Well, for the 2.5 people out there who give a shit, I present the Olympic Hockey Tournament Power Rankings, all of the 6 "dream teams" plus the 2 qualifiers played their first round-robin game today, so here we go:
1) USA. Made Finland their bitch, 6-0. Offensive outburst against supposedly strong defensive Finnish team. Mike Dunham, thought to be the "third" goaltender on the team, records shutout. USA simply overpowering in all aspects of the game.
2) Sweden. Kicked the crap out of consensus pre-tournament favorite Canada, 5-2. Greatest display of passing I have ever seen in a hockey game in the 4-goal 2nd period. Goalie Tommy Salo looked sharp. Used the "big sheet" and the no-2-line-pass rule to perfection, making North American style of Canada look impotent. Watch out for those Europeans!
3) Czech Republic. Sure, they beat hapless qualifier Germany, but the Krauts used a tight, effective defensive scheme to advance, and the Czechs, led by scoring machine Jaromir Jagr, seemed to casually rack up 8 goals. Dominic Hasek let in 2, but this was just a warm-up.
4) Russia. Coming in, I would say that goalie Nikolai Khabibulin was the second-best goalie in the world (to Hasek), but he looked very shakey in the 6-4 win over Belarus. Russia has as much, if not more, talent at forward, and shear ability to score goals, as anyone. It will take Khabibulin playing at his usual high level, but Russia can be a gold-medal winner.
5) Canada. Eh? I won't soon forget the stunned look of the two Canadian fans the camera focused on after Sweden went up 5-1 in the 2nd period. A ridiculously talented team will have to learn the European style if they want to do anything in these Olympics. Were made to look absolutley foolish during at times. Look for them to shake up some line combos and refocus on an attacking style.
6) Finland. Other than Teemu Selanne, who is the Finnish offense? They simply ran into a buzzsaw against a high-flying American team playing on home ice.
7 and 8) Yeah, right: Belarus and Germany are here merely to bask in the glow. They are the sacrificial lambs looking for moral victories.

Well, I think we now have some definitive proof that cats are taking over the World:
She is the cat's meow in cloning
Soon we will be over-run by cute, fuzzy kitties, controlling all our comfortable places to sit and sleep and rendering our nice furniture into extravagant scratching posts. They will of course strike first and most intensely at those who are allergic to or otherwise don't like them, causing them to fold under a constant barrage of leg-rubbing and purring.

I, for one, welcome the coming invasion. I look forward to the mandatory nap times which will increase our usual sleeping hours per day to 16. While the crouching under shrubbery for hours waiting for a hapless songbird to flutter along may take some getting used to, I will certainly enjoy the leisurely pace of life which our feline rulers will provide for us. Getting up in the predawn hours for a "hunting" session won't be so bad when we can follow that up with our morning nap in a sunbeam. And, beyond all that, if the weather really sucks, we can just hang out in the garage or just stay inside and find a high piece of furniture to curl up on. If company comes over, and we're not particularly interested in being social, we can simple crawl under the bed and zonk out. Add to this the joys of a good scratch behind the ears, and the occasional intoxicating roll through some catnip, and life sounds pretty good.

Hey kids, want to sound Sophisticated, want to sound Different? Merely follow Jake's Speech Guide to Effective Vocal Affectations!

lesson 1:

controversy: pronounce con-TRAH-vur-see (as compared to CON-troe-vur-see)
advertiement: pronounce ad-vur-tiss-munt (as compared to ad-VUR-tize-munt)
schedule: pronounce shed-yule (as compared to SKED-ul)

Well, the second night of frustrating soccer this week. Tuesday night we got pounded 4-nil because we only had nine guys show up... and only two of us seemed to be playing any defense. Tonight, indoors, we lost 3-2, their 3rd goal came off a flukey bounce, and I had the game-tying goal with two minutes left off a great on-timer -- except I muffed it, putting it right in the goalie's lap. We didn't exactly have everyone playing their hardest up and down the field, and we fell apart. I had another disapearing act in the second half -- another chicken and the egg type 'did I break down because of the team breaking down' thing.

