President Joe Biden praised U.S. Olympians for navigating the difficulties of a coronavirus-tarnished games with “moral courage” and extended an invitation to Team USA athletes to the White House during a Zoom call Saturday evening. https://t.co/wLEHAVWUVX
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 7, 2021
Performances that look effortless, as long as you don’t know how much work has gone into them…
Leslie Jones, the official Olympic Commentator ?? https://t.co/sxBr22kQsk
— Teresa Freeman (@DemoLady7) August 8, 2021
Gold medal has been awarded to Leslie Jones for serotonin https://t.co/414fXWHhsd
— avalanche warning is vaxxed?? (@morgannaanna) August 8, 2021
REVIEW Olympics Synchronised swimming-Evil dolls and rap music, the new face of synchro https://t.co/Y4BazIaHGV pic.twitter.com/pDzDENQa9O
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 8, 2021
The alluring voice of an evil doll invites people to “come out and play”. Witches, spiders and snakes cavort in edgy routines. Teams spin and twist to hip-hop and rap in the water.
It is the new face of synchronised swimming, aimed at changing the image of a sport long derided as flailing limbs, splashing water and fluffy water ballet done to florid classical music, and it dominated the Tokyo Games competition…
The sport’s official name was also changed to “artistic swimming” in 2017 by international swimming organisation FINA as part of a rebranding attempt.
The sport is a blend of muscle and grace. Swimmers have to hold their breath for extended periods underwater, swim in tight, intricate patterns in synchronisation with music, make eye contact with judges – and have it all look easy.
There are costs, with swimmers known to faint.
U.S. athlete Anita Alvarez briefly lost consciousness at the end of her routine at a qualifier in Barcelona this summer and had to be pulled from the water. She and her duet partner appeared at Tokyo but did not make it to the finals.
Swimmers collide in practice, leading to bruises, bloody noses and worse. The sport also sees high rates of concussion…
Per the Washington Post:
… Artistic swimming, which used to be known as synchronized swimming, looks almost impossible to contemplate, let alone perform.
It’s a mixture of swimming, diving, acrobatics and ballet; performed mostly underwater, often upside down, in perfect unison; while wearing clips across your nose. When you do come up for air, a constant smile must adorn your face. It demands complete mastery of your body, of your position in the water, of your teammates’ positions and actions, of rhythm, strength and poise.
There are countless positions that have to be mastered: the Ballet Leg, the Fishtail, the Front Pike, the Knight, the Dolphin and the Catalina Reverse Rotation. Then there are the moves: the Flamingo Twirl, the Porpoise Spin, the Swan, the Albatross, the Butterfly, the Heron and the Manta Ray. Not forgetting of course, the Eiffel Tower Twist Spin and the Helicopter…
It’s as though the Hindu goddess Durga transformed herself into a mermaid, or Simone Biles coached the world’s smartest octopus.
“In my country, people usually say that synchronized swimming is too easy,” Romashina said. “We don’t like these words because only we understand how difficult it is, how many hours we train.”…
Baud
It’s too bad the Olympics have had a pall in them. The sportsmanship has been great, and USA women did really well.
prostratedragon
And it’s Esther Williams day on Turner Classic.
Steeplejack
Short road trip planned for today. I’m picking up Bro’ Man at 9:30, and we’re going to motor south down the Maryland side of the Potomac River, crossing over at Newburg and ending up at Colonial Beach, VA.
I’ve got a well-reviewed Mexican restaurant staked out for lunch in La Plata, MD (that’s “La Plate-ah,” thank you), but we might try another place if we see something interesting. We’re going to meander around Charles County and the Cobb Neck peninsula and see what’s what. Mainly it’s just a chance to get out of the bunker and break the routine. Perhaps I’ll take some pictures for submission here.
Bro’ Man has been camping out at Sighthound Hall in the middle of a major renovation (dream kitchen, big changes to family room and master bath). The family has abandoned him for Rehoboth Beach, so he’s up for getting out and about.
I’ve been to Colonial Beach once before, in 2005, after I first moved to NoVA, and it attracted me strongly. It struck me as “cool beach town before it became cool.” I’m sure it has changed a lot in 16 years, but I’d like to check it out.
The “beach” is on the Potomac, which at that point, about 35 miles from Chesapeake Bay, is about three miles wide. My memory is that you can’t see the other side, so it definitely feels like a beach town. Wikipedia says that, in fact, it has Virginia’s second biggest white sand beach, after Virginia Beach. It was a popular summer destination for Washington people until the Chesapeake Bay Bridge opened in 1952 and made Maryland’s Eastern Shore more accessible.
