The Canadian figure skating judging system is in major need of less Paulas and more Simons. For realz.

First, the U.S. mens' final today was very edge of your seat, nail biting worthy and exciting! Though he did not make the Olympic team like I had hoped, Ryan Bradley did a wonderful job on his LP today. I was so proud of him! He really took the mistakes he made in his short and used them to fuel a spectacular performance. Unfortunately, his SP did cost him, but it sure was close between him and Johnny Weir. Only 7 points. Is it terrible that I was sitting there hoping and praying that Ryan would manage to edge Johnny out of third? Had it only been based on the LP, he would've gotten silver. Ryan truly was the second best skater of the day.

The 'best' label, however, goes to Jeremy Abbott hands down. Wow....and...wow. He basically blew everyone out of the water today. A near flawless program. In fact, I didn't notice a single mistake. Of course, I'm not a figure skater, so maybe I'm not knowledgeable enough to have spotted them. If there were any, they were very minimal. Jeremy ended up finishing 25 points ahead of silver medalist, Evan Lysacek. Again, wow. While Ryan is my all-time favorite male skater, I wound up spending most of my time watching Jeremy's routine with my mouth hanging open. Ryan still owns on the entertainment and audience interaction factors though. I would love to see him skate live some day! And Jeremy too!

And our Olympic team is gonna be, as expected, Abbott, Lysacek and Weir. No shake ups :-(

So, I always wind up with some sort of drama or frustration issues after these kind of things. This time around I found myself fairly content, but slightly disappointed about Ryan, knowing that we do have three strong skaters who made it on the podium and will in turn be going on to compete in February. Johnny and Evan have a little work to do on their LPs before Vancouver. Though today may have just been a result of the pre-Olympic jitters and a fluke. It happens.

Anyway, the drama didn't come until after watching the mens' final at the Canadian Nationals. They have a couple of pretty good guys up there. Not quite at the level of our American men, except for Patrick Chan that is. He's "above" the level of our guys. After his LP, he received a higher score than Jeremy's skate. The commentators at the U.S. mens' final today were talking about how Jeremy had edged into the amazing category with his cumulative score of 263. So then, Patrick's score of 268 should indicate that he managed to out-skate Jeremy, right?

Wrong. Okay, let me state that I really do like Patrick Chan and I think that he's a great skater. I enjoy watching him and hope for the best for him at the Olympics. But there is NO way that he skated better than Jeremy today. I'm aware that it was different countries and different judges, so you're gonna end up with different opinions. I am starting to wonder if we need a universal figure skating judging boot camp before the games in February. I can't seem to remember either Jeremy or Patrick's exact scores on their LPs. After a little calculating of what I recall their SP scores being (Patrick - 90, Jeremy - 87), Patrick must've gotten roughly 2 points higher than Jeremy received on his LP. Patrick had no quads in his program, Jeremy had one and landed it nicely. Patrick made a few noticeable mistakes (even I spotted them) and as previously mentioned, I didn't see any in Jeremy's skate. How does that work out?

Yes, I know they weren't judged by the same people. It sure would be curious to see how each of them would have fared had they swapped countries for the day. Man, Jeremy's scores might've been off the charts if he had skated in Canada tonight, while Patrick would've received a rude awakening here in the states. Personally, after watching him skate, I would put him right below Ryan. Not just because I'm biased and madly in love with Ryan, but to be honest I don't think he's on the level (yet!) of the top four we saw today. They showed a clip of Patrick's SP before his LP and even there he made a couple of mistakes. Which tells me that his SP score was considerably inflated along with his LP.

Someone on twitter the other night tweeted about how they were shocked that Patrick scored higher than Jeremy did on Friday without a triple/triple combination in his program. I tried to mentally give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he must have been so amazing that he didn't need the points from that combo. After today, I'm starting to think that the Canadians are just plain over-scoring their athletes. What they don't realize is that this is actually hurting them by giving them false expectations. I really hope that Patrick tries to track down and watch the performances of his Olympic competitors at their National competitions. Because if he just goes off of the comparison of his score to others in order to determine who his biggest competition will be, he's gonna be in big trouble.

