Yet Another Inspiring Olympics Quote

(cue Olympics theme)

MEN'S VOLLEYBALL QUARTER-FINAL
8:59 PM EDT

"You know, one day, you get up, you look in the mirror, you get on the bus and you say, 'Today, we play the Brazilians.'"

(re-cue Olympics theme)

Rice Rice BABY!!

The corporate bloodshed continues at The Evil Boring Day Job, with our new overlord arriving on Monday. I imagine his entrance to be in the style of Darth Vader sweeping aboard the captured Rebel cruiser in the opening scene of Star Wars, complete with smoke, billowing black cape, and littered bodies in the hallway.

My confidence in retaining my position shot straight up yesterday,when my co-worker was contacted to set up a meeting with Darth, and she mentioned that she’d have to check with my schedule to see if I could attend.

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t think Tink will have to be there.”

Am I correct in thinking this is not a good thing?

So resumes are flying at a furious rate around here, and we are all passing hot job prospects back and forth. I myself am applying for this:

Director, Consumer Publicity Program, USA Rice Federation, ArlingtonVA. USA Rice Federation promotes rice consumption through programs to strengthen and enhance the public image of rice. The Director of Consumer Publicity develops and manages culinary and nutrition education programs to highlight rice's attributes, including versatility, taste, convenience and role in healthy eating.

I burst into tears when I came across this ad, for at last my dream of enhancing the image of the oppressed ricecake is now within my grasp.

Comment below so as to praise the almighty Uncle Ben, or email blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Au Revoir, Suckers

There are all sorts of homecomings.

Back gallops Gary “Riding Under the Radar… WAAAAY Under the Radar” Stevens from five months in France. He was supposed to stay through November… November, 2005.

“I’m very homesick,” he said.

“I’m going to host a talk show,” he said.

“There’s a language barrier,” he said.

“Some of the owners have not been happy with me,” he said.

“Also,” he added, “France sucks.”

Okay, I made that last part up. (Not the part about France sucking, of course; the part about him actually coming out and saying so.) Gary made the announcement yesterday as he slid out of the saddle of a mount that had chugged home fourth. By the way? I’m leaving. Next week. Screw you, France, and your whole business of making right-hand turns around the track. His jock agent has been lining up mounts at Del Mar for September the third.

This is worthy of a party. At the risk of causing another hurricane, I need to have a party over this. For Gary was once lost, and now he is found. My most recent party was a racing party, a Derby to-do complete with Meal Wheel, so you know it was quality, and I still have the leftover cups and napkins and plastic jockey helmets (don’t ask) that I need to use up because if somebody wants to borrow this stuff for something other than a racing-related event I really don’t want to know what’s going there.

I’ve already got the alcohol taken care of. I am now, after much trial and error, Princess of the Mint Julep. A lot of work went into this, huge amounts of research and practice that pretty much consisted of a trip to ABC Liquors about twelve hours before the guests were due.

Back in April my local ABC had just undergone rennovation, and the fact that I 1) was aware of this 2) was excited about it should give you a window into how thrilling my life is at any given moment. “Rennovation” at the ABC pretty much consisted of moving the rack of Boone’s Farm from Aisle 9 to Aisle 5 and also replacing the linoleum floor with a tile one, with the unintended effect that shopping cart usage suddenly became much more noticable.

Granted, if you need a shopping cart in a liquor store, you have bigger problems than noise pollution concerns, but when you have pina colada mix and a stack of plastic champagne flutes and two bags of ice, the little green basket ain’t gonna cut it. You need a cart. But a cart on tile creates its own unique soundtrack (quote: “rattlerattlerattleRATTLERATTLErattlerattle”) and for once in my life I did not wish to draw attention to myself. I was unshowered, wearing a baseball cap, and pushing a shopping cart around a liquor store on a Friday night.

Therefore: I fit right in. The cart and I spent many happy minutes in the Australian wine aisle.

Having never made—or, frankly, tasted—a mint julep before, I had a dress rehearsal with Flipper as Assistant Bartender. I knew what to watch for, though—mint juleps are famous for their very own, very special flavor, namely gasoline garnished with crushed peppermint TicTacs--but I wanted to make sure the drink tasted like ass because it was a mint julep, not because I had effed it up.