The weather should be nice—sunny and low 80s. We’ll probably come back roughly the same way but with different meandering. The alternative is I-95 up from Fredericksburg on the Virginia side—efficient but blah.
I hope everyone has a pleasant day!
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Tokyo Love stories:
(photo 1)
(Photo 2)
prostratedragon
“Tokyo,” Vinicius Cantuária
lowtechcyclist
@Steeplejack:
Crossing over at Newburg? That would be the Nice Bridge, which isn’t exactly a nice bridge, in fact it’s a narrow, steep bridge, no fun at all to drive across. (It’s named after a former MD governor, Harry W. Nice.)
Enjoy the rest of your drive!
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Something I’ve been noticing, with my sister’s kids who are in the twenties now. I don’t sense any generational gap between them and me. They talk about the same experiences I had their age, except with cellphones. But it’s not like the sense of I am talking to someone from another time and place like I get with people who are older than me.
WereBear
How did they know?!?!?!?!
WereBear
@Steeplejack: Beach it!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
“The roots o’ the Tree ‘o Libberty occasionally need waterin’ with the congealed lung fluid o’ Memaw over in Prestonsburg, Uncle Larry in Paintsville, cousins Billy, Bobby and Sue over in Boyd County and muh worthless brother Fred down in Hazard….”
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@WereBear:
They seem to follow events pretty well. I don’t get Turner, but I appreciate old movies and the culture around them.
Steeplejack
@lowtechcyclist:
Thanks for the tip. Nice or not, it appears to be the only bridge south of Alexandria!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Let’s chat for a moment about that old Franklin quote that gets trotted out. A friend of mine posted this up, so I have no original claim to it. I did fact check it, and it’s true – I just enjoyed his verbiage.
zhena gogolia
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I hate these people and their stupid snippets of stuff they do not understand.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Like the Constitution… ?
Nicole
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: That is really interesting! Thanks for posting it.
Fair Economist
Sunday morning open thread, Yay!
LiminalOwl
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Thank you! I had no idea.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Baud
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
It’s because his words kept getting taken out of context that Ben Franklin never joined Twitter.
sab
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Thanks for that. We sure do see that quote used bassackwards out of context.
Baud
BTW, I will be posting more intermittently over the next few weeks.
artem1s
@debbie:
Like the Declaration of Independence. It’s always annoyed the hell out of me that the only thing we are taught about the Revolution in US history is there was the Boston tea party and then Jefferson single handedly defeated the British by declaring taxes to be the root of all evil.
I remember when NPR started the tradition of reading the whole thing aloud on the Fourth and the wingnut outrage when people heard it for the first time. I know I was surprised at how much of it is complaints that the British appointed governors were failing to govern and preventing communities from enacting laws so they could govern themselves. The whole thing is a celebration of good governance and rejection of the modern interpretation of libertarianism. The word tax appears exactly once, yet has become the focus of the whole damn thing.
Baud
@artem1s:
In certain areas, the Founders were more liberal than people are today. In other areas, not so much.
Jerzy Russian
They were also shapeshifters. I have been binge watching Deep Space Nine, so I know all about them.
L85NJGT
It’s still not clear to me if I can get Olympic content (beyond NBC’s highlights and fluff wrappers) via Peacock or if I need a NBC Sports app subscription. After some thought about the industy’s shift to streaming, you know…. fuck Comcast.
Sloane Ranger
@Baud: I hope everything is OK?
Baud
@L85NJGT:
Someone said this site has everything, but I don’t know if you have to have a cable subscription to use it.
https://www.nbcolympics.com/schedule
Baud
@Jerzy Russian: This was known.
@Sloane Ranger: Yep. All good. Just going to be busy and away from reliable internet for a while.
Sloane Ranger
Congrats to the UK Olympic Team who pulled out two Gold Medals on the last day to finish 4th on the medal table with 22 Gold, 21 Silver and 22 Bronze Medals, including some sports we haven’t won a medal in for years!
Plus we beat both the ROC and the Australians!
Baud
@Sloane Ranger:
???
debbie
@artem1s:
I remember that uproar. Every bit as sad as this stupid uproar over Critical Race Theory.
debbie
@Baud:
Enjoy your sojourn!
Spanky
@lowtechcyclist: I love the Nice bridge! Yeah, it takes you a hundred feet over the water, and it’s one lane each way, but the view is marvelous. Especially partly cloudy winter days, which this is not.
