Getting back on the horse

I was home sick yesterday, so you'd think I'd have had plenty o' time to come up with something vaguely interesting to post about. Not so. I was most interested in sleeping and not feeling like crap, so I wasn't online for most of the day. And when I was, at my usual posting time, absolutely nothing caught my interest so I gave up and slept some more.

I've dragged myself into work today because the level of crapocity didn't warrant another day off. In between doing the very vital things they pay me to do, I checked on some of my usual suspect sites and found what my post yesterday would have been about had I been up to it.

This article from Slate captures everything that was so very, very wrong with the coverage of the Olympic trials for the U.S. Women's Gymnastics team. For the first time that I can recall, this event couldn't hold my interest for more than 10 minutes at a time over the weekend. The fact that they kept showing and talking about Pam Anderson turned my stomach and, believe me, I couldn't really risk any more of that!

I have nothing against Pam apart from general disinterest -- not being a guy, her most prominent attributes don't spin my wheels much -- but the way the commentators just couldn't resist mentioning her and her connection to the one gymnast, while flashing her cheering self on-screen, again and again, just left me cold. Well, nauseous, really, but I can't be sure that it was actually because of their pandering.

As talented as Mo Bhardwaj undoubtedly is, and as deserving as she probably is of being on the team, a small part of me hopes that she doesn't go to Athens because I dread the media-created spectacle of having Pam be there to support her.