The men's giant slalom seems to be the top event for both scrappy disadvantaged athletes and lazy elitists. I was watching it on Sunday and it fell into a hypnotic repetition of the announcer going "[Name of athlete]...(three second silence)...[20 / 25 / 32] years of age... this is his first/second/third Olympic Games..." as 80 people from 80 different countries went down the hill, each finishing between 10 and 15 seconds behind the leader. Bosnia, Cyprus, Montenegro, Kosovo, Mexico, Lebanon, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Monaco, San Marino, every country gets someone in the men's giant slalom. With the ones from Bolivia and Chile having suspiciously Germanic names. Did their grandparents move there in 1945 by any chance?
So she's basically playing the Tim Ferriss self-promotion strategy?
The Four Hour a Week Olympic Training Schedule.
Perhaps I should write her a fan letter once the buzz has died down, on the off chance that she *is* the next Tim Ferriss & is still new enough to the game to be making friends with randos.
Based on those videos she really is so mediocre it's mesmerizing, in something enough people can do so you can tell. I'll bet we have commenters (not me) who are better freestyle skiers. I feel like you could choose at random at any major ski resort amongst people who are willing to ski a half pipe and most would be better. It's not so much Eddie the Eagle (find an obscure, challenging sport and be bad at it) as it is like being a weekend athlete who places somewhere towards the back in local half-marathons and still goes to the Olympics, just by carefully reading the rules. I'm not sure I've ever been so evenly balanced between hate and love.
5
Right, she's not even bad by Olympics standards, she's just actually mediocre. I wonder what it's like to have that little shame. It's probably kind of nice.
5 is kind of the point I was trying to make in 1 as well. If every country in the world can generate someone who loses the Olympic Giant Slalom by a mere 15 seconds, surely there are 20 people at any high-end ski resort who could do it.
I did occur to me, in years gone by, that I was close enough to Olympic qualifying times that with some serious training I could have competed for Iran, who I think sent just one swimmer recently. But even in that case, I was actually born in the country I'd compete for, and I would have had to make time, so even schlub blogger would have had a better claim to the Olympics than Swaney. I bet she's nuts kind of like serial stowaways are nuts.
I think maybe the pool of swimmers is larger.
Freestyle skier Elizabeth Swaney is an affront to this notion, and her, um, laconic run down the halfpipe is so thoroughly average that it's an inspiration of sorts.
That is not what "laconic" means. You mean "lacklustre". A laconic run down a halfpipe would be either one conducted without speaking very much, or one conducted while wearing a tunic, breastplate and bronze greaves and carrying a spear and a hoplon bearing a large capital lambda.
I think they meant lackadaisacal. Actually no. I can't put my finger on the word they're thinking of, either, but I'll know it when one of you says it. It's not lackluster.
Seductively languid mediocrity.
OH!!! Lethargic!! not languid. LETHARGIC. That's it.
I didn't want to play that game for the next 80 comments, uninterrupted.
14: That approach has been surprisingly unsuccessful for me in the boudoir. Perhaps I should have trying out for the Olympics.
19: Laydeez, does my penchant for leaving out random words drive you mad with desire?
She's fascinating. Her "please fund me" video is full of great stuff. Really, it just highlights the fact that she has a totally average level of dexterity. A Google Image search on her is wild too, because she looks almost like a different person when she's made up compared to when she's not.
Labefact?
Labile?
Lachous?
Lacunar?
Languorous?
Lax?
22: You're going to have to make each of those separate comments, if you want to compete with heebie.
"Lethargic Weapon" would be a good movie. Tagline: We're both getting too old for this shit.
Why isn't "Le Accost" the French name for Me Too?
26: I like it. I saw Black Panther last night, and I enjoyed it, but I'm starting to feel the pain of not having a superhero character that I can relate to. Lethargic Weapon could fit the bill.
I like "Liturgical Weapon." "Apostolic immunity... has just been revoked"
Hold off on the Black Panther thoughts - there's been a designated thread.
10: And here I was expecting her to let her hair down (on account of it making the beautiful more comely and the ugly more terrible), and slowly and methodically march down the halfpipe to the music of flutes.
33 more to anyone that was inclined to riff on 31.
I'm sure if they lined the pipe with helots and gave her a spear she could have turned in an unforgettable performance without leaping at all.
37: You tell me: has morale improved?
Why did she switch from Venezuela to Hungary? Just because it was easier to game the rules? Or has the ongoing collapse of Venezuelan society reached the Olympic ski team?
9: Both pools are Olympic-sized, by definition.
Read somewhere that she once ran for governor of Hungary California.
