elaine's strange little world

yes, it is in fact 4:20am. this is because thunderstorms knocked out power in (apparently) many parts of tucson this evening, and my complex didn't have electricity from about 8:30 to about 2:00am. this was rather inconvenient, given that i wanted to watch swimming and the men's gymnastics all-around competition. so, the logical solution was to go to bed, be awoken by all the lights turning on at 2 (oops!), and get up to watch nbc's primetime replay, amusingly brought to us by ambien cr (a sleep medication).

i have many thoughts about the games themselves, most of them too hyper or too whiny or too pedestrian to want to write down, so i will instead share more amusing quotes from the NY Times, which has become my main source for articles about the olympics.

this entire article, about the completely amazing and sometimes distressing bodies of the olympic athletes is pretty great throughout, but several parts made me actually giggle out loud:

"Here are the gnomish female gymnasts, seemingly more compact than ever, more muscularly developed and yet at the same time troublingly arrested, to judge from the lack of secondary sexual characteristics like breasts.

Here is Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer with the blister-pack abs and the padded deltoids, her stupendous physique attained, she says, through Herculean training, and now unquestionably resembling that of a cover boy for Men’s Health."

"Even in the classical world, the range of forms at the Games was broad enough to encompass lean bodies suited to running, wiry wrestlers with bantam bodies, refrigerator-size hulks capable of feats like lifting a young ox (and then consuming it later: certain athletes at the ancient Games gained laurels, while others won all they could eat). A mosaic floor in a fourth-century villa at the Piazza Armerina in Sicily depicts three female athletes playing some sort of ball game and wearing bandeau bikinis. One of them looks distinctly like that Diana of beach volleyball, Kerri Walsh."

"What the Games also frankly accommodate is a taste for the spectacle of straining young bodies, an appeal that was not lost on the ancients. The crowds at the early Games, according to the historian Nigel Spivey, were as excited by the “boys with slim waists, broad shoulders, neatly proud buttocks and springy thighs” as they were by the lofty ideal of the Games."

oh, dear. springy thighs? neatly proud buttocks? what does that actually mean, and do i really want to know? i'm sad though, that while the article briefly mentioned michael phelps, it didn't really talk about male swimmers who, to me, have the ideal male body type. also, cin, this picture (from the accompanying slide show) is for you. :)

this article about china winning all the diving golds thus far isn't really funny in and of itself. however, i find it fairly awesome that the picture accompanying it is not, in fact, of divers, but of tennis player roger federer. huh? this may be corrected, so sorry if it's not funny by the time some of you read it, but i'm very entertained.

ok, it is time to actually sleep. man, i'm on a weird schedule these days!