Unsolicited Advice

I am really tired of being angry at things, so here is something adorable and cheerful. Every so often I remember I follow figure skating, and go check to see what my favorites were up to. Much to my delight, Johnny Weir and Stéphane Lambiel are working together in Fantasy On Ice this year. I adore them both; the technical jumps are impressive and all, but they both do a lot of fancy spinny things and daring layouts that I am sad I can't get up enough speed to do on a dance floor. They are also both rather interesting people. Weir's always had a smart mouth, and surprised a lot of people by being an entertaining commentator for NBC Sports -- admittedly, when you think 'professional athlete' or 'fashionista', the first thing that stereotypically jumps to mind is not 'well-read wit'. Weir's book is a hilarious, if quick, read. He wrote it when he was twenty-five. He'll probably be terrifically embarrassed about it when he's fifty. Most of u...

I don't like not knowing why I like things any more than I like not knowing why I dislike things, so I've been going through YouTube again. I've come to the conclusion that most of the reason I like Stéphane Lambiel so much is that he doesn't really skate like a guy. Mind you, he doesn't skate much like a girl, either. Female figure skaters suffer from a lot of the same things that irk me about ballerinas, like intense pressure to weigh nothing, and an insistence that their image be scrubbed clean of all suggestions of maturity or sex. (Not that the men aren't sniped at for their weight. Brian Boitano is kind of infamous for getting really stabbity at people who bugged him about it when he was younger. He's nearly six feet tall, and he had judges suggesting he lose yet more weight even after he was down to what he considered his razor-thin Olympic fighting form. Given that he is the only male skater I've heard this about, I'm thinking that the yo...

Argh, dialects. I found Moggie backstage footage of the "Kings on Ice" show ( part 2 , 3 , 4 ) -- she's a theater tech, it's in her blood -- and she apparently adores Evginy Plushenko, so I went nosing around about the other performers in the thing. Brian Joubert does not appear to be having any fun with that show, figure skating, or indeed life in general, but everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. Stéphane Lambiel looks interesting. I'm shallow, he's pretty, and his self-appointed mission in life seems to be to sit next to Johnny Weir at press conferences and distract him until I start watching for their sixth-grade teacher to come stomping up the center aisle to ask them if that note they've been passing back and forth is anything they'd like to share with the class. The gibbery fan boards were swatting around a rumor that the two of them were involved at one point, and I can honestly say I have no idea. Their main "evidence" ...