I in a sense fascism does promote better morale than anarchy.
|| Ok, I'm not saying I had any kool-aid with lunch or anything, but filling out an SF-86 is a king-sized pain in the ass, even for a nobody like me. (I'd saved the foreign stuff for last.) For someone like Kushner, it's way beyond annoying. |>
Do you have, or have you had, close and/or continuing contact with a foreign national within the last seven (7) years with whom you, or your spouse, or legally recognized civil union/domestic partner, or cohabitant are bound by affection, influence, common interests, and/or obligation? Include associates as well as relatives, not previously listed
Names; addresses; dates of birth, first & last contact; method of contact, etc. requested.
My question: how much do you have to like someone for 'affection' to kick in?
I had to work out that joke backwords from what I knew it must be doing.
I think she's great, but then I'm favor of pretty much anything that gives an FU to the IOC. I hope they give her a tank and tell her to do her halfpipe routine in the special lanes for IOC officials at Tokyo 2020.
51 I couldn't imagine having to fill one of those out now, addresses and dates of birth especially.
55 I suppose anyone close enough to list is close enough to be asked for their address/birthday. I tell people that I've listed them; no one should be surprised about getting a call from the federales -- had a good laugh the first time I did this about some poor schmoe at the FBI being tasked with calling my mother-in-law.
I'm having some real trouble deciding where to draw the outer line. The standard corporate advice is that if in doubt about anyone, go ahead an include them, because the kind of people who do the followup assume that all omissions are the result of an intention to mislead.
51: JFC, sounds like that thing has metastasized since I filled one out (in triplicate! by hand!) in late college.
That definition could be, I dunno, everyone in my fencing club on the "common interests" axis or the guy who introduced me to an editor who then hired me to write some articles. By which point, it's basically everyone I've known in 20 years of living overseas. Gah.
Even so, Kushner is a weaselly rat who was very conveniently overlooking material connections. "Russians? What Russians? Oh, those Russians, why didn't you say so?"
51. Wtf is that thing? Kill it with fire!
I hope all the USAians on Unfogged will remember to declare the overseas 'tariat if they need to fill one in.
"I declare that I interact frequently with a person who goes by the name of ajay, due to a shared interest in boutique blogging. I suspect that this may not be the person's true name, but I am unable to provide details of their true name, whereabouts, gender, age or nationality, since their on line persona may or may not be entirely fictional."
I had no idea that Sinn Fein had a policy of abstention in the Irish Parliament that lasted until the 60s.
51. My recollection from the last time I filled one out is that you have to go back ten years for things like jobs, addresses, and foreign trips. It used to be 14 years, iirc. The foreign friends-vs.-acquaintances part is really a PITA, though. ("Are they my friends, or my wife's friends, or my kids' friends?") Eventually you will be interviewed about your form, and the contractor who does the interview gets all excited by your "foreign contacts": How often do you interact with them? How close to them are you? What kind of contacts with them do you have? Dinner? Lunch? Trolling? Sex grottos? Doing these interviews must be the world's most boring job, most of the time.
My sympathies.
58. I was thinking about Mossy Character. Said to live on an island once visited by Sinbad.
That's not the only list all the foreigners question. Also every foreigner you've advised or been asked to give advice. Or any business dealings.
As I said, not excusing Kushner. But listing every foreigner he's asked for money would be a full time job.
I thought the main subject of Kushner's dozen-plus addenda was business holdings, assets, and debts he somehow forgot about, not individuals.
In other news, Billy Graham is dead and Dinesh D'Souza is still a piece of shit.
||
NMM to Bully Graham, you reprobates.
|>
Now you fill it out online, and they have lots of different check box options, plus spaces to provide more complete information. It's way harder to be hand-wavey than before. I'm kind of expecting the interviewer to be more of an asshole than before, and wouldn't be surprised if there was a feeling in some circles that people clearly opposing Trump ought to be given extra scrutiny.
It just feels way more likely that I'll be asked about FB friends this time than in the GWB era.
As I said, not excusing Kushner. But listing every foreigner he's asked for money would be a full time job.
Maybe these forms are designed to gently disincentivize people whose entire job is asking foreigners for money from seeking high posts in the government.
68 Yeah, or suing the government when the case would involve classified information.
The emphasis on nationality is just so silly. It seems to me that one is way more likely to run into bad people in Florida or DC than Banff or Campbell River. I can be at the Unabomber's cabin in an hour, but they want to know about how when I went to my parents vacation home in BC to clean up before the closing, I gave the table saw and a bunch of other tools too big to pack out to the neighbor who helped my dad build much of the house during the 80s. The menu choice on foreign travel is single country driven, so I have to have a completely separate entry for skiing across the border into Italy for lunch two weeks ago.
OK, whining over. Back to the Olympics!
Well, I guess I would have to congratulate Billy on having still been alive. I thought he died years ago.
He seems to have been more or less out of it for many years. His extremely unpleasant son, Franklin, has taken over his organisation and uses it to publish right wing talking points.
Billy was an evil motherfucker in his own right. I hope that doesn't get overlooked in the upcoming wave of nostalgic hagiography.
