A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

OLYMPIC ROUNDUP: Just a few random Olympic thoughts, approximately 48 hours into the Games.

1. I have to confess that I miss the Soviet Gulag style of Olympic athletes, as I have during every Olympics since the USSR ceased to exist. There just isn't the same patriotic oomph as there used to be, cheering for the sunshiney torchbearers of freedom, peace, and light to knock off the Iron Curtain athletes who'd been locked away in training facilities since they'd been identified while still in diapers as potential medalists for the Motherland. And while I know that I can toss the Chinese into this category, the petite Chinese athletes just don't pack the same Central Casting punch as, say, East German swimmers.
2. What I love about the Olympics, especially the winter flavor: announcers who do a great job of educating the uneducated as to the nuance of each sport just through their commentary on each competitor. Examples from the first hour of tonight's coverage would include half-pipe snowboarding and K-95 ski jumping.
3. What I hate about the Olympics: announcers who assume that each spectator is an expert in the nuances of the sport. Example: the coverage of the pairs short program last night, in which the new scoring system was "explained" in a manner that left me pretty much as clueless as I'd been before they explained it. Also, shouldn't we all get a quickie reminder of the differences between the salchow, toe loop, axel, and flip during the first figure skating event of an Olympics so that it's not just "hey, that guy spun around a bunch of times in the air and landed cleanly, and somehow that's more impressive than that other guy's spinning around a bunch of times in the air and landing cleanly"?
4. Okay, so Michelle Kwan withdrew. Big deal. She didn't qualify in the first place, and the one thing I do understand about the new scoring system is that it was likely to hurt her anyway. Plow a runway and get that Hughes girl onto an airplane, pronto.
5. TiVo is already enhancing my Olympic experience immeasurably. I got to watch three hours of coverage this afternoon in approximately 20 minutes and so was all caught up on what happened without having to skip my appointment for a facial. Good stuff. And I didn't have to watch the men's 5000m speed skating races in real time last night. Thank God.