MagdaInBlack
@Steeplejack: Sounds like a wonderful way to spend a Sunday. Enjoy ?
satby
@Fair Economist: It makes me a little sad that the Sunday garden thread has become another balkanized thread limited to just gardening, when before (I felt) it was more freewheeling and not just limited to gardening. This has become such a rigid blog.
satby
@Baud: Have fun, I hope!
RSA
I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen and read of the Olympics this year, for the first time in a long time. One thing that’s surprised is the obsession American press coverage has with American gold medals. Just today, on the front page of the Washington Post, there are headlines like “The heartbreak of Richard Torrez Jr. over the gold medal he didn’t win” (Torrez won a silver) and “Tokyo Games end with Team USA atop the medal table” and “With a fifth gold to their collection, Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird become the most decorated women in Olympic basketball history”… I don’t know if it’s always been this way, treating anything less than a gold medal as losing; it’s annoying.
Kattails
@artem1s: @debbie: Stonekettle Station (Jim Wright) did a great essay on this, it’s in his web archive and worth a read: https://www.stonekettle.com/search?q=declaration+of+independence
Exactly the issues you’re both referring to, expanded.
Elizabelle
@satby: I am so grateful to Anne Laurie for putting up a non-gardening thread on Sundays for just that reason.
Mainly because one did not always want to lob a potentially not so cheery news item into the zen of the garden thread.
Always good to have a non-specific thread as a catch-all.
People do stay in their lanes a lot more. Not sure just why.
Ksmiami
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: me too- I think it’s because we’ve all been forced to adapt to technology and so our life experiences rn are very shared.
Elizabelle
@Baud: Mysterioso again. Trip to Catalonia? I shall hope that is where you are headed.
Enjoy the break. Watch something big happen with TFG and his confederates (please, please, please).
smith
I’ve been watching some events in sports I’d never heard of on CBC via my VPN. They post videos of a lot of events start to finish, even if the event lasts 10+ hours. The one I was most struck by was sport climbing — who knew human beings were capable of the impossible things they do?
MagdaInBlack
Grocery store expedition uneventful, most people masked. The highlight was: woman at the deli counter,wearing a camo Q jacket. I took a wide path around that one
Eta: thats the first of that tribe I’ve seen in the wild.
Kent
@Sloane Ranger: plus they crushed the Germans who used to be good at this stuff.
Johnnys mom
I had synchronized swimming as a gym class in college (PSU). There were moves I never mastered. I was so exhausted after every class, that I couldn’t even walk a straight line. (I was athletic. In college I was still swimming a mile to a mile and 1/4 most days. In high school, I was captain of girls tennis, co-captain of swimming and worked out with the gymnastics team. Synchronized swimming kicked my ass. It is easily one of the most demanding sports.
sab
Stepson’s landlady is selling their place. Their washing machine died, and no point in replacing it now. So his laundry is here, and our basement smells like a machine shop again.
sab
@Johnnys mom:
Gymnasticsballet underwater wearing a noseclip and holding your breath. What is hard about that? //Brachiator
@prostratedragon:
I don’t think I have watched one of her films, just clips. But I was fascinated by the segment devoted to her on the podcast You Must Remember This.
She trained as a competitive swimmer but did not get a chance to compete in the Olympics because the games were cancelled during the WW2 era and she was not in top competitive shape when the games resumed in 1948.
The movie studios had to develop waterproof makeup and special swimsuits to show her at best advantage in the water.
The podcast notes highlight some of her career struggles.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@lowtechcyclist: not state highway 69?
zhena gogolia
@MagdaInBlack:
We just went to church, thinking everyone was being careful. All masked (mostly up over their noses, but not all), distanced, no singing. The interim minister is on vacation, but she determined, as I recall, that we would not have “prayer requests” so as not to drag out the services beyond 30 minutes. The person leading the service did a very nice prayer, then the Lord’s prayer. Then this guy (retired minister) got up and said, “We didn’t do the prayer requests!” He proceeded to ask for prayers for the two people who had been at a funeral he had presided over this week, who had since tested positive. I’m looking at my husband like, “THEN WHY ARE YOU HERE AND NOT QUARANTINING AT HOME?” I guess no more church for us for a very long time.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: Good grief, some people are just oblivious.
debbie
@Kattails:
Yep, these are the people who wave their pocket Constitutions around, insisting they can do anything they want. The only thing that they are doing is destroying this country.
Imagine if he had republished that on 1/7/21!
satby
@Elizabelle: You and I disagree about a few notable things ?. I know mine is a minority view, but I’m old enough to remember when all threads were open threads and there were conversations, not just statements into the void. IMO, it’s unfortunate.
