I told myself we weren’t going to start the week with this, but the best laid plans, etc.: “A Russian chimpanzee has been sent to rehab by zookeepers to cure the smoking and beer-drinking habits he has picked up, a popular daily reported on Friday. An ex-performer, Zhora became aggressive at his circus and was transferred to a zoo in the southern Russian city of Rostov, where he fathered several baby chimps, learned to draw with markers and picked up his two vices. ‘The beer and cigarettes were ruining him. He would pester passers-by for booze,’ the Komsomolskaya Pravda paper said.” I guess the markers are a promising sign. Art therapy is often helpful in cases like this.

Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers returns to that website!

by Katie Baker

South Korean darling Kim Yu-na was an absolute stunner last night in the ladies free skate, shattering her own world record score and twirling her way to the gold. Aerial ski jumper Jeret Peterson-known assonantly as “Speedy”-landed a “Cirque du Soleil on skis” move called the Hurricane that he had not successfully stuck in competition since 2007; he won a silver. The Canadian women’s hockey team boozily Owned The Podium (and almost Drove The Zamboni) after winning their third Olympic gold. And still, all I could think about as I lounged on the couch and let the NBC broadcast team play cat’s cradle with my heartstrings was: how the hell did the US go one-two in the Nordic combined!?

I had long assumed that the United States just wasn’t in the mix when it came to these types of endurance-based competitions that require spacious lungs, strong bones, a healthy body and a presiding cultural preference for biathlons over NASCAR. And you know, I wasn’t wrong: it was only about a week ago that Johnny Spillane’s silver medal in the “normal hill” Nordic combined gave the United States only its third medal of any color in any Nordic event, ever. (The other two were a cross-country silver in 1976 and a ski jumping bronze in 1924; those two sports, incidentally, are what the Nordic combined… combines.)

Spillane picked up his second silver yesterday in the “large hill” event despite falling on a late turn as he headed into the stadium for the final lap. Seconds ahead of him, winning the US’s first-ever Nordic gold, was Billy Demong. It was a few days earlier than the February 27 date predicted by Astrology Zone to be “the luckiest day of the year” for an Aries like Demong, but consider that a rounding error: after winning the gold, he proposed to his girlfriend Katie Koczynski-smart move; there’s no way she could say no!-and then learned he’d been selected as the American flag bearer in Sunday’s closing ceremonies! Always trust content from Susan Miller.

The surprising finish for the Americans is mostly explained by nasty weather conditions that rolled in during the ski jump portion of the competition, hampering the jumps of the top medal contenders who were scheduled to jump near the end of the lineup. “It’s a joke,” complained Magnus Moan, of Norway, whose severely wind-challenged jump hoisted upon him an insurmountable cross country start position of 28th place.

But regardless of the “rogue wind” that made its mark on the competition, there’s no denying that Demong, Spillane and teammate Todd Lodwick (who, Demong explained, effectively positioned himself to prevent “those strong guys like Hannu (Finland’s Manninen) and (Germany’s Bjoern) Kircheisen” from moving up to threaten the top US skiers) earned their success in Vancouver via more conventional paths. In an outstanding piece on the devoted teamwork of the Nordic team, ESPN’s Bonnie Ford quotes gold medalist Demong saying:

“We know that as a small sport in a big country, we need to be together to push each other … That’s what makes us strong, not only on the playing field — we’re a band of brothers. We spend upwards of 250 days a year together. At 29 years of age, I was reflecting today … that I’ve probably spent more nights in a hotel room with Johnny Spillane and Todd Lodwick than I spent with my mother.

It’s the group that has made us good. It started with Todd being able to break the mold and say, ‘You know what, Americans can be good at this sport. I’m not gonna take history as an example.”

I can think of two Skiers Who Shall Not Be Named who could maybe learn a thing or two. The United States has not won the overall medal count at a Winter Olympics since 1932, and the Germans have not lost it since 1994. It remains to be seen what the final tally will be-currently, the US leads by six-but the performance of the US at these games has been remarkable. More significantly, in this age of pre-hype and high expectations and saturated storylines and knowing projections, it was unexpected. And it is guys like Demong and Spillane who are the unfamiliar faces behind the tally.

