Olympic Blogging

Not Olympian Blogging - there's a nuance there!
Olympic - as in Titanic!

If you can't possibly follow all of the events that are of interest to you at these 2014 Winter Olympics taking place in Sochi, in the erstwhile USSR-now-back-to-simple-Russia (hey, as prophetized! But that's another story..) - fret not, humanoids! 

There is a blog (or several billion blogs - but we cover them only one at a time, due to serious time constraints! Hey - if Blogger's staff can't do any better, why should little luminous pundit blogger me do it, hmm?) oh yes, there is a wondrous blog that can make you up-to-date with humor... er, mirth... and more whimsicality than you really need, actually! 

No kidding: it is a Y! blog, after all - again, one of those...

The blog is called ''FOURTH-PLACE MEDAL'' - is that whimsical enough for ya, folks? Helmed, for the most part, by one Mike Oz (a wizard editor, assuredly, for Yahoo's other offering called ''Big League Stew'' - the kind of wizard that welcomes tips all the time, probably needs them, badly, too: email him one now at mikeozstew@yahoo.com - what else?) with some occasional postings coming from other contributors (such as Sam Cooper or Kevin Kaduk, who nearly trivializes the scattering of the ashes of a deceased athlete who did not live to see her dream come true, in Sochi... Great job there, Kev! Just like a Kev to do it that way - Kevs, you know...) so that this thing, therefore, a worthless-for-entirely-fictional ''4th medal'' recounts, in humor, entirely true events...

That's a Yahoo's brand of journalism, all right!
(Not to be confused with yellow journalism now - nooooo!)
(Nor with blogging - whoa!)

Topics can be ranging from ''the bet'' (that never really was) going on regarding the outcome of the semi-finals game between hockey's Team USA and Team Canada (Americans turned out to be true Beliebers, in that one too; boo-hoo) to the top five things you might have missed during the opening ceremonies (like, the Russian police's choir rendition of Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky' is a must for your ears; not that this Y! blog has it embedded at all; it relies, once again, on other media sources to deliver the goods - in this case, it's nbcolympics.com. Warning: all you may hear is a sweet, not-so-robotic, female voice telling you that ''this content is currently unavailable''...  Why... Y!... Why!!! Oh, never mind.) And then you might waste time reading about allegedly-colorful, supposedly flamboyant but actually-so-eccentric-he's-very-nearly-a-coocoo paradoxically named Sage...  and whatever he had to say - or do! (So he gave the insufferable Bob Costas pink eye, apparently - we wish he had given Bob a blackeye instead! But that's another story, too...)

It is as it always is, with such blogs: we wonder Y they even exist...

This umpteenth Y! blog also sins the same cardinal way that all other Y! blogs do: it follows the lead given to it by American corporate media (namely, in this case, NBC.)   It is truly abysmal that the latter ''great, time-honored, major'' network chose to air a 20th anniversary of the Kerrigan-Harding affair semi-documentary to lead into the closing ceremonies - instead of any number of uplifting stories on numerous athletes who just participated, totally and completely in the spirit of Olympic competition, and did not win any medal for all their efforts...!!!  Mike Oz, as a true Y! guy possessed of a sheepish mentality and ample desire to indulge in the sensationalism brand of journalism that makes American rags number ONE, followed suit and had to post the so-called highlights of that 20th anniversary ''special'' complete with interviews given to one Mary Carillo... Why, Mary, Why! Everyone with half-a-brain agrees that this was of extreme bad taste from NBC; but it doesn't stop anyone from still following that lead - and adding more to it.

We, of course, add on - by blasting it to smithereens - here!

(Not the same!)

Mike takes a malicious pleasure relishing upon the poor performances of particular athletes, too: cases in point can all be found in hockey, coincidentally, and in the USofA, too...  True Canadian, Mike? Patrick Kane and all of his sad faces were compared with those of his fellow patriotic countrywomen in women's hockey, Team USA, who also lost to Canada (but, in their case, it was excruciatingly painful: as they lost in overtime of the Gold Medal game!)  Now, do not get me wrong: the sadness, pain and outright despair of the Americans who failed so miserably at proving (if only to their own delusional minds) that they are ''the best - at everything'' in the whole wide world, and their weeping makes me smile, nothing else. They had it coming and they deserved it all (now, if only they had lost Gold to someone else; at least Kane and his sorry bunch of chokers lost the Bronze to Finland instead!) - in fact, I had wished to see Pat Kane weep oceans of frosted water back in June, when his other lousy bunch of mercenaries on skates were taking on a true team, one imbued with a family spirit, real sense of unity, true grit - the Boston Bruins! Ironically, Kane cried all the more when he and his fellow chokers couldn't score a single goal in the Bronze medal game against Boston Bruins goaltender Tuukka Rask! Sweet revenge, Tuukka! But that's another story once again...! So, yes, I seep it all in fine myself; but to devote so much time to that, as Mike Oz does, with ample visuals (GIF imagery included) of the simple, pathetic fact that Kane was crying like a baby at the end of those games, well... it's pathetic too, Oz!  And it is downright cruel when he adds a link to an entire slideshow with pictures of the women all in tears over their overtime defeat, too! Now that bordered on misogyny right there...! Shame on you, Oz - and shame on your wizardry too!

