Vancouver, Canada - Olympic Memorabilia

I love to play Scrabble, but no one in my house will play with me, which means I don't get to do so as often as I'd like.  That changed when I started playing Scrabble on Facebook. There are two players with whom I've always got a game going, one in Vancouver, Canada and one in Louisiana.  Both are pretty good, and we're evenly matched.  Sometimes we play a word every couple of days, sometimes a word a day, sometimes a couple of words a day. 

[Side bar:  If you like Scrabble and have never read the book Word Freak, I highly recommend you check it out.  It is about competitive Scrabble and the year in the life of a journalist as he penetrated this wacky world.  The scores of professional players are far beyond anything I've ever even approached.  My highest score ever was 469; my biggest word score 88.  Professional players regularly score in the 700s and above.]

Oops, I digress.  Back to postcards.

When the Winter Olympics were on, I asked my Vancouver Scrabble buddy to send me an Olympic postcard.  And she did!  Not one, but four.  (Thanks, Kathie!)  She's pretty funny and I think if we ever have a chance to meet in the off-line world, we would spend a lot of time laughing.  Each of the cards has a funny message on it, but my favorite is that she signs herself as "the polite and friendly Canuck" on each one, knowing full well that this is how the world press kept referring to Canadians during the Olympic Games.

Cycling

I've put out a few requests for a postcard from the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, but in the meantime my last Atlanta Summer Olympics postcards will have to do.

Was it during the Atlanta Olympics that cycling started to become so big?  It seems the amount of riders has exploded in the last ten or so years, with expensive bikes, designer duds, and a direct drift to seriousness.

We used to ride  bikes a lot, BC (before children).  We'd throw the bikes on the back of the VW Rabbit, and head to Sonoma or Napa or Bodega Bay.  It was an incredible way to spend a Saturday or Sunday, either riding a relatively long route (I think our longest was about 40+ miles), or meandering from winery to picnic spot and back.  Now, the biking is called cycling and it seems a LOT more intense.

What is it with our culture where at some point with any new activity, a group breaks away and starts going all out, and the whole thing gets very intense?  Is it the sheer numbers of baby boomers, and the never ending desire to be faster, stronger, louder, longer?  To have the most expensive toys?  To be the first with the best, and use it better than anyone?  Is it looking for a way to displace energy that used to be focused on attempting to make the world a better place?  I suppose the sociologists have an answer, or perhaps the psychologists, but I certainly don't.

Athletics at the Olympics

Last night I watched some of the men's short program figure skating from the Olympics.  I love watching the combination of athleticism and artistry, and the mere ability to skate and leap and jump and twirl and spin amazes me.  Some of the final spins were so fast, their heads disappeared!  I don't know if there's anything like figure skating during the summer Olympics.  Perhaps diving is the closest, where there are points for difficulty and artistry and the contestants are required to perform certain moves.

Olympic Events

We went to the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, just deciding to go for it relatively last minute, driving down to Los Angeles without a ticket in hand.  We ended up attending a track and field match in the Coliseum, the soccer bronze medal game in the Rose Bowl and watching the marathon (can't remember if it was men's or women's) from our friend's house in Venice Beach.  It was very exciting to be a part of it.  I had forgotten that most of the Soviet Bloc countries boycotted the Olympics that year, with the single exception of Romania.

I have one minor connection to a Winter Olympic event, and that is to luge racing.  No, I've never tried it, and have no plans to. 

However, I did play a German nurse in a student film about a luge racer.  The film, Bullethead, is "the story of an East German luge racer whose head is surgically streamlined to make him the world's most aerodynamic human."  It was shown in art houses all over Europe and my part, while very small, gets the only laugh in the entire 13 minutes.  One night, I fell asleep in front of the television and woke up to hear, "and next up, Bullethead, a film by David Munro".  There I was, on PBS!  I still remember my two lines, which were in German, and can perform them at will.  My great disappointment is that, on the IMDb site, I am not listed as a cast member.

Winter Olympics

Friday night, I caught the end of the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.  The special effects were fantastic.  At one point, the floor appeared to turn into water, with whales pushing through it, spraying out of their blow holes. 

Until 1992, the Winter and Summer Olympics  were held in the same years.  (I did not remember this, or perhaps I never noticed.)  At that time, timing was changed so that each appears in alternating even years. 

I found this postcard I sent to myself from Atlanta in late 1995 when I went to surprise my sister for her 40th birthday.  The Atlanta Summer Olympics had not yet occurred but they were already being marketed heavily.   It felt to me that the Atlanta Games had just happened, but in fact there have been three other summer Olympics since that time:  Sydney in 2000, Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008.  I watched pieces of all of them, but it seems impossible that that much time has passed.