Jessica Dube Loves Scott Moir

A few years ago I read The Big Short, a successful quasi-comic story centering on the precarious (as it turned out) housing bubble of the mid-0s. What stayed with me was learning that terms for financial products are intentionally obscure. The name of an investment term is not going to tell you what it means - it may mean the opposite or have no relation to the name.

There may be a facile, quasi-legitimate explanation for this custom but obviously the natural supposition is to assume banks and investment companies want a barrier between their understanding and the client's ability to understand what's being done with their money.

Here an aggrieved Papadakis & Cizeron fan on youtube weighs in on the results at Europeans:

Word salad matching the floaty. metronomic incoherence of Papadakis & Cizeron's out of sync, lowered center of gravity, all hands on deck, two-footed mish mash of skating skills.

Confident fans of this stripe still exist because while figure skating has rules, codes, definitions, and criteria, not only have these been dumbed down and not only has wiggle room been built in and not only are what rules and criteria still exist often ignored in the scores, but the figure skating markets itself as performance, not sport, and its participants as emotional and theatrical performers, not athletes.

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Checked in on Virtue and Moir and could only find lots of stuff like this:



and this



Here a glossy Tessa once again delivers the same painfully anodyne point she's been recycling for a decade. The importance of using her "voice" to empower (retire that word! Retire that fucking word!) and inspire girls. Cautioning how the sport puts so much emphasis on aesthetics. Tessa, the greatest ice dancer of all time, has had a post-Olympic career with an explicit and implicit focus on how beautiful she is no matter what's coming out of her mouth. Well, beautiful AND adorable because one wants to be accessible. relatable. I wonder if when she delivers copy like this for the hundred millionth time if she ever wants to bash her own head in. Our takeaway here is she wants girls to know it's important for even female athletes to be fit. Good Christ. Two Olympic golds and that's what she's got for us.

Needless to say she's embodying a classic contradiction between words, the format in which they're conveyed, and an immaculately enhanced appearance (in what is already a conventionally beautiful woman).

Although she's speaking softly and earnestly, the overall message is more this (From Crazy Ex Girlfriend):