We read the directions on the mix, imported from a bluegrass shop at the Greater Cincinnati International Airport (“It’s Not Just For Getting Stranded Anymore!”) and encountered an immediate problem.

“What’s a ‘jigger?’” I said.

It was not listed, oddly enough, in my Better Crocker Book of Kitchen Measurements. Flipper wound up calling her father. “It’s a shot,” she informed me upon hanging up. (Huh. You really can talk to your parents about anything. Perhaps it’s time for the “Where did my baby nephew come from?” conversation.)

We then faced the issue of what constituted a shot and, more importantly, which shotglass to use. I have many shotglasses, all of them kinda sorta cherished and very definitely unused. The last time I called one into action, I had gotten into this huge, massive argument over American involvement in Kosovo with my then-boyfriend and I needed a drink once I realized that I had in fact sunk two years into dating an utter toolbox. For this occasion I turned to the “Class of ‘99” shotglass I’d brought home from the gift shop at the Air Force Academy, as this would have been my graduating class at the Academy had I been highly disciplined or scientifically talented or in any way competent. The shot glasses, then, were somewhat useful as an undergraduate; they now line the top of my refrigerator, a tactless yet incredibly pathetic landscape of thick, decaled glass.

Flipper and I wanted to use something appropriate to the occasion, however, and I suggested the one with the Cincinnati skyline on the side to add some local flavor to what was an essentially Kentucky-based celebration, but she pointed out that the tiny plastic flying pig embedded on the bottom might displace the proper measurement of an actual jigger. There was then much discussion over calling into action a glass shaped like a tiny beer mug, but I vetoed it on the grounds that I had already gotten into the borboun and the idea of pouring liquor into a tiny beer mug was starting to freak me out. (“It’s jockey-sized,” I pointed out. “That’s— that is just too scary, man.”)

So we finally settled on a high standard of properly balanced emotionalism and good form, selected the glass with the least amount of dust in it, added a jigger’s worth of Early Times into a Ron Jon’s Surf Shop glass, sipped at it, agreed that it tasted like ass for all the right reasons, and dumped the rest down the sink. Thus do legendary hostesses hone their craft.

That party was perhaps my greatest feat of home entertainment, largely because it was pouring down rain, but it also pouring over Churchill Downs at the same time, and as you well know a good hostess is all about an authentic atmosphere. Everybody drank the mint juleps, even my friendboy Andy, although in between sips his face tended to spontaneously contort into an expression I’d not seen since I watched him take multiple doses of the finest Wal-Mart brand cough syrup on the market, a very high-quality product called “Tussin.”

I attempted to arrange a pari-mutual betting pool, a plan that was immediately abandoned once I realized that this would involve math, so everybody threw two dollars in one of the plastic jockey hats and drew names of horses to root for. (Andy got Minister Eric. “Great,” he said. “I got the fundamentalist Christain horse.”) G-Force was happy with her selection, Song of the Sword, until Song of the Sword came in something like forty-seventh in a nineteen-horse field. “I am over Song of the Sword,” she announced as he cheerfully trotted across the finish line just as the last car was pulling out of the Churchill Downs parking lot.

Some of my guests had never seen a Kentucky Derby before; some of them, not so much as a single horse race. I poured out to them everything I knew about the factor of a sloppy track, the various styles of the jockeys, and the horses’ performances as two-year-olds. It was a very intellectual twenty seconds.

Your average Derby lasts just a blink over two minutes, and once the bell sounded I tore my gaze away from the race to cast sidelong glances at my guests. These forklift drivers, these graphic designers and college professors, were perched on the outer edges of the futon, clapping and yelling. I took stock of how far I’d come since last year’s Derby, having returned to this sport that rooted me in my over-the-border-from-Kentucky background, marveling at my transformation from emotionally attached Cincinnatian to poised, educated racing fan who very firmly felt that the little chestnut with pretty tail should win so that he would not feel sad after the race.

Yeah, that’s worth a party, and Gary Stevens missed it. He will not miss it next time. Gary didn’t like France, or France didn’t like Gary; either way, he’s coming home, now, returning to counterclockwise starts and dirt tracks—away from the wine glasses and back to the shotglasses. Here’s to you, Mr. Stevens: One jigger decanted from a first-edition “I MADE IT TO THE TOP! PIKE’S PEAK, ELEVATION 14,110 FEET”. You're home now.

shaving her legs at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Raise the Flag

NBC’s broadcasts of medal ceremonies other than the U.S.’s are snottily few and far between. I say, show 'em all. It's the only way to truly know what we're dealing with here. You can tell a lot about a country by its national anthem: Who you can party with. Who’s not to be trusted. Who's bombable.

