The Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Skating Moments of the Past Few Weeks

As I sit here wondering if Evan Lysacek will do any Tweeting from the Oscar parties he’ll reportedly be attending later… I’m prompted to get on with that list of “non-Olympic Olympic TV moments” while I still have it handy:

THE TOPICAL…
From The Daily Show: John Hodgman (aka That Guy in The Macintosh Commercials) did a bit on how he’d improve the Olympics which included making figure skating “glitzier” which featured Olympic Men’s Final stills of Florent Amodio, Kevin VanDerPerren, and Plushy (heh)… then moved on to the ubiquitous photo of Johnny Weir with the crown of roses he wore in the Kiss’n’Cry, with Hodgman taunting “Was that really as gay as you could come up with, Johnny?” (OK, I don’t think he was the first one to say that.)

THE HILARIOUS…
From The Colbert Report: in addition to various mentions of Weir, Colbert did an interview with Scott Hamilton discussing (what else?) the men’s event that was a lot of fun (Colbert: But no one did your back flip, Scott… shouldn’t the gold medal go to YOU?)

He also had a great one-liner about Davis/White’s Bollywood OD that implied it was one more thing Americans had “stolen from the Indians.” And even better was the Twitter response it got from Charlie White himself (“We were made fun of on the Colbert Report!!! Woohoo, haha I've made it!!”)


THE ANNOYING, Part 1…
Not that I miss them at all, but I just want to say how barbaric it is to try and convince us that you’re “eating like an Olympic athlete” if you dive into a box of Chicken Nuggets with a certain new kind of dipping sauce. I haven’t fed my face at one of their restaurants in over 20 years, so I’m not interested in promoting them any further… I’m sure you know which place I’m speaking of anyway.

THE ANNOYING, Part 2…
As if it wasn’t enough that every comment about Rachael Flatt had to be followed by some kind of mention about her AP classload… and then, the news about her first college acceptance letter… we had Ann Curry standing there in the cold pre-dawn of The Today Show with Flatt (and others), chirping to her, nearly a week after the fact, “I just heard you were accepted to Stanford!”

Ann, Ann… don’t you watch your own network??

Finally… there were so many great moments on The Figure Skating Review/Preview Show (over on Universal Sports) that I’d need a separate post to list them all… (which I might be able to do since I still have several episodes recorded; if anyone wants to “hear” more highlights, say the word)

But here are five quick things that spring to mind:

+ Tamara Moskvina precariously balancing herself (in a way I will simply call “gymnastic fantastic”) on the desk

+ Terry Gannon shooting hoops (and by that I mean a teeny tiny “hoop” that was held at the end of the desk by, most likely, a production assistant) with the likes of Peggy Fleming and Dick Button

+ Scott Hamilton coming by and “loitering” on the set

+ Co-hosts Peter Carruthers and Kristi Yamaguchi busting out some of their own fashion mishaps from their competitive days

+ And finally, back to Davis/White again as White delivered my favorite line of at least one week: while watching a playback of their Phantom of the Opera FD, he explained as he and she blazed down the ice in a flurry of traveling, synchronized one-foot spins, he explained (I’m paraphrasing here) “Here we have to think: how would Raoul and Christine (the characters they play from Phantom) skate… twizzles?”

Admittedly it loses something in the translation… White had perfect timing with it!

If you have other fave “non-Olympic Olympic TV moments” be sure to leave a comment about them!

Since I put Evan in the Clip of the Day last time, I’ll put Johnny’s Regis & Kelly appearance as the Clip today.