So, sure, you'll be all up-to-date; but the reporting will be either on the ''homer'' mentality - or it is juvenile, outright. Not all that different, hence, from Yahoo actual ''journalism'' in the end...

Now, since we've reached this Y! exclamation point of no return...

We would be remiss if we didn't bash the yahoos' attitude about their borrowed material; it is all ephemeral, all borrowed in the first place, too, and all destined to be as valuable as yesterday's yesterday's archival news from many yesterdays ago... Thus... WHY... Y... this:

The video cannot be embedded, eh?

The spirit of the Olympics has failed to flare up 

anything at all in the last traces of lizard brains 

that you may have left in your craniums: 

for not even the relatives of these athletes 

could make a dime off 

any embedding of this footage! 

No one wants to embed this stuff

other than to marvel at the feat 

(22 medals for the Dutch - wow!) 

share with friends, family, readers 

and all that in the exact same spirit 

dictated and described 

by Pierre de Coubertin

Now, you never got that message, 

you corporate rats,

did you?!?

This would be why Yahoo is in such sorry shape -

with its MILF CEO there... unable to do squat about it!

(Yeah - that's another *sad* story too!)

I so wanted to pin it on you, too, yahoos:

but it truly is the CBC that cannot help but typo 

''speeskating'' instead of speed skating 

while failing to pluralise ''medal'' on top of that 

(they're not up... to speed, one guesses?)

and it also manages to end with 

''this Olympics''

instead of ''in these Olympics'' too.

Yikes.

AND BLOGGING IS NOT UP TO SNUFF - 

DARING TO TAKE AWAY READERS 

FROM THESE ACCLAIMED 

''PROFESSIONAL'' WEBSITES 

that can even get their proofreading done?!?

Time For Some Good Old-Fashioned *Nombrilisme* Here...!

I promised (myself) I wouldn't dry (out)... No, that's not it... I had made it my mandate to spotlight those blogs-&-vlogs that don't make the cut in the eyes of them PTBs here, on Blogger, here, on my own version of their award-dispensing ''blogs of note'' over there...  And so I've scavenged the cyberways in search of suitable candidates, with the emphasis upon those that are the fruits of other providers' generosity, primarily: for, quite obviously, those will never make the cut with Blogger!  In truth, I stumbled upon quite a lot of them by chance, not even having to look for anything in particular: quite suddenly, it was just there, the labor of love of a fellow blogger brother (or a blogger sister!) who simply took to it with another web service, that's all.

It is a pleasure to see that so many are as versatile as me; that so many have found their niche and so many blog posts are constantly produced, as a result, that it is hard to keep up!

That reminded me of something some lady blogger said upon discovering my very own ''TLB Prime Network'' here, on Blogger: she had come to discover it through the late, lamentable and not-all-that-missed ''BloggingToFame'' thing; her exact words were ''there is so much choice, I don't know where to begin!'' (I supplied some suggestions, of course - duh.)

Well, then - indeed, I have all the blogs to denote right here then!  Why not a little bit of touting or blowing (or both!) one's own horn - eh?  It never hurts (too much) and it does the blogging GOOD! (Aye, we admit that some of the blogs part of the TLB Prime Network are less frequently updated than others - sue us, willya? But that's another story, rather...)

Verily, we have so many that, whenever we are left uninspired by our discoveries elsewhere, we could pick any one... two... or up to three of our own and spotlight them here, too!

Hence, without further ado, let's invite you all to check my less wordy blog of all:  the Laconic Blog. 

There's really not much else to say about it, here: the name should say it all!  Just click here already (or go through my Blogger profile to find it on the little luminous network that we've got all set up here - whatever floats your boat, eh) and discover yet another truly luminous blog to denote...! 

No need to thank me... us... ever!
:-)

Sempre Por O Melhor

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