The Greek national anthem begins suspiciously, initally throwing off the fumes of functioning as little more than a really solid drinking song, but it is, on the whole, passable. I thought the same thing for the first five bars of Italy’s, but then it lost control of itself and spun off into an inexcusable over-jauntiness. It sounds like the theme song for a circus wagon. You can't take a nation seriously with an anthem like that. For such laughable non-sports such as speedwalking (seriously, speedwalking) and judo and basketball, they can get away with this, but once you move into the hard-core stuff, your synchronized swimming and your discus throwing, you’ve got to show up with a national anthem that doesn’t make people snort their Dr. Pepper. I recommend “Everybody’s Working For the Weekend” by Loverboy.

Japan’s, clearly created by a fourteen-year-old who sampled the incidental music from a horror movie and added a gong at the end, is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. Why the long face, Japan? Is the the radioactivity? Is it the fact that your chief export is outrageously stupid-looking cartoons? Japan is right up there with the US for the most gold medals, which means the entire Olympic Village has been subjected to this thing something like 40 times in the past seven days. I now understand why so many of the athletes have turned to drugs.

Ethiopia, you'll be glad to know, actually has a national anthem. Here I was under the impression that they couldn’t afford one, what with all the famine. I stand, unfortuantely, corrected. Let's just say the “We Are the World” revenues weren't put to the best possible use.

France sucks.

I missed Romania’s national anthem because I was in the bathroom but I imagine it’s an utter piece of post-Soviet crap, complete with the noise of the tape being eaten as the sound studio falls apart around it.

I am quite possibly the only citizen of the United States of America who knows all the words to “Advance Australia Fair”—the very obvious answer as to why, of course, is that I rollerblade to it—and so was able to be all “AdVANCE AusTRALia FAAAAAAAIR!!!!” right along with Ian Thorpe. It’s the little things, you know?

BOOOOOOOOOOO, GA'BAGE!!!!

ACTUAL TRANSCRIPT

11:12 PM, EDT, Men's Gymnastics High Bar Finals:

AL: "What does he do that gets you excited, Tim?"

TIM: "Just about everything, Al!"

And yet, that wasn't the most disturbing thing to come out of the event finals last night. That wasn't even the most disturbing thing to come out of the men's HIGH BAR final.

I want to know just what exactly Paul Hamm did to piss off the universe. First he executes the world's most hilarious vault in the all-around, then has to dig himself out of a twelth-place hole; and then after he does that, he's all of a sudden subject to an incredibly convenient South Korean objection, at which point that most august body, the U.S. Olympic Committee, left him hanging on his high bar. Paul was then forced to sit and watch Katie Couric attempt to form words and sentences in his general direction.

And THEN, on Monday, Alexei Nemov of Russia did all kinds of freaky-ass twisty shit in the high bar final (“OOOOHHHH!” went the crowd in increasing decibels after every release, until I actually started feeling a little uncomfortable and got the impression I should really be giving Alexei and the crowd some alone time) and the judges, who had been staring intently up their own butts, gave Nemov a ridiculously low score, whereupon the crowd delivered the absolute best booing performance in the history of ga'bage calls. It went on for ten minutes. It was the Citizen Kane of sustained booing. I am going to carry a tape of it wherever I go from now on, because it will enable me to win whatever argument in which I happen to find myself:

POLICE OFFICER: Weren't you going a little fast back there?

SEVENTEEN THOUSAND GREEK GYMNASTICS FANS: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...

The judges immediately puckered and formed a Huddle of Asshats, the upshot of which was slightly higher score due to a revision from the Malaysian judge.

Okay. First of all: MALAYSIA?! Where the hell does Malyasia get off having any say on anything? Why wasn't this guy out stitching turtlenecks for the Gap?