5: Heh, yeah, I had two interviews for that a few months ago. It was a pain.
The standard corporate advice is that if in doubt about anyone, go ahead an include them, because the kind of people who do the followup assume that all omissions are the result of an intention to mislead.
Maybe even include people when you're sure you shouldn't have to. The instructions said include anything about education in the past 10 years, so I left it blank. When I had my interview, the interviewer asked me about all education, college and even high school, not just in the past 10 years. The interviewer didn't assume it was intent to mislead because apparently a lot of people read the instructions the same way I did, but I still had to Google my school's street address and get back to her. They might not ask for that at your age, Charlie, but just so you know.
Another fun part: the neighbor two doors down who I know pretty well, who we have drinks with now and then and go to each others' parties, who's babysat for Atossa a few times, who I was happy to use as a current character reference, is technically a foreign national. Oopsie.
Another fun part: pot smoking. In 2016 I went through three drafts of this section of the questionnaire with my company's security officer to be strictly accurate while minimizing it as much as possible. A friend had advised me that they're a lot more concerned about dishonesty than actual law-breaking, so I figured honesty was the best policy. Despite the language-massaging, the investigator and I spent at least half an hour talking about it anyway. I wonder if I should have lied after all. It didn't help that just days after my first interview, I was going on a vacation to Washington State, and for Christmas I visited my sister in Colorado.
Another fun part: pot smoking.
You're not the first person to make that argument. I just don't know where to buy some without looking like a narc.
76.last Somehow I don't think my smoking some really kick-ass Lebanese Yellow on a balcony in an infamous hotel in Beirut (frequented by spies and journalists back in the day) with my Dubai raised Lebanese friend who works in a field that would provide ideal cover and where we discussed his oddly coincidental itinerary for the last, oh, say 8 years--working in just about every single hot spot in the MENA region about a year to 6 months before things kicked off--would go over well. Not that I would want to work for this administration in any capacity anyway.
I just don't know where to buy some without looking like a narc.
The darknet, man. It totally works.
And you can pick up some stolen credit card numbers while you are at it, then launder the money through the Amazon casheteria.
I'm not going to start using bitcoin just to get stoned. Not when there's alcohol I can get with regular money.
I haven't smoked in years, but if I wanted to buy pot, I'm not worried about where to find it. Aside from friends and family in those states, I'm pretty sure the guys hanging out on the street corner near Atossa's daycare could hook me up and would assume that I'm not a narc. The problem is, I chose to be honest about it on the form, but it also seemed important to say that I'd never do it again, and it was hard to reconcile those two things. Never is a long time.
79.last: eh, I got my current job before the election. The current administration is probably making things miserable for someone in this building, but my boss's boss's boss's boss position is an apolitical "keeping the lights on" thing, same for me and everyone in between us.
I just don't know where to buy some
Benefit of children all well into adulthood. At this point their mother is almost as likely to accuse them of being a bad influence on me as vice versa.
82 last -- That's what everyone in the Deep State says. They're on to you, man.
|| Large group of high school students just marched past my office. "Hey Hey NRA How many kids did you kill today?!" |>
It turns out that sending our 11-year-old out to buy drugs really pisses off his mother.
82.last I didn't mean to cast aspersions if you're working in the sciences or similar and you are holding on, good on you; I meant in the kinds of fields in which my particular skill sets and contacts would be useful.
84.last the kids better than alright.
Should we send them some avocado toast or is that older kids?
84. Me. New laptop doesn't know me yet
I'm not going to start using bitcoin just to get stoned.
Aw, but that's basically its only real-world use case! Also, one time I had some that was set aside for weed, forgot about it for a while, and accidentally made hundreds of dollars.
I've just been stabbing a work laptop screen with my finger like a barbarian because I now have a tablet as my personal computer.
10 et seq: She wounds the heart with a monotonous languor.
I was rooting for Lindsey Vonn, inspired more by Emerson than by NBC. Oh well.
How 'bout that Kikkan Randall, though?
OT: How many times does a car alarm have to go off before you can break the windows?
26. One to position the stone and the 25 to pick up the car and drop it window first on the rock.
Women's biathlon: surprisingly hot. I blame the influence of gun culture.
Hotness aside, some of the biathlon events have been great competitions and you can really appreciate the difference the shooting part makes.
There's four people on the bobsled. One to steer, one to brake, and two that are free for target shooting.
you can really appreciate the difference the shooting part makes
Even more so if they combined it with the ski jump. They ski a 3km track which finishes at the bottom of the jump, and then shout "Pull!" to send the first jumper down...
No; it should be combined with the snow boarding down a ramp event, so that all those contortions in the air are actually an attempt to dodge the bullets
97
I developed an armchair theory of hotness and skiing events, except it didn't really hold up. IIRC the hottest athlete didn't even compete in the Olympics this time.