But I wanted to talk about figure skating. Yeah, you read that right. Not only has it become a bizarre parody of itself, not unlike heavyweight boxing, but all this shock and indigination over this latest Olympic controversy has me thinking of college football and the BCS title game matchup. All three have one thing in common: the rankings and determination of matchups, as in boxing and the BCS, and the "winner" in a figure skating competition, are based on almost entirely subjective judgements, with a bit of objectivity thrown in to lend it "credibility." What the BCS and boxing has that figure skating doesn't is a legitimate, unbiased, unsubjective result: boxing has the K.O., and football has winners and losers of games. In fact, to go a step further in "defending" the BCS against figure skating, is that there are very objective numbers that can be fed into computers, and poll-voting coache's and sportwriter's brains, that help determine rankings, and thus the arbritrary 1 vs 2 matchup for the "BCS title game," which is only a trumped-up version of the mythical championships of old. There are won-loss records, records for those teams opponents (so-called "stength-of-schedule" quotients), points for and points against, and so on.

Where boxing loses out in this is when fights go "to the cards," i.e. the fight goes the distance, and the winner is determined by the judges scorecards. However, even this compares favorably to figure skating for one simple reason: there are two combatants, and they battle each other. In figure skating, the two dueling skaters or pairs aren't on the ice at the same time, in fact, these judges sit through, what, a dozen or more performances, arbitrarily doling out scores after each one.

So, what do we conclude? I'd say it's something we've really known all along, that figure skating isn't a sport at all, and has no credibility as an objective athletic endeavor. I'd say it's performance art, and we all know that judging art is, in the end, a largely pointless endeavor.

So I watch these latest proceedings from Salt Lake with a sense of sly bemusement. There is nothing about this "scandal" that reveals anything we didn't already know about figure skating. The beauty of this is the simple fact that this is just the biggest, most visible example yet of this, and even the most die-hard figure skating people can't be in denial any more.

One reason we like the Olympics? Good-looking athletic Nordic chicks.

Watching the coverage of the men's Downhill in the Olympics tonight has inspired this outburst.

Slope of a hill is often described in a percentage, for engineering purposes, because percentages are much easier to deal with mathematicaly than degrees. They are two separate and distinct scales, and once you learn the difference between the two, it is quite laughable that one could get the two confused. I'm sure a lot of you are saying "I know what the difference is, jackass," but it is apparent to me that NBC commentators don't know the difference, and I wonder how many of YOU do.

I kept hearing that the slope of the top of the Downhill run was "74 degrees." Well, what if I told you that there is no one in history, or will ever be born, that could ski down a 74 degree slope. You would FALL down a 74 deg. slope, and you may very well happen to fall down that hill with skis on, but you could not SKI down something that steep. As we all know, vertical would be 90 degrees -- and if you were standing at the top of a 74 deg slope, it would pretty much look vertical to you.

Engineers prefer to use rise/run, expressed in a decimal or percentage. A slope that rises (or falls) 1 foot for every 2 feet horizontally, would, of course, have a grade of .5, or 50%. If you saw a hill that steep, you would think, "wow, that's a pretty steep hill." that slope would be 22.5 degrees. A highway with a 10% grade (4.5 degrees) would be very steep, and have all sorts of warning signs and maybe even a special lane for trucks. A 100% (rise of 1 with run of 1) grade is 45 degrees, and I seriously doubt anyone could walk up that steep a hill without using their hands.

So, obviously, this vaunted "74 degree slope" is really a 74% slope, which works out to about 33 degrees. If you don't think that's very steep, go get some skis on and stand on top of a slope that steep. Obviously, this doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "74 degrees!" but I suppose we are supposed to succumb to hype.