In the meantime, the gymnast forced to follow all this was... Paul Hamm, who at this point is probably loathe to cross the street in Athens lest some dink from any old piece-of-shit country starts shrieking at him that he’s done it all wrong, and he doesn’t deserve to make it to the other side, and shouldn’t he personally now carry the entire South Korean contingent across the street too?

Paul got up to execute whole chalk-0n-the-hands routine and was shoved by sheer force of noise back over to the sidelines twice while this was going on, and I will tell you, I have been in some very high-stress situations, at least two of which involved a propane torch, but if I’m Paul here I’m bursting into tears and throwing myself a total Kerrigan-fit right there on the pommel horse.

Paul turned in a very admirable performance, but the judges, sponsored by France, gave him a score that was much higher than the Russian’s, and Paul reacted with this sort of sick smile and suddenly I was looking an Olympic athlete who, Bengals-like, just had to be hoping that he was not going to win. Higher, faster, stronger, baby!! Way to go, Maylasia. Tell Angora I said hi at the Lame Nations Barbeque.

The First Candle

Last week, this website very quietly turned one.

You know how it is with one-year-olds: The crankiness, the wild pooping, the temper tantrums, the general swath of destruction in the contrail. Since the site began, I am down five inches of hair and up one hurricane, eight pounds, and one nephew I’ve visited exactly twice. If we expand the ViewMaster to the past two years so as to encompass the entirety of my stint here in the swamp, the count includes one automobile accident, several hundred nervous breakdowns, and a downed space shuttle. Florida’s been great, wish you were here.

I am, as you might imagine, the very image of forward motion. Last year at this time, I was utterly boyfriendless, trapped a job I hated, drove a car that peed on me, was nowhere near conducting a full-time writing career, and completely in debt. But just look at me today: Now I’m also in intensive psychotherapy for clinical depression!

Yes, this has been a year of progress. I now know exactly how many Krispy Kremes may be safely consumed within an hour (four), finally admitted to myself and a small poster of Jimmy Buffett that I do not like margaritas, and discovered that I detest Oprah Winfrey even more than originally thought. Don’t even try to tell me I’m not a better person for stomping through this, the Year of the Blonde.

The traditional gift for a one-year anniversary is paper! Please send large checks to: blondechampange@hotmail.com, or simply leave a comment containing your bank routing number.

Olymphysics

The Olympics have confirmed a great many truths I have long held about the universe, among them the fact that Katie Couric is a world-champion asshat.

It’s high time somebody broke it to Katie: You’re not cute. You’re not smart. You’re sure as hell not a competent interviewer. I never watch The Today Show, because I do not wish to start my day by experiencing an upward exit strategy from my breakfast, but my new boyfriend Paul Hamm was to appear, so I took one for the estrogen team and gutted through it. Here’s an actual moment from the transcript: “So, you kind of…growing up, you…with the gymnastics, you just always kind of (voice trailing off)…did it?” I have seen more natural conversations between dictators and hostages.

Also Katie was wearing a brown paisley shirt that was apparently teleported in from 1974 and then thrown up on.

I’m not the only one who feels this way, which makes me have some small flickering of hope for Western civilization. My friend Annie referred to Katie as—and I’m paraphrasing here—“chipmunk cheeked pure evil.” I came very close to declaring this as the Official Quote of the XXVIII Olympiad, but at the moment that honor is held by my friendboy Andy, who, much to his horror, saw an interview with Michael Phelps, who was disturbingly dry, unshorn, and overly enthusiastic about his PlayStation. “He’s so much hotter inside the pool, when he’s not talking,” Andy said. “Shave your eyebrows and shut the f--- up.”

The bronze currently goes to some CNBC commentator, who, as I channel-surfed past the gold-medal round of badminton, said of the winner, “He is the bad boy of badminton.” Does he swagger around at night slamming his shuttlecock into windshields and vacant building windows? Or… you know what, the less I know about this, the better.

Oh, and the beach volleyball players are ho’s and each individual round sets the women’s movement back 27.5 years. Imagine taking part in this crap and then standing before God on Judgment Day: “And how did you objectify yourself and the entirety of the femalekind?”

“I was an Olympic beach volleyball player.”

“Ohhhhhhh, so sorry to hear that. Listen, on your way downstairs, don’t even bother to send in the chick waiting after you. Just hit the trap door for me, will you?”

“Really? What’d she do?”

“Olympic beach volleyball cheerleader.”