* * *

I have that weird feeling that I got the end of my senior year in college: I am having so much fun with these Olympics, but can’t wait for them to be over. I’m ready to break free of these primetime-y shackles, but I’m going to miss them when they’re gone. A few thoughts on what we’ve seen over this second week.

• Shut up with the moralizing about the Canadian women’s hockey team’s celebration. OMG SHE IS UNDERAGE shut up shut up shut up. If you want to, like, make fun of how they look in the pictures, I’m obviously fine with that.

• Setting aside the heartbreaking story of Joannie Rochette, which had me doubled over in tears every time her face appeared on the screen, I could maybe have used a little more intrigue in last night’s figure skating I think? Not to take anything away from the talented ladies, but everything went just a little too smoothly. Even the mediocre Americans skated relatively flawless routines. The drama was lessened, really, by Yu-na’s unprecedented dominance as well as a scoring system so convoluted that attempts to explain it are headlined “The Futile Search for Understanding” and go something like this:

Compare that to the also excellent but significantly lower scoring program from Mao, where the early triple axel-double toeloop received only a 0.60 GOE score, as opposed to Kim’s 2.00. That’s a significant difference — 1.4 points out of the 4.7-point difference between them is the quality of the execution of the combination jump, despite the fact that neither one of them fell down, which is how many of those of us with very little knowledge judge good and bad jumps.

Oof. I think I actually miss the corrupt Soviet judges.

• The Netherlands’ Sven Kramer, on the other hand, probably wishes that his race had been just as boring. Instead of speedskating to the gold that was roundly assumed to be his, the 23-year old Dutch celebrity was disqualified when his coach Gerard Kemkers got distracted by his clipboard and mistakenly instructed him to switch lanes. In a country like Holland, where speedskating is a national obsession, the terrible gaffe will reverberate for generations to come. “We call a pure blunder ‘a Hilbert’,” said Dutch speedskating correspondent John Volkers, referring to Holland’s previous “poster boy for speedskating misfortune” Hilbert van der Duim, who once blamed bird poop for a catastrophic fall. “It will now be replaced by ‘a Kramer’ or ‘a Kemkers’.”

• The only thing that keeps my attention in the “sliding” events is when they do the TV trick of superimposing one racer on top of another. (They do it in skiing too.) I love that!

• Former tennis pro turned commentator Mary Carillo’s role as human guinea pig-”she dressed in a buffalo check plaid jacket and cackled loudly as she watched a logging truck do wheelies in the Canadian outback,” just as one example-has been creeping me out. Who does NBC think she is, Emily Yoffe?

• Credit (or, more likely from your perspective, blame) for my interest in the Nordic events goes to color commentator Chad Salmela, who managed to get me excited about cross-country and the biathlon through his Gus Johnson-esque enthusiasm levels. I’ve done some low level stalking of Salmela and learned that he is, among other things, the cross country coach at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN; a real estate agent in same; pretty freaking adorable; and amusingly candid:

At the Olympic games, NBC tries to approach it in the commentary aspect as a neutral call. Their policy is that it’s not “us,” it’s “the Americans.” In fact, in the first show of Torino, I said “we’re doing really well today,” and the producer came through the headset to say “knock it off.” I did it again later in the show, and he got really mad.

• Speaking of “the Americans,” I’m like incredibly nervous about US hockey going on right now even though the US is leading Finland 6–0 and honestly I don’t want to jinx anything by even discussing it right now. In fact, why are you even still reading? You should be watching the game. It would be tremendously tremendous if you would make sure to cheer for “us.”

Katie Baker can’t wait to graduate from Olympics school!

No, I’m not some joyless prude. I was once like you, even. Remember when we were sitting around your apartment and decided to watch the trailer online? How we laughed! Someone had tried to adapt early 90s Trapper Keepers® for the screen! And they’d spent a small nation’s GDP to make it happen! If, some months from that point, James Cameron Trips Over A Fanboy Wishlist Into The Uncanny Valley wasn’t going to be the flop of our young century, jeez, it really should’ve been.

