I totally missed this

Hot stuff

Even though I mentioned the Mr. D episode in an earlier post, I only halfheartedly tried to look up to see if she was actually Scott's first partner (whose name I had forgotten) or a pretty ok sitcom actress - certainly better than either Virtue or Moir. I decided she must be an actress playing a sad sack/whipping post character on Mr. D, and moved on (is she that as well? I know nothing about Mr. D).

ETA am informed below that the childhood partner on Mr. D was played by an actress (and the character name is not Jackie Mascarin), so it's just extra fun for all.

I don't review the comments as much as I should (which I should change) as I'm trying to place hold this blog until ice dance wakes up to something other than Papadakis & Cizeron's march to 5 World titles and their already-awarded 2022 Olympic gold. Clearly, stuff slips through the cracks as the blog lens gets wider and more general instead of gathering up the details - to mix metaphors.

So I missed the fun in the blog comments (which are very funny, and my apologies for having not seen them when they first landed) and remained in the dark. I had no idea Mascarin was the actual ex partner and this was a new thing they were doing until I recently plugged Virtue and Moir into a search engine and landed in tumblr:

This account has Lots and LOTS OF FEELINGS ABOUT FANS!!
HAVING FEELINGS!!! STOP!!

I've edited out the account name for obvious reasons.

That sort of post makes me cringe, but obviously VM find this stuff entertaining.

Takeaways. They missed trolling? They're going for it in 2022? The latter terrifies me. But they're just not going away. Is their fame so ephemeral that if they dial this shit back their Q rating and earning power takes a dive? WTF are the elements in the algorithm that spat this thing out? Can't they hawk grocery delivery services, fawn over each other, smirk about partnerships, can't Tessa pull diner imagry she got from some movie* where the people are old, the lighting is misty, they share hot chocolate and get wistful about that time they were young and never got together and now never will but what a time it was - if they retired? Aren't those things retired Olympic champions can do? So why aren't they retiring? I could do mental backflips and think they're not retiring just so they can have an excuse to be cowards and not widen their own lens, but that's what I thought last time, and then they announced.

How come they mix it up with every new program (except their show programs) but don't mix this up? Wait, the parenthetical just answered the question.

In hindsight, the spot is a lot cuter without the 
multiple overlays of "See everything we just did there?!!!
In real life things are the opposite but then it flips back again
and then again!"

I'm kind of creeped out by this configuration. I know why - I think it's because most people had only known he had a previous partner when he and she were both eight and then it was radio silence (she wasn't even dragged in to weigh in in all the years Virtue and Moir competed and their "bio" was served up relentlessly. Nothing that got around, anyway.). Her showing up this late in the game in this capacity is kind of cooties-inducing no matter what retroactive narrative gets stitched together. Ew. But then again:

The W Network, 2014. Tessa & Scott.
Want some "Ew"? Check it out. Still available
on video-sharing and streaming
service websites. And reviewed on this blog.

Yes, with Tessa's 30th birthday just around the corner I was anticipating that the icky days were behind us, but that was just a dream. And then again, a sort of knee-jerk bad taste has often been their metier. Their first sham flaunted plenty of partner-swapping and a kind of smarmy unsavoriness (and also voyeurism), the second started off benignly enough but got ambitious and then offensive (review the reality show if the ways it did so are lost in the mists of time), the third was pretty benign with Tessa showing up routinely as the bookend on (our) left, and this one is like Huh? and Yucky had a baby.

***

So now of course I'm checking out the comments I've missed and right off I see a transcript of commentators trashing P/C's inflated points. Thank you for that. But, it's also scary, because if people are allowed to question the judging instead of talking about PC's ephemeral magic, the door might be creaking open (again) and I just don't want VM to skate through it. I was positive they had the green light last time, and look what nearly happened.

