June 11: Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Rampage Jackson, and the dude from District 9.

So it’s the day after and I’m suffering from an Olympics hang over. The countdown to London 2012 has begun. While it’s still fresh, here are some of my winners and losers from Vancouver 2010:

Winner: Canada
Own the Podium turned into Blown the Podium which ended in a furious golden finish for the host country. While weather was a huge story, winning an absolute spectacular hockey final vs USA was the gold cherry on a successful Olympics for America Jr. That touching piece by Tom Brokaw on how the tiny hamlet of Gander coming to the aid of displaced travelers following 911 has solidified Canada as the best people in the world. Finishing 2nd to last are the French, one beignet above al qaeda.

Winner: Stephen Colbert
Jay Leno was supposed to act as the hype machine for our athletes leading up to the games. But the late night fiasco crippled much of any momentum. Colbert stepped in with a hilarious week of coverage as an official assistant speed skating sports psychologist, where he was allowed to surprisingly take shots at NBC. NBC later tried to take a comedy cue from him, but their anemic attempts at humor was like watching my dad  try to do stand up.

Winner: Bumping and Grinding events
Short track, snowboard cross and ski cross are basically roller derby events and they were completely riveting.

Winner: Shaun White
Winning when you are supposed to is one of the hardest things to do in competitions. Shaun White stomped the field and he made it look effortless. His cool factor is so off the charts right now, he totally got away with looking into the camera during a studio interview and said, “Hey Obama, invite me to the White House.” And he’s going to get that invite.

Loser: Over-saturation of key stars
It’s annoying how NBC pre-games already determined who would be the sweethearts and stars before a single event was held. But I understand how they want to go with sure things. Lindsey Vonn getting the Michael Phelps treatment was just plain aggravating. And I’ve had so much Apolo Ohno force fed into me that I swear I crapped out a soul patch last night.

Loser: Curling
I watched 10 matches before giving up. The men’s and women’s teams were both talking medals. Both finished in the cellar often getting mercy-ruled. The most unbearable thing about the coverage was the smarmy announcing. The main analyst went on sanctimonious rants about the teams getting criticism on the internet. Well if you want to call glorified team shuffleboard the greatest sport in the world and make comparisons to football, baseball and basketball, then you are fair game to be criticized when the skip chokes four straight games away and then gets pulled. If you want curling to get more exposure then you need a winning product, and more of those Russian babes (incidentally on the ending montage of the great Olympic moments they included an unnecessary awesome shot of the tasty Anna Sidorova).

Loser: Day time coverage
All you could pick from was curling or any of the 10 (!) cross country events where Americans were no where to be seen. At least show qualifying rounds of more exciting events like speed skating. Watching a bunch of Scandinavians shuffle around for miles is as dramatic as an infomerical. And then there is listening to Al Troutwig drop beauties like, “Emil Hegle Svedsen is his name, biathlon is his game.”

Loser: Me and NBC
84 hours of coverage with 50 being commercials. NBC you suck for coming out of 6 minute commercial breaks, cutting back for a 15 tease then tossing to another 6 minute break ad nauseum. I’m the loser for tolerating it. Thank God for DVRs.

It’s no secret that Winter Games has an inferiority complex to it’s bigger sexier brother. Contrary to the Red Bull snowboarding youtube culture and painted on lyrca skinsuits (I have issues with how intimidating our star studded pajama outfits are), the Winter Olympics have the same edge as a spelling bee (Turino got squashed by Dancing with the Stars and over the weekend I went to a restaurant and they were televising bowling instead). NBC was so desperate to boost ratings, during one night of prime time coverage they teased an interview with Michael Phelps all night as well as a kiddie piece about snow dogs. The Peacock is estimated to go $250M in the red this year.

There are lots of problems with the format. From the over-priced venues, overdose of non-friendly American viewing events (10 cross country medal contests), the “other Olympics” are trending the wrong way.  What saddens me the most is the globalization of the Games, which is a great thing but ultimately debilitating (read: internet porn). Personally the Olympics have always been about scratching my nationalistic itch. That’s not a euphemism. Country pride always transcended the actual event and I would scream as passionately over womens ski cross than I would over a Rockets play off game.

But now the flags have just become logos. Athletes are fast tracked dual citizenships and national teams are now international collections of sports mercenaries. Our speed skating team is coached by a Korean Korean. Figure skating’s Queen Na trains in Toronto with a cadre of white coaches who have never soured on kimchee, and embarrassingly the Canadian homegrown top mogols skier represents Australia because they were more amiable to his multi-million dollar internet spam company. (The same goes for the Summer Games- in ping pong Brazil fielded a Japanese, Canada an Indian, and America a past medalist for China). This tells me that the Olympics have evolved more into professional sports and has lost the galvanizing “us vs the world” cache.

While I’m here I’ll do my part in taking pot shots in the media created Cold War on Ice…010!