BigJimSlade
@prostratedragon: ahh, Vinicius Cantuaria makes lovely music.
BigJimSlade
Lol, that picture of the American team looks like they just came out of an old Robert Palmer video.
I had long ago heard about how hard synchronized swimming is – amazing stuff!
Brachiator
@MagdaInBlack:
My supermarket now has a big sign at the door saying that masks are recommended. No longer required. But on a recent trip I noticed that everyone wore masks.
Oh, this is in Los Angeles county.
MagdaInBlack
@Brachiator: NW Chicago suburbs. This area has been great about masking etc, but you get a little further northwest, in the Fox River Valley area, you venture into MAGA country.
debbie
@BigJimSlade:
They dance like them too.
zhena gogolia
@Brachiator:
We just went to Stop & Shop in our CT county where the positivity rate went from 0.75 to 3.75 in the last couple of months. Half the people don’t seem to have gotten the memo, including employees.
JMG
OK, my son is married now. It was a magnificent ceremony (couple read vows they had written) and terrific party. One thing about getting married in Prospect Park. You get spectators. I am a very happy person right now. This wedding reminded me just how damn lucky I’ve been all my life. That’s a good thing to keep near the front of my mind.
dnfree
@satby: I’m much newer, but I appreciate some subdivision of threads. There are often a lot of comments these days (I don’t know about past history), so if I like garden topics I can read that thread, or if not I don’t have to scan it to see if there are other topics. Same with pet posts, photo posts, etc. There’s a lot to cover here!
I think most posts are open, but people just seem to respect the topics for specialized posts?
sab
@satby: I agree with you. I like the two simultaneous threads going, but it is sort of jerky to jump back and forth between them.
I think there are a lot of traumatized jackals out there. It’s nice to be able to jump into a completely happy thread sometimes.
Although we did just manage to politicize the garden thread just now, but it’s still gardens.
Yutsano
@JMG:
First: MAZEL TOV!!!
Second: I’m glad everything went well. Here’s hoping Ms. Delta Rona didn’t show up uninvited.
sab
@JMG: Congratualtions. Weddings can be traumatic. We eloped, to avoid the planning. So glad yours worked out well.
Another Scott
@satby: I think we have a pretty good balance here. One thing that does seem to happen frequently is that after 200+ comments a thread will kinda die because, I guess, everyone expects a new thread to appear soon. Most threads seem to effectively go Open eventually, except for the photos and garden and Mayhew threads, and that’s not a problem if there’s another reasonably fresh Open one nearby.
Too Open can be too much of a “good” thing, IMHO. I quickly gave up trying to read comments at Atrios’s place because (while his “topics” were rarely more than a sentence) instantly the comments were about everything under the Sun except what he posted, which could have been quite interesting. Wonkette is mostly that way too (but much, much better since they went from 5000 comments to a few hundred – apparently by removing trolly/botty logins). LGM seems that way too.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed that locking comments to a topic can be bad for conversations. I don’t know of a way to have a happy medium.
It would be good if FYWP would automatically put up an Open Thread with some random news headline every, say, 3 hours, if something hasn’t gone up before then.
(You should comment more.)
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@JMG:
Best wishes to the newly married couple!
Geminid
@Baud: Have fun on the Appalachian Trail! And stay hydrated.
debbie
@JMG:
Mazel tov! Glad it was a success.
satby
@JMG: Congratulations!
Ken
Kicking off the campaign with rallies in remote rural areas?
Steeplejack (phone)
@satby:
But I thought some people were complaining when icky political stuff was being posted in the garden thread.
Steeplejack (phone)
I’m home from my expedition, tired but happy. Will report later.
Chief Oshkosh
@L85NJGT: TOTALLY AGREE. And if you’re a cycling fan in the US, it’s abysmal except for the Tour de France.
Tehanu
I would find artistic / synchronized swimming much more watchable — well, to be honest, watchable at all — without the heavy makeup and the spangled suits and the frozen smiles. I’m perfectly willing to concede that the athletic aspects are for real, but the cheezoid showbiz stuff really puts me off. That applies to women’s gymnastics too, and the beach volleyball players who refused to wear bikinis — good for them!
sab
@Tehanu: Yes! I am in awe of their swimming, but I kept thinking you shouldn’t need a Brazilian wax job to be in the Olympics. When I complained, I learned my husband didn’t even know what a Brazilian wax job is. I am fine with that.
J R in WV
@Baud:
Oh, good!
I’m kidding, of course. Baud, your humor is fabulous, don’t ever go away !! Hope the absence is for good reasons, a vacation away from the web or some such… Party!