I had every intention of just coming on here and making this a quick rant, but as usual when I get going, I have a hard time reeling it back in. On another note, the Australian Open is going on right now. Unfortunately, they're not giving us free live feed of the matches :-( I loved that the US Open did that in September! Now, I have to resign to listening to the Australian Open radio and watching the scores as they change. It's so much more fun watching it live though. Oh well. I'm actually listening to the Nadal/Luczak match this very moment. So far, it is tied 6-6 in the first set. But I'm gonna have to go to bed and won't get to finish listening to it. Hopefully, Rafa comes out on top. On the ladies' end of things, Maria Sharapova has already been knocked out of the running. She lost to Maria Kirilenko. Bummer. Justine Henin and Roger Federer are the ones I'm hoping win this year. So, we shall see.

I really need to go to bed. I'm heading up to Seattle later today to go see the 100 Monkeys concert in Seattle with Stephanie tonight. Yay! And the ladies and ice dancing competitions are happening later this week at nationals! So, good night! Oh, and remember that Pigs Can Fly! (showing some Jeremy love :-)

Too much time on my hands...

I need a job! Though I have been attempting to be somewhat productive by working on my room and getting it ready for whenever I'm financially able to move out to my own place. Do you know how hard it is to organize 26 years worth of stuff? I probably should throw some things out, but I'm too sentimental for that. One of the positives of having a lot of time is that I've had the chance to rediscover things I used to love and discover some new infatuations. Primarily music and movies. I recently found a whole bunch of my old CD's. I had almost forgotten how much I enjoyed the music of the late 90's. Was that really more than 10 years ago? Eeeek!

Despite the lack of depth in several of their songs, I really love my old Aqua CD. Yes, the group famous for the "Barbie Girl". "Be a Man" and "Turn Back Time" are actually really good songs and the rest of their music is just fun to bop around and be silly too. They did a song called "Doctor Jones" and I'm wondering if it's a reference to Indiana Jones. There's a line in it that is in Temple of Doom (more on that later). Hmm.... I also found some of my BSB and Hanson albums. Plus a whole bunch of singles. Remember those? They may still make them, but I haven't bought a CD in so long, so I don't know. They were great for if you liked a particular song by an artist, but maybe had heard that the rest of the album wasn't all that great. I remember buying them for like a dollar or two back in the day. My friends and I used to collect Hanson and Spice Girls singles, since those were our two favorite groups.

I'm actually listening to one of my uncovered CD's right now, the Aida original Broadway cast soundtrack. I wish they would bring the show to Seattle, I love it! Princess Amneris is my favorite charactor and my fave songs are "My Strongest Suit", "The Gods Love Nubia" and "I Know the Truth". Elton John and Tim Rice did such an amazing job with the music!

So, one of my new discoveries is Ariana Grande. This girl is super talented and she's like 16 years old! I had seen that Amanda Bynes had sent her a comment on Twitter one day and ended up clicking on the link to her youtube channel to see who she was. Before I knew it, I had watched like every video on her channel. From the looks of it, one of her favorite past times when she was younger was putting together amazingly edited videos. She was on Broadway in the short-lived show called 13: The Musical, which is about the trials and tribulations of adolescence performed by the first all-teenage cast ever. It actually looked like a great show. I'm kind of bummed they ended it already. Anyway, here's one of my favorite Ariana videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sEjGp2WmDA Talk about some major multi-tasking and I so want one of those looper thingamajigs! I'm looking forward to seeing Ariana on the upcoming Nickelodeon show, VicTORIous. I really hope they take advantage of her phenomenal voice.