*or Tessa pulled it from somebody's online fan fiction. She's wicked clever, right? Would not surprise as that's where the W Network's "Tessa and Scott" stole its entire script. I'm sure there's a Dr. Zhivago-esque scenario somewhere, only in London and it's a diner, and Old Scott sees Golden Ager Tessa across the street going into a shop, does a double take, rushes out, and gets hit by a car. Life is poignant. The diner schtick, for me, evokes Tessa's tweet of some time past sharing a wisdom-fueled flight she experienced with her seatmate, a man named John who was just the right amount of old (77). If his name had been Larry we'd have never heard about it.

I don't like you, Madison Hubbell

Happy Halloween

I don't know these people, but it's a bunch of
biathletes dressed up as figure skaters for Halloween.

Now that ice dancing has been cleared of many high level competitors, Hubbell & Donohoe have easily qualified for the Grand Prix final, where they will be defeated by Papadakis & Cizeron, who have yet to make their Grand Prix debut.

I still hold a grudge against Madison Hubbell from last year, where she employed her outspoken personality to perpetuate the kind of narrative bullshit that we can't get enough of in ice dance. To refresh:

Tessa and Scott are kind of that — for me, at least, they’re the quintessential Old Hollywood team. Like, they just…no matter what music you give them or what choreography, they find their place inside of it. I think that they knew their strengths and they knew their weaknesses and seeing them train, they don’t compare themselves, so it lets them be 100% committed to whatever it is they choose to do. And that’s where you see, for me… You know, they get the tens and they get all the +3s. And we see them compete, you know — they’ve had a lot of little bobbles, little mistakes this season in their performances. They don’t always skate perfect, but they make you believe that it’s perfect because they’re so committed to each other, to their performance, and they just get lost in their own little world.

Oh fuck you again, Hubbell.

The sour grapes in figure skating are enough to choke on. Dear God the resentment when somebody or a couple of somebodies are extraordinary AND consistently win. Hell, the resentment persists even when the best skaters with the best skate of the competition are blatantly prevented from winning. Can we please not get some gold hardware and serious respect for the amazing stuff thrown down by the lesser skaters and teams over here instead? Let's have some fairness!

I went looking for Hubbell's quote before starting this post and found it on a webpage -JudgingPrivilege wordpress - I hadn't read before. It reads like something a regular participant or two on this blog may have created. Here's Hubbell re Gabby and Guillaume:

For Gabriella and Guillaume, I think that they’ve always had, even when they were younger and less successful, they had a power, a glide and, you know, sometimes in practice… We actually trained for a little while with them in Detroit when they came, visited Pasquale [Camerlengo] in our first season together [2011-12], and they were a team that were a little bit of a mess, made a lot of mistakes, but those moments that they were really skating together, you could tell they had just this special chemistry, a glide…

Like, for me they are the kind of skating that I want to see in ice dance. It’s power but it’s also elegant. Their lines are just gorgeous and they’ve put a lot of work in the last four years of being here in Montreal on the precision and what it takes to not lose points and not make mistakes, and that’s really the only thing they needed to become the powerhouse that they are, because naturally they have just such beautiful lines. They’re artists in the way that they represent music and feeling and so I think that’s their quality.


I was going to call up some images of P&C's magnificent lines* but how often can you do that? It doesn't matter.

The Judging Privilege blog calls her out.

Excerpts:

When the quotes were condensed and tweeted by Figure Skaters Online, they got to the heart of the matter: Hubbell holds up Papadakis and Cizeron as a sort of Platonic ideal of ice dance, while Virtue and Moir make mistakes, but let you forget about them.

It is also a curious juxtaposition to create — Papadakis and Cizeron as a team who have ceased to make mistakes, Virtue and Moir as a team who do — when the French have logged disruptive falls at two of this season’s events.

Hubbell also stressed on the same call that they are keenly aware that none of the three top U.S. teams have any real edge over the other, nor can they overlook the threats of many other international teams ranked on par.

But something has made them feel similar caution is not in order where Virtue and Moir are concerned.

Judging Privilege surmises this something was Hubbell & Donohue's cozy relationship with notably non-partisan US Judge Sharon Rogers and her frequent scoring of Virtue and Moir as on par with Hubbell & Donohoe.

