan of the city's main sights. But alas, it is over. And now it is time to reflect because I want to drag it out and I just love lists!

Things I learned while watching the 2012 Summer Olympics

1.) They probably spent an English butt-ton (current £ to $ exchange rates can be found here, but not measured by the remarkably accurate "butt ton" scale) but the font they chose for everything looked a bit like artfully placed duct tape.

Seriously, I could have saved the London Olympic Commitee a whole lot of pence. Just get some duct tape and slap it on there man!

 2.) Oscar Pistorius is an absolutely inspiring bad ass.

The only person who may come close to his awesauceness was his mother.  I seriously choked up and smiled every time mentioned how his mom would tell his older brother to put on his shoes, then tell him to put on his legs.

There was no shortage in these Games, or any Olympic Games ever, of people who are awe inspiring to all of us.  Michael Phelps made incredible history and is still a goofy adorable kiddo to me; the Fab Five; Missy Franklin; Jess Ennis; Mo Farah; the women's track and field relay teams; all the world and Olympic record breakers; the men's 4 x 100 relay team who went silver but were soooo close to Usain Bolt and the Jamaicans that I was deeply impressed; the list could go on and on.  But I think a man who can out-run the majority of us who have legs while having the incredible attitude he has ... just awesome.  Bonus, he's cute too!

3.) BMX racing is some scary shit. I do not want my kids doing that. Holy crap I had like 16 heart attacks every turn!!!

4.) Usain Bolt.  There was a lot of smack talk coming into these Olympics about him being out of shape and incapable of doing well because he didn't *beep, beep* fly like the Roadrunner at the trials, but dude put those naysayers to shame!  I think there is a difference between a cocky arrogant ass and a confident one.  I love Bolt, I think he is incredible to watch, fun to listen to and a real athlete in not only the physical talent sense but also in the sportsman sense that would shame a badminton player.  Did you know he stopped an interview with a Spanish reporter because the US National Anthem was playing honoring Sanya Richards-Ross's accomplishment in the 400m?  Seriously, I love the guy.

Plus, he's got flair.  I respect flair.  Did you know he only ran in these Olympics for about 40 seconds?  All together, under a minute of running and he earned three gold medals.  

5.) I've never been a fan of it before, but this year I watched both the synchronized and individual diving because NBS chose to air a whole lot of it.  I realized that diving is quite beautiful.

Then again, maybe not.  In real time.  In real time, diving is beautiful, in slow motion or stills it is a lot like running and all those pretty faces (seriously, is it a prerequisite to be adorable or hot?!) look pretty bad.

6.) Silver medals, and being the second neatest in the whole wide world, sucks.

McKayla Maroney's face made me, and the rest of America/the world apparently, giggle.  The responding meme made me laugh, I wasted a good fifteen minutes on tumblr looking at the pictures, though admittedly nothing made me laugh as hard as I did when I saw teammate Aly Raisman's adorable parents acting out every second of her routines.

I can't decide if it would be fun or annoying to sit near them.

Okay, looks like both.

Even McKayla could poke fun at her pout caught-for-all-time when she tweeted her instagram reaction to the hotel pool being closed.

Ah.dor.ah.bull!

7.) Ralph Lauren, for all his success and admitted brilliance with clothing design, is an idiot.  Who in the actual frack told him that a big giant Polo logo over the heart of every American athlete was a good idea?  Who was all "Oh yeah, Ralphie, baby, lets totally make the polo player logo of yours really big and on the left breast, then we can just slap an itty bitty American flag on the right side."  Great plan, cuz you know what I think of when I see anything polo related?  America, of course!  I mean come on, isn't it a totally American sport?  We invented that stuff!

Oh, wait, maybe that isn't polo ... I guess I think more of British peeps when I think polo ... I know it wasn't a cultural statement in the sense I am using it here and is just his company logo.  But lets be frank, even if his logo was a baseball player eating apple pie and watching reality TV and embodied something that at-a-glace said "American" it would have still been tacky for it to out-size the USA logo.