The headline is Evgeny Pachinko’s sour grapes. Refusing to accept the outcome of men’s figure skating, he has now styled his silver medal as platinum. He cites that he was robbed by the new scoring system. The problem with this excuse, as brought up by Scott Hamilton, is that in 2002 he got silver on the old rules and gold in 2006 on the new rules. So the Russian Nose is just being an international dick.

The story that no one is covering is the Russian women’s curling team. The average competitors (I refuse to accept their self-given athlete label when one of them is 6 months pregnant) are mid-thirty housewives. Then there are the Russians. Most are 19 years old, all are tall, thin, attractive model quality talent. Two are legitimately smoking hot. In an event that emphasizes experience, their team captain is a sage 23. My theory is that they curlers with benefits handpicked by the Russian mob to shave points for gambling purposes. And if the Games are all about money then this is a trend that I can get behind. That was a euphemism.

Two pieces of anecdotal evidence.

1. Cincinnati  WR Chris Henry got into an argument with his fiancee while he was in town planning their wedding together. They get into a fight and she tries to drive off in a truck. He chases after and jumps into the truck bed. Woman behind the wheel leads to him flying out. Cops find him dying on the side of the rode because she drove off.

2. One of Tiger’s floozies gets on Good America and talks about their relationship and rough sex among other things. Why? Because she felt betrayed that he had other women in his life. Colbert breaks it down.

Moral of the story: Women are insane.

So the unthinkable has happened. I’ve been languishing in unemployment for a few weeks now. My couch has that ass cheek mold you see on kiddie booster seats. Then last night my cable box dies. I just got off the phone with Time Warner and they confirmed it’s deader than the CW’s The Beautiful Life. So no tv. That’s like telling me that I have cancer and no tv. What am I supposed to do without tv? Go through my mail? Do my laundry? Look for a job? And now my internet is doing it’s best AOL impersonation. It’s times like this I am forced to a higher power- Xbox 360.

If it can be had at discount, I will only buy it at discount.  Whether I’m using coupon codes, rebates, special offers, combo deals, ebay, price matching, if it’s under $25 I will not pay full price.  But if you knew I’m Asian then you knew all of that already. Today I went to Walmart and returned some things I never used and then I bought the just released video game Borderlands. $59.96. As in full price.  As in, this is what it must be like to be a white American. It’s a little unsettling.

I like having my parents in town. The fact is there isn’t much to do besides eat and watch tv with them. When we haven’t been huddled around a table of food, it’s been a non-stop eye bleeding double team by my folks of Fox News and Lifetime.  There was a small break when we watched the old Bond movie Moonraker.  For some reason my dad was mesmerized by the MS Paint special effects.  I was railing the other day about how cheesy it was naming Denise Richards Christmas Jones, just to set up the line, “I guess Christmas came twice this year” during their obligatory sex making.  In Moonraker, the super-model astrophysicist/space shuttle top gun was named Dr. Goodhead. Isn’t innuendo supposed to be subtle?  Should we expect the next Bond girls to be named Dr. Dirty Sanchez and Professor Broken Cowboy?

My parents rolled into town for the long weekend. Before they arrived I got this text from my mom:
We are stopping off for some franch flies

Later in the day I was watching some Bond movie that I hadn’t seen and I incredulously blurted, “Are we supposed to believe that Denise Richards is a nuclear physicist?  Do we even know if she can pronounce nuclear?”  My dad then jumped on top of that with, “Yeah, at least put some glasses on her.”

Somewhere Michael Bay was air guitaring in his underwear.

I enjoy railing on Twitter more than on Nic Cage or Michael Bay.  But it’s one thing to try and explain how absurdly retarded it is and another to experience it.  It’s not that I’m a misanthrope, it’s that I have no faith in humanity.  Spend 10 minutes at TweetingTooHard.com, and you’ll feel the hatred washing over you like a cool summer breeze.

I’m not one to critically comment on fashion because I always dress like I’m about to paint a house, so I’ll just say that the HK fashion sense is curious. There is the niche couture for the chicks who hyper-accessorize that screams, “I’m disaffected and ironic!” (translation: Chinese girls have daddy issues too.) But for the most part I’ve noticed that people here like wearing stuff that has English words but have no idea what they mean or imply (think of the knuckleheads in America who get don’t realize their chinese character tatoos actually say, “I’m the biggest kind of d-bag”).

I haven’t been able to photo-document what I’ve seen, but I’ve passed a slew of moms in their mid-fourties walking with their kids dressed in shirts that say: BIG AIR, MINI SKIRT, SPORTS, NEVER TELL THE TRUTH, IM A TEASE.

Then there is my own mom who has been wearing the same t-shirt everyday for 2 weeks. At first I thought this was weird, but all we do is see my grandparents who do the same.  My grandfather has worn the same pair of pants and shirt for 6 months in a row (regardless of the weather- I wish I was exaggerating). I think what it comes down to is that most people just don’t give a crap. I started doing the same and it’s been nice.  I dress like I’m at home. If I come back when to HK when it’s cold I plan to go out in public in pajama pants.