are you sick and tired of the same old extreme sports? looking for a new challenge? maybe extreme ironing is for you. or tampon bowling, perhaps?

if not, well, then maybe you should just become a hard-core sports spectator. i know this olympics has brought that out in me. last night steve and i were cheering for the hamm twins like we'd been men's gymnastics fans all along. of course, the cheesy personal stories that NBC pulls out to create drama are a big part of it. they drive steve crazy! instead of telling you what's going on in the events (like what all of the crazy gymnastics stunts are called) they tell you over and over again how close the hamm twins are, and how they used to do jumps and flips around the family barn in wisconsin. steve's definitely more ticked off than i am about the coverage. i don't mind the personal stories (i guess it's the little old woman in me that likes the cheesy drama) but i do agree that it would be nice to actually learn about the sports a bit more.

here's a rant from TVGuide.com's Rochell Thomas, who sounds as irritated as Steve:
Let's hear it for our boys winning the silver! Blaine Wilson and the Hamm twins (especially Morgan) know they carried that team. But if Al Trautwig keeps talking over all the good parts during tomorrow's women's team finals, somebody's going to have to stop me from looking up his home address. For real. He was working my last nerve with his pretentious comments tonight. Gymnastics is my favorite Olympic sport and he was ruining it. Sometimes I turned just to get away from him. I mean, seriously. He must have stayed up writing that crap. After a while I had to start jotting them down. They were that over-the-top.
Among the Trautwig lines I love to hate:

"The Romanian men are knocking on the door of greatness that has eluded them...."

"He knows that this is the routine that defines who he is as an Olympian."

"He's got to be all about redemption for what went wrong."

"We are at the point where these steps are dream killers."

argh!!!!!!