what may or may not be hard reality

CONGRATULATIONS to the Swedish Women's Sprint Team who won GOLD this morning!!! Yay!! And also, CONGRATULATIONS to the Swedish Men's Sprint Team, who won GOLD, like, 30 minutes later. Dude!! Which catapults Sweden from having been not in the medal list at all, to suddenly being 4th in the Gold ranking. Of course, we're still 11th out of the 16 who have any medals at all, so.

And I also watched the Pairs Figure Skating last night. Aiii... the Chinese pair who were totally gonna win, who do the quadruple twist jump thing that no one else can do, and he tossed her on her way, and something went wrong, and she went into the ice hips first, looking like she at least twisted both her knees, and maybe broke her pelvis too. Very very very scary. So she skidded into the side of the rink, and he had to help her back across the ice, as she dragged one leg behind her... And then they talked to the judge, and their coach, and she shook her leg a few times, took a few exploratory moves, and then they went back, continuing right where they'd left off. And ended up so totally blowing everyone away with the rest of their program so they placed second total when everything was done. They were amazing, tho. I mean, the Russians who won were really really good, technically, but the Chinese pair was just astounding. He threw her higher, and they jumped higher, and the pirouettes seemed deeper, and it was just more than any other pair. Of course, I don't actually know anything about figure skating, but in my eyes they totally outclassed all the others that I saw. Shame about the fall, but incredible that she could just go back out there and continue instead of, say, breaking half the bones in her body. *shudder* Believe we'll see more of them in the next few years.

And finally today, some random IMDb trivia: Fran Bennett has, granted, played some 78 different roles, but 11 of those are judges. That's gotta be statistically significant. Type casting much?

I got this from 3 different people, who's only connection, to my knowledge, is that they happen to be on my flist, so apparently it must be all over the place: http://kevan.org/johari?name=fallon_ash

Opening of the Olympic Games last night. Wow. I spent most of it just barely holding back tears. (I'm the kind of person who does that at standing ovations, powerful imagery and little children who sing prettily.) That 9-year-old girl singing the Italian National Anthem *let us all let out a collective 'awww...'*. However, the very very coolest thing *ever* was the ski jumper, made out of hundreds of people in different colored clothing, moving across the large stage, that from above created an enormous picture of a ski jumper. WOW.

Tho I will say that the most striking piece of imagery was the Peace Performance. Not only am I happy they didn't let a thousand live doves to their own devices who'd been raised in captivity, but gosh, it was so beautiful. Maybe two dozen white clad people moving as in a fluid slow motion up and down a huge vertical (invisible) net, creating ever-moving shapes to lovely soft music, finishing by a flurry of motion in which they all gathered to the center to form the shape of a flying dove, a wing span of maybe 20 metres, as the camera zoomed out and the dove was framed perfectly in the middle of one of the Olympic Rings. *guh* The commentators were equally stunned.

And then there were the parade of the participating nations (dude, Brazil was the coolest *evah*, looking like a psyched safari expedition in khaki hats, sunglasses and almost-shorts), and the ferrari who skidded in circles, eventually leaving behind the Olympic Rings as track marks, and the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of dancers, and Sophia Loren was there (and just why on earth was Susan Sarandon carrying the Olympic Flag?), and Luciano Pavarotti singing Vinceroo (OMG amazing), and the lighting of the Olympic Cauldron, and on and on and on, and I'm sure I've forgotten more than half of the things that made me go OMG WOW must blog about last night. I haven't even been able to find any decent pictures.

I will, however, finish, give you a picture of the ( Olympic Rings. )