I am not even touching the whole made in China stupidity that proves Mr. Lauren really had his head in his tea pot while at the drawing board.

But lets look critically at the outfits in a more general sense.  The Managing Director of the US Olympic Committee said "the Closing Ceremony garments embody our national sentiments of what it is to be an American."  Um, okay.

Closing Ceremony clothes on the far right

Yeah ... that looks kinda like something else ...

Andy Goram --
Scottish Cricket player

Alan Fairfax --
Cricketer from Australia

US closing ceremonies

So we have a big assed polo player -- an English sport -- on our ensembles that look best suited for a cricket match -- that other decidedly Englishy sport -- well at least we are distinctive in our colors.  The good ol' red, white and blue are ... dude, wait a sec ...

us

them

Yeah, no wonder I couldn't figure out who was who. 

8.) Badmitton players think they are gangsteh ... but happen to be shitty liars and pathetic actors.  Not to mention really bad sports.

Hint, when the judge at the game is pleading with you to "try your best" you are not only a cheating piece of crap who happened to make it to the Olympics, but you also have no future in acting.

9.) Commercial success: All those world record breaking ones AT&T  has done in their New Possible campaign where the kid changes their goal in light of a new world record being set.  Awesome.  Example:

Visa did, as usual in my opinion, a pretty bang up job too.  The P&G mom ones have been choking me up for months.  And the Nike commercials about "greatness" were awesome!

But there is a yin to the yang. BMW airing a commercial every fifteen seconds with AWOLNation's Sail -- a song with an amazingly limited amount of lyrics in the chorus but can some how still get stuck in your head! -- telling me that they don't make cars for people who want to "look a certain way" or "be seen a certain way" ... as evidenced by all the professionally dressed, young, attractive, white people in the commercial.

Yeah, clearly BMW does not have a "type" and people who drive them are individuals, edgy as all get out in their upper-class-yuppy-trying-to-be-a-bad-ass glory.

9.) Opening and Closing Ceremonies were so completely different from each other.  I love love loved the Opening, but I am a history geek and UK history was one of my primary areas of study for my bachelors in history.  Closing had the Spice Girls, and I must admit I was beyond excited for that.

Meatball says there is no way these women are "old."
Too hot to be moms.

I haven't seen The Who yet because I was so bloody tired by the time it was finally supposed to air that I recorded it and will watch it today.  The giant John Lennon face was cool, but they only showed it from the top about a nano second before the pieces came apart again.

Now I can see it, but then I was all "Whats with the cloud?
Are those Olympic rings on top?"

And the tight rope walker recreating the Pink Floyd album?  Yeah I still don't know what the hell he was walking between because they never panned out.  I assume it was high up though.  

This crappy camera angles and odd video stuff brings me to my final point ...

10.) NBC could air nearly every single diving semi final (there are six rounds!) and a wholota synchronized swimming but would edit the sand right out of beach volleyball matches. Really, they won the last set, but trust us it wasn't any fun to actually watch Keri and Missy make freaking history. You don't need to watch that.  Oh, and medal ceremonies?  Pssh, its not like the song is any different!  We will just show you one of those even though the US received several today.  Its not like we have editors who could do a cool mash up of all of them with one song.  Hey, while we were away on commercial break, the US scored a bunch of points in the game ... WTF, not like anything was actually live!

I was sick of the Twitter plugs.  Confused why on earth it was all taped yet still had dubbing errors, sick of them ruining the prime time outcome for me with stupid flubs.  Ooops!

I will say that Mary Carillo has like the coolest job ever though.  Well, her and this chick.

I have never complained about the coverage of the Olympics before because I have genuinely never had a problem with it.  But this time ... well McKayla says it best.

So not impressed.

Overall, I am both sad and happy it is over.  It had its really bright moments, and I am looking forward to Rio, but I am also a bit relieved to have it be done.

Sorta like this uber long blog post.  Sheesh, no wonder I never do this kind of stuff!