Then we went about our admittedly terrestrial lives.

Oh, we saw the commercials flit by while fastforwarding on our DVRs, and glanced at those posters in the subway. But it would take more than a shitty Papyrus font and skin colors by Van Gogh to get us on the bandwagon-otherwise we’d be going to stuff like free first guitar lessons and Blue Man Group on a regular basis.

Eventually a co-worker or blogger clued us into the nation’s metastasizing fervor, and we didn’t begrudge anyone this eager attitude: Obviously an epic 3D sci-fable would appeal to someone. It just wouldn’t-by unspoken agreement-be us. Finally, the week it opened, you made an announcement that took my breath away.

“Welp,” you said. “Gonna see Avatar. You in?”

When I asked why, you gave me a look of sternness and pity, as if we both knew this day was coming and my put-on ignorance couldn’t stop it. As if IMAX theatres were wells of cultural gravity that we had no right to resist. As if you’d said, “Scientology’s definitely a sham, but we’ve all got to join sooner or later. Wanna come?”

How the hell this sense of duty originated is a mystery in its own right, but it’s only half as scary as what came next.

Here’s a thought experiment. I’m aware that you’ve undergone a quantum cinematic evolution, so this may be difficult for you to imagine, but: try to envision a world in which you have experienced Avatar solely through hearsay. Through friends’ reactions and zeitgeist-fondling articles. Through self-congratulatory Hollywoodese. Welcome to the surreal tangent universe I’ve inhabited for the past two months. Every day, someone gently prods me to see a movie I have no interest in seeing. I sense a blanket consciousness I cannot access. People are waiting for me to cave. There are times when, so help me Ebert, I feel like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, trying to blend in with a converted humanity, wondering whether that’s better or worse than being converted, and keeping my outbursts bottled up lest I be pointed and howled at.

“There were flying dragon-things…” “…dude, the colors… “ “…my heart was racing nonstop for two-and-a-half hours…” “…so intense.” It doesn’t sound like you’re recommending a film; it sounds like you’re walking me through a night on iffy designer drugs. Moreover, almost nobody actually seems to think this film is any good; most unwittingly describe it as an audiovisual colonoscopy, a firehose treatment that leaves your mind sparkling and evacuated.

And I can’t name a single other instance of someone arguing, “Look, it’s stupid, it’s lame, but you hafta,” except when it came to wearing a name tag at a catering job. From what stems this word-of-mouth obligation to a product that you acknowledge as inferior? Was the fact of your attendance so overdetermined that you must spend all of Oscar® limbo season finding stubborn Avavirgins to sacrifice upon the altar of steroidal and abused CGI?

I’m betting you didn’t have to sign a street marketing agreement with 20th Century Fox to get those special glasses. The issue is probably a bit more personal, and even cute, albeit perversely. My poor, sad friend: You want to paint Avatar as too Big ’n’ Important to ignore, because that’s what you were convinced of when you bought that fateful ticket and ferried yourself across the digitally-painted Rubicon. When you realized, amid the explosions and allegory, that this Big Importance was a promotional fiction, and that you would’ve been better off watching old worn-out Disney VHS tapes with good company and good beer, you panicked.

You couldn’t admit that you’d been had, not after this investment, this 180º, this surrender, because there was no way to rejoin the ever-thinning chorus of people murmuring “who cares.” Because you cared, God damn it.

Look, I’m sorry it happened to you. This thing sounded bruising and disappointing and dumb. I certainly didn’t expect you, of all people, to fall victim to it. One day, through arduous work, you will reclaim your dignity as a moviegoer. Just don’t expect me to shed mine so easy.

Miles Klee really isn’t going to see Avatar but he knows you’re just going to ask him about it again tomorrow.

You know I feel bad, because cats should be about the love. But holy God is this a cat fight. The first 24 seconds are just a good vocal warmup. Then it’s off and over the roofs and walls and up and down stairs and man these cats hate each other. Like most fights, it ends just the way it began: without much gained.