So in these quotes from last season, Maddie is not being candid. She's politicking.

She will be much happier always coming in second to Papadakis & Cizeron than third behind Virtue & Moir and Papadakis & Cizeron. She can't possibly kid herself that they have a shot no matter how the skating goes down. They're already better than Papadakis & Cizeron and yet must pretend Papadakis & Cizeron's abilities are something to which they can only aspire.

Here's Hubbell & Donohue's free dance at Skate Canada. I don't think it represents their best. I thought there were a lot of little bobbles, as it were, too much sliding and scampering, and many small slips and moments out of sync. And they seemed somewhat gassed in the back half of the program.



I think Hubbell's attitude also resides in the Montreal situation. I suspect and continue to suspect that while H&D and P&C were actually coached by and part of the supposedly close-knit crew at Gadbois, Virtue and Moir were pretending for public consumption only - something with which Virtue and Moir are thoroughly experienced.  I suspect Virtue and Moir had their own coaching, own training ice somewhere else, their own choreography, and behaved as if they needed resources far beyond what was available at Gadbois - and indeed they did need resources far beyond what was available at Gadbois and they got them. As skaters they are far beyond Gadbois and everybody there.

I suspect that what Virtue & Moir did was considered elitism, which I've come to understand is a big no no in elite sports like ice dance. As is truly elite level performance. Be truly elite, you will piss people off.


*sarcasm.

Tension in Paradise

Belated remarks:

Papadakis & Cizeron haven't confirmed their music, but this interview in May* - written by someone in the style of a mythologizing syncophant - had lots of pre-emptive sour grapes:

Gabriella: Yeah, we like to skate very fast, sometimes not so much into the details, but more…)

Yeah, I feel you Gabriella. And actually, many of your fans believe ice dance should not be defined and quantified. I think a divinity is meant to descend and anoint Papadakis Cizeron with gold upon the conclusion of their free skate, a la Bernie Sanders' bird.

Both P&C and some of their fans were dragged mercilessly on the interview thread, deservedly, so that's some sort of progress. Maybe some day a plurality of fans on skating forums will decide that real skating skills and rhythm should determine a competition's outcome, versus program composition / music selection, and I'll faint dead away.

Gabriella: I’m not a big fan of Latin for skating. I love Latin dances, I love watching Latin dances, on the floor. But on the ice… I think it’s such a different dynamic in the body that cannot really be translated on the ice, so it’s always gonna look kind of… cheap…

Guillaume: Cliché…

Understood. They can't do it, so it's not worth doing. More ice dancers than this blog can name check have ably translated Latin dance to the ice.

Gabriella: Cheap and cliché, Latin dances on the ice. Plus, there are no much possible different choices for themes and musics. Latin music always kind of sounds the same for me, with the same kind of instruments, and rhythms and… Not like this season – you could’ve had the 20ties, the 30ties, the 40ties, the 60ties, rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, there was so many difference choices you could have! Latin music? Iiiih, not so many! [she makes a squeaking sound, and then starts laughing]. So it’s hard to be original on these things.

That's a whole lot of ignorance in one paragraph.

Guillaume: The thing about the free dance is that you get to really ice dance, and not dance on the ice. You know what I mean? And the short dance is more about dancing on the ice. All those ballroom positions don’t really fit to the ice, to the material that we have. I think it’s always gonna be a struggle, because we are ice dancers, we’re not ballroom dancers.

And for me the short dance kind of feels like Dancing with the stars. You pick skaters, and you try to make them ballroom dancers, but it’s never gonna… Like if you wanna see Latin dance, go watch a ballroom… ball, you know? [laughing] So I think it always kind of looks cheap.

And that's a whole lot of mumbo jumbo bullshit. That's freedom defined as liberation from any sort of technical standard, when anyone with a clue understands technique facilitates freedom. What does he think his particular skating discipline is about if not translating dance to the ice? Well, we all know. Skating whatever the fuck, however the fuck. He's absurd.

Anyