Usain in the brain! Sweet baby Jesus. As I said earlier, my favorite run ever was Michael Johnson’s 200M world record in Atlanta. Second, before this week, was the 4x100 relay in 1992, when the U.S. destroyed the field, Carl Lewis ran away and hid, and Dennis Mitchell went nuts after he handed off to Lewis.* Bolt’s two world records this week are suddenly in the mix. I shudder to think what the Jamaicans are going to do in the 4x100 relay.
Trying to keep these things shorter. I’ve never been a gymnastics guy, and this year has reinforced the wisdom of that decision. Not that I understood the scoring before, but it’s even worse this year. I’ll be the one millionth person to ask, how can you fall down on your dismount and still win a gold medal? My favorite technical aspect of the Olympics might be the curve cam in the long sprints.
I’ll try to do these more often this week, to avoid 1000+ words of rambling. I forgot to mention in my first Olympics Notebook that I’m thrilled with NBC’s coverage in one big way: we have five channels of high definition coverage. S. laughed at me on the night of the opening ceremonies when I got terribly excited when I saw there were four new channels. Of course, two are fairly limited in what they show, mostly basketball and soccer.
With seven weeks to go, we’re finally cranking up the baby preparations. Of course, when you already have two girls, there isn’t that much original preparation to do. We moved the crib back up to newborn level today. We moved all of C.’s clothes out of that room and into her current room as well. Sometime this week, we’ll start pulling out all the infant clothes and restocking the dresser. We officially have a nursery again.
10 “Paid In Full” - Eric B. & Rakim, 1987. I’ve told this story before. In the fall of my year in the Bay Area, I discovered a hip-hop show on Stanford’s campus radio station, KZSU. The only problem was we lived way across the Bay, and I could only pick the show up on a small, portable radio that had a three foot antenna. So, to record the shows, I had to run a cord to an old-school tape recorder (this was 1987, so it wasn’t so old school at the time).
I can’t believe that between the Olympics, the phenomenal weather, etc. I’ve forgotten to share some very important news: we’ve scheduled the c-section. If she doesn’t arrive sooner, Baby Girl #3 will arrive on October 3, sometime shortly after 10 AM. All continues to look well inside the Baby Mama. The Baby Mama herself is a bit tired and uncomfortable. But that comes with working as much as she’s worked the past couple weeks.
The first of what should be many Olympic Notes entries over the next couple weeks. I looked back at the archives of my original blog today to skim through my thoughts on the 2004 games. I may have to pick out a few gems to share with you during this year’s games. I understand I have a problem of having a problem with people who have problems pronouncing foreign words, especially in the two languages I’ve studied.
The Olympics kind of snuck up on me. All kinds of blog-worthy material there, so look for lots of that stuff over the next couple weeks. For now, I found this on Wired’s website and thought it required sharing. Even if you’re not a Geek, I bet you have a fond place in your heart for WarGames. It’s one of my favorite 80s movies and could have been a turning point in my life.
Don’t mess with the bull, Frenchies. You’ll get the horns. My MacBook just about went across the room at the end of the 4x100 relay. The Olympics are awesome.
A few words about the methodology for my favorite songs list. First, I had to own a song for it to appear on the list. Duh. Second, I limited myself to one song per artist. After some consultation with a few other music geeks, I determined that I could consider both Beatles songs and John Lennon’s solo work separately. Same for Neil Finn’s work with Split Enz, Crowded House, The Finn Brothers, and on his own.
Songs 20-11 of my 20 favorite songs of all-time below the jump. I changed my mind; part two will come out next Friday. 20 “Born to Run” - Bruce Springsteen, 1975. I have this theory, still in its infancy mind you, that all American rock groups must follow one of two models: Van Halen or Bruce Springsteen. They need to be focused on either having a good time for the sake of having a good time (VH), or on having a good time while talking about some important things with friends along the way (The Boss).
A quick but good trip to the lake over the weekend. There were four families, and ten kids total, at this get-together, which made things a little crazy. Especially when the three two-year-olds decided to get wound up. Unfortunately, we were the only family without an older kid - each of the other three had at least a seven-year-old - so our girls lagged behind everyone else a bit. While even the other two-year-olds were hopping into the water (with life jackets, of course), ours would only stick a toe in, or walk ankle deep while holding one of our hands.
Here is my look at the latest iPhone software update, the Application Store, and other things iPhone. I’ve found the iPhone 2.0 software update to be a profoundly mixed-bag. One of the reasons that lines were (and continue to be) so long for the 3G iPhone is how successful the first generation model was. There were some opening weekend issues a week ago, as well, but things quickly fell into place.
We took the girls to our church’s festival/carnival last night. While I did not indulge, I was reminded of why I’m glad I married a Catholic girl: drinking is encouraged at church fund raisers. That’s going to come in handy when the girls get a little older. For now, though, we had to concentrate on keeping the girls from getting trampled and whatnot. We succeeded and they seemed to have a great time.
I was a little disappointed that baseball is being purged from the Olympics after this year. Not that anyone really cares about Olympic baseball, and I can usually name about one of the players on the U.S. squad. But this news makes me think it is a good idea to ditch it. Freaking Euros messing with our traditional American sports.
Perhaps Brett Favre and Manny Ramirez should run off together. And then they could take a significant portion of the sports media with them. Every football off-season, it’s Favre’s retirement drama. And every July, it’s the Manny Wants Out Of Boston drama. Every summer Favre comes back to play another year. Every August, Manny wakes up wearing a Red Sox jersey and goes out and continues to be Manny as long as the Sox play that season.
We decided to bite the bullet, take the plunge, make the move, etc. and put the girls in the same room last night. My rough plan was to do it sometime in August, so we had a buffer A) before school started and B) well before the baby arrived. And so, if we had a set-back, we had time to regroup and try again. But C. continues to have trouble going to sleep when we put her down and then wake up at least once a night because either her teeth are bothering her or just because she’s a stinker and enjoys waking us up, so we were dreading making the move.
We celebrated M.’s fourth birthday last night. As mentioned earlier, her actual birthday is today. We didn’t make a huge deal out of. Next year, no doubt, she’ll realize that she got to go to several cool birthday parties for friends and that she should start complaining about wanting farm animals to come to the house, or a trip to Chuck E. Cheese, or something like that when her birthday comes around.
Our house has been taken over by small creatures I can only assume are aliens. Nearly every room has at least one piece of paper with these strange little being drawn on them. Surely this is some kind of message that there are E.T.’s living in our backyard, right? Either that or anytime you give M. a crayon or pen and a piece of paper, she draws these cute little guys and tells us what people she wants to send them to.
Interesting that these two pieces hit the Internets today. First, Joe Posnanski writes about autographs, mentioning how he sent letters to players and teams as a kid. Then, former player Doug Glanville writes in the New York Times about cleaning out his closet of some fan mail left over from his playing days. Apparently Glanville is a really sharp and cool guy. Who knew? I totally spent my summers in the early 80s sending baseball letters to players, with their cards and SASEs included, and to teams hoping for autographs, stickers, pocket schedules, and any other freebies they were willing to send my way.