Thoughts on Olympia

Ahhh, youth, man. Elvis Stojko of Canada putting in his bid on the Olympic gold in men's figure skating as I write. And he's almost 30. Before him, American Todd Eldredge was on, and he is 30. Kind of nice to see the older athletes still kickin' it in.

When I first began watching the Olympics, I was a kid -- I can't even remember how old I was at the time. Another thing my dad gave me -- a love for the Olympics. The guy appreciated a thing done well, done right. The Olympics were one of them. Shoveling snow was another, but that's another story. (It's something odd that the writer notices, how once you use the word another, you seem to automatically follow with another phrase using another.)

So, I'm watching -- let's see -- these would be my eleventh Olympics -- though the farthest back that I can remember is Dorothy Hamill, in 1976. (The writer also here confesses that he has yet to determine the difference, if any, between furthest and farthest, though he knows that further and farther are clearly different, that further carries with it a connotation of more, greater, in addition to, while the latter condones primarily distance, a sense of space, though it too lends itself to metaphorical purpose.) And I remember Nadia Comaneci, the then 14-yr-old Romanian gymnast who landed the first perfect "10" on the parallel bars and won two gold medals in Montreal, Quebec, in the '76 Summer games. (Dorothy, a winter gamer, of course, was in Innsbruck, Austria -- had to look that up.) So, in the midst of these swirling remembrances, there's an ad for something -- I don't know what the product is -- but the theme is some young guy in a boutique trying on a really ugly sweater, some lumpy wool thing, looked hand-knitted, but badly, and of a pinkish hue speckled with darker, perhaps orange yarn, and all these dark European-style lovelies keep complimenting him on how nice the sweater looks on him, and he's real skeptical about it, because he knows it's as ugly as sin, he keeps grimacing in the mirror as the compliments flow at him like gentle kisses, and he eventually caves. He later wears the sweater out to a club, and there's a scene where his mates are at a table, hanging out, joking, ribbing each other, drinking (prolly not smoking on tv, but my brain took me back to the days when I'd meet groups of male comrades, and we'd have some pretty silly times, plain old simple drunken camraderie) -- they see their bud in his new sweater, and immediately burst into insulting laughter. Yeah......chicks'll never understand this kind of thing........

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