Happy kitschmas

In my last post, the blog Follow The Yellow Brick Road was mentioned in passing; sticking to the theme, today I'm going to see The Wizard Of Oz on the big screen. (The Cornerhouse recently invited Twitterers to vote on their favourite festive films; if you were reading W&F last year, you'll already know this was my choice - and it just so happens to have been scheduled for my birthday!) The print has been digitally remastered and is apparently in all its full three-strip Technicolor glory; one of my favourite devices in the movie is the variation between the black and white dustbowl Kansas reality and the land of wonder and fantasy over the rainbow represented in full saturated colour (a fairly recent innovation in 1939 after the expensive process fell out of favour during the Great Depression which immediately followed its invention). I may leave the ruby slippers at home given the snow, but may all your White Christmas dreams come true, lovely readers... see you soon!

Ice magic

It would be rude not to mention the Winter Olympics, wouldn't it? Apart from anything else, it has raised the serious issue that I don't know what the term is to describe someone or something from Vancouver: Vancouvian? Vancouverian? Vancouverite? Canadian? I looked up "Vancouver" and "adjective" online and was simply informed that Adjective are a post-punk musical combo from Vancouver. I pursued this line of investigation no further.

Whatever. We're here to talk about figure skating. Figure skating is a secret love of mine, if only one that shows up every four years when the Winter Olympics are in town. You can't deny the glamour of it: all those sparkly skintight rigouts (the men), the blood red talons and American tan tights (the women), the baited breath, the adoration, the furs, the flowers, the fabulous Clare Balding.

So there was I, watching the "free" skating (just like the Clipart image above), when I began to notice how intriguing the crazy names are for all the figure-skating techniques the artistes stack their performance points up with. Triple toe loop, twin triple twist, double axel, salad bowl (well, I may have misheard that last one)... The list goes on, and everything in the list, it turns out, is classified into sub-lists. I am going to be swotting up here, where I may have also inadvertently stumbled across a new true love: synchronized skating. Awesome.