Okay, I'm tired of being careful about correct punctuation. No more quotes and italicizing. Lately, I have been on a kick of watching movie series. The other night was all about X-Men. So, I know I previously blogged about how horrible the third installment, X-Men: The Last Stand, was. But after watching it again for the first time since seeing it in theater, I may have to retract some of the ranting. While it still doesn't hold up to the first two films, it's really not all that bad. I think it's growing on me. Yay for second chances!

Now, this is not the case for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I'm in the middle of an Indy-fest (Indy being short for Indiana) and last night I watched Raiders followed by Temple of Doom. I think I've seen Raiders at least once a year (if not anywhere between 2-5 times) since I was born. I was like 3 or 4 when I fell in love with Indiana Jones. He was my second crush after Luke Skywalker. My family has been big fans of the series for as I can remember. Raiders and The Last Crusade are staples in our family movie times. While I really love The Last Crusade (Sean Connery totally makes the movie!), Raiders just has a little bit of a headstart since it was the first movie to come out.

You would think that Temple of Doom should be in that mix since it was second in the series, right? Prior to last night the first and only time I saw it had been about 18 years ago when I was in 3rd grade. All I remember from the experience was an annoying Asian kid, an even more obnoxious blonde lady, people eating monkey brains, some priest dude ripping out the heart of another guy and just completely hating the film, in general. After watching it last night, my opinion has not changed. I had to resist the urge to turn it off 10 minutes into the film. The reason I love the other two is because of the humor and charactor development. Temple of Doom lacked both. Cheesy dialogue, bad acting, scenes brinking on being horribly offensive/racist and over-the-top disgustingness. The dinner scene was seriously one of the worst things I have ever seen. Now, I don't mind a little racist humor every now and again, as long as it's not outwardly offensive or rude. After watching this movie, you would come to conclusion that people from India are Satan-worshipping, voodoo-doing, eyeball/snake surprise/monkey brain/cockroach eating freaks. I'm aware that they probably do eat some things that we would not consider appetizing by any means here in the States. I have been to the Philippines, so I've had some eye-openers when it comes to food. But this was so ridiculously overboard and gross. And a 7.5/10 rating on IMDB? Really? I'd give it a 2. It completely lost the continuity of the other two movies. I had watch part of The Last Crusade afterward to remind myself why I loved Indiana Jones. "Ah, Venice", "Look what you did, I can't believe what you did!" Love that movie! Oh well, I guess even Lucas and Spielberg are entitled to make mistakes and Temple of Doom was definitely one of them :-( Tonight I plan to finish The Last Crusade then watch The Crystal Skull, which I have not yet seen. I've heard mixed reviews, so I'm feeling a little pessimistic, but we'll see.

I saw Avatar last weekend with my sister. All I can say is WOW! They could have done without the spurts of foul language, but aside from that I was blown away. I don't think I've ever cried over blue people before, lol. I can't wait for the sequels since it's supposed to be a trilogy!

I got a leopard print Snuggie for Christmas....and I'm actually starting to like it. While I still think it's a silly fad and that they really do look like multi-colored Monk robes, they are pretty comfortable. In fact, I'm using mine right now :-) Today is the start of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships! I guess the pairs are just about done with their SP. Sad day for Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker :-( There were some twittered updates that Keauna fell twice. It's okay, they still have the long. I'm pulling for them to make the Olympic team! Tonight is the Men's SPs. Unfortunately Universal Sports is only airing like an hour and a half of live coverage. I hope they're smart and show all of the frontrunners (Evan, Ryan, Brandon, Jeremy, Adam....and even Johnny) during that time. I'm gonna be bummed if I don't get to see Ryan's routine. To celebrate the week of figure skating festivities, I created a lovely backround for my laptop and Twitter page. Check it out:
Yeah, I know it's a little Ryan heavy, but what can I say, I love the guy! I'm currently counting down the hours until 10 when US is supposed to have some live coverage tonight. So excited! Good luck to all of the skaters! I think this may be my longest blog entry ever. I think I'm done now, lol. Au Revoir!