Sunday March 14, 2021
As we see the number of people arrested and charged in the Jan 6th Insurrection grow we also see the fabrications and denials by the right increase. The situation is absurd, but those are the times we live in. I don’t think when you are gaslighting yourself it counts as gaslighting. I think that’s either lying or denying reality (at a minimum.)
Ron Johnson the Republican senator from Wisconsin is the most glaring example. Saying that he could look in the protestors eyes and see they were patriots, but if it had been BLM and Antifa then he would have been scared. Does it get more racist than that? Yes, yes, it does, but you gotta go some distance for that to be true.
There is no reasoning with such people. They must be removed from positions of power and never let back in.
Meanwhile, rumors circulate that Satan could be charged in New York any day now. Specifically in Manhattan, one has to specify as there are two ongoing investigations in New York.
The other day we flipped to the Olympic channel and watched some slalom skiing and some halfpipe competition. One of the announcers was talking about the second tier of skiers, those people who are placing 4th, 5th, or below. Always in the hunt, but never breaking through. The problem for them is that after awhile they begin to doubt themselves and then they try to do something different and it makes it worse and they fall farther back.
I watched a little of both the women’s and men’s competitions in both sports. There is a difference between those in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd and the rest. It is a notch different, but it is noticeable even to one not skilled in the sports.
We were entertaining ourselves trying to figure out the difference in the spins and the grabs in the halfpipe competition, because they all look about the same. One of the moves the announcer explained was difficult because you have to shoot up in the air and blindly reach back and hope you grab. Oh? Okay. I don’t think you’ll see me going flat out up the steep slope of something and shooting twenty feet in the air. Not gonna happen. (I’m thinking.)
Many of the people competing in the half pipe competition were born in this century. Egads. All the Japanese women were dressed the same in black with little wisps of hair coming out of either side of their helmet.
All the competitors wear these big goggles with a sunshield on them so you have no idea what anyone looks like, except that before their run the TV puts up a picture of the person. They are all cute, good looking or both.
The skiers tend to be taller and have more of an outdoorsy alpine look. This makes sense because, I realized, you could build a half pipe facility in or near a large urban area. This also explained why so many Japanese can compete in half pipe, but not skiing.
We also watched some downhill snowboarding and I kept thinking about a picture in LIFE Magazine when some dudes in Colorado made two little mounds of snow and were doing back flips on skiis. How crazy was that?
I also thought about when Billy Kidd was skiing and how everyone kept perfect form with their skiers locked together. Then came Franz Klammer. Skiis wide, arms flailing, he was all over the place. There was one turn where a camera was set up that saw skiers enter from the left, sweep around the gate, and exit to the lower left. The part towards the gate was almost horizontal. All the skiers came in tight, skiing in locked parallel form as they brushed the gate. Not Klammer, he swept the thing like a tornado, whirling way wide on the gate, almost losing control. You didn’t need a stop watch to see he was going faster than anyone else.
That run changed the sport. It was Innsbruck 1976.
Then I think of Mikaela Shiffrin. She travels with 400 pairs of skiis and a guy who spends his time in a shed sharpening them. After every run they need to be sharpened. She can tell immediately if they aren’t right. Amazing.
Then I think about where we’d be if Satan had won the election. Do you think we’d be looking at the whole country being vaccinated? Or that we had already passed the 100 million shots?
And I think of how this thing could have been contained in China a year ago, if we had had real leadership. Or if not there, then how it could have been so greatly reduced in its effect here. If …
But now there is hope.
Watching these young kids do their slope style 1080s and their back grabs twenty feet in the air give me hope.
PS Me and The Man at the Renwick
(in pink)
Extra Credit Quiz – Who’s the girl in pink. ( You know her name. It will kill you if you don’t get it. )
Leave a Reply