Happy people are more selfish and pay less attention to details than do those of us who know that life is an unrelenting slog of boredom, horror, and melancholy, says Science. This obverse of this assertion is looked at in much longer detail in a Times Magazine article on depression this weekend. It examines the idea that depression is an evolutionary strategy aimed at helping us better focus on things. And there is this, on the link between depression and creativity.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

It’s funny, I consider myself a fairly unhappy person. The self-loathing? Oh boy do I have it! The endless rumination? That’s the street where I live. The dark despondency that leads to crippling bouts of despair and terrible thoughts of self-destruction? Why do you think I drink so much? It ain’t for the taste! And yet: “a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style”? Really? Have you seen the crap I churn out? Some of it is barely comprehensible even to me. But self-centered and unable to pay attention to the small details? Why, yes, that does describe my personality fairly well. Who would have thought it? Turns out I’ve been happy all along!

I will delete the holy shit out of some movie reviews on this site for $400,000. Enquire within! Or best offer!

The number one thing I am pissed off about this month, right after NBC’s Olympics coverage, is the disappeared John Yoo emails, which could probably shed a lot of light on how the previous administration created policies to torture people. This is such an unbelievable scandal, both on the issue of torture but also of government accountability. Pretty much, as a nation, everything should come to a standstill until this is dealt with. This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Gary Grindler, Acting Deputy Attorney General, about the emails, and got total mumbling in response. This is like, pitchforks and subpoenas and prosecution time, people. There are extremely explicit rules about this kind of thing, and in light of the Bush administration email-disappearing shtick, in which everyone had to go to court over and over again simply to get what should have been carefully-conserved White House emails, was bad enough. But these are actual lawyers, at the actual Department of Justice, who have engaged in disappearing critical emails.

“He was two years [old] when the slavers captured him in 1982 and hauled him off to the little town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the far Canadian west. And there he met his fellow slaves, Nootka and Haida. Day after day in slave school they learned their tricks.”
-Alexander Cockburn “goes there” about the “killer whale” attacks and quotes Frederick Douglass along the way.

It is absolutely no fun out there, unless you’re a kid I guess, because kids, like, don’t feel weather the way that we feel weather I AM TOTALLY CONVINCED OF THIS. Right? When you were a kid all you needed was a snowsuit and a pair of Freezy Freakies and you were all set to stay outdoors for ten or so hours. Now? The two and a half Midtown blocks between my office and the subway might as well have been a day spent in Pine Barrens chasing a drunk Russian.

Okay but now I’m safe and sound at home and oh boy am I ever bored! And lonely. Because my life is empty and fairly meaningless. So I’m baking cookies! For my imaginary family and friends.

There are all sorts of ways to make chocolate chip cookies, which is neat if you’re into things like rising power (eggs + baking soda = is that a roll of quarters in your pocket or are you just etc.?) and also a nice trick to know about if you prefer one style of cookie over another. This recipe yields thin cookies that are crispy on the edges and chewy in the middle, a combination that makes me want to waltz around my apartment trilling, “You can never be too thin or too chewy!”

I never said I didn’t understand why I was all alone in life.

Melt a stick of butter and then let it cool. I have no qualms about sticking the melted butter in the fridge to speed things along, and though I’m SURE there’re baking purists out there clutching at their pearls over this admission, you should feel free to do the same.

Measure 1/3 of a cup of white sugar and 1/2 a cup of brown sugar into a mixing bowl. Hum a few bars of Ebony and Ivory if you want to! Stir the melted butter in, then add a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla and 3 tablespoons of water.

Next stir in 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt, 3/4 teaspoon baking soda and 1 cup of flour. Not so hard right? And there’s only one more thing to do! Mix in 1 cup of chocolate chips (or hell, any kind of chips! Butterscotch? Toffee brickle? Can you tell I have a type?)

Bake at 350° for 14 minutes (unless your oven burns hot like mine, in which case maybe 12 minutes would do? Sorry little batch that went on the bottom rack!) Et voila! Snow day cookies.

Now I’m going to go feed my pain and maybe talk to the walls.

Jolie Kerr wants to know if anyone would like to come over?