We’re in the middle of that quadrennial snow festival
known as the Olympic Winter Games; this time in Sochi, Russia. Concerns aplenty as the games began. Concerns about security, treatment of LBGT
athletes and visitors, and facilities that are still in various stages of
completion (a local columnist described some areas as looking like a big
construction site). And then there’s
Mother Nature. She’s apparently
irritated at Vladimir Putin. Mountaintop views reveal a shortage of snow and according to the "expert analyst" talking heads what snow there is,
is of poor quality. At the half pipe the
snow was too bumpy; at the skiing venues it was too slushy and at skeleton the
ice was too warm. The folks at the Sochi
Chamber of Commerce (if such a body exists) must be taking good long pulls from
the vodka bottle every time the camera pulls to show vast brown hills. For his part Putin has poo-pooed the criticism. Calls it cold war propaganda. Vlad should know cold war. The man who once called the Soviet collapse the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century" sometimes seems to have aspirations of resurrecting it. Sort of brings a nostalgic tug to my heart strings; the good old
days of fallout shelters, those brilliantly colored mushroom clouds, ducking under a desk when the alarm goes off with all
those jolly jokes about kissing your ass goodbye and watching the occasional
B-52 cruising overhead. My apologies comrade, I digressed.
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| Sochi 2014. Got snow? |
Snow quality? I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. What in the hell do I know about snow except that it's wet, we yearn for it in vain every Christmas Eve and actually getting it would cause an untold number of traffic accidents once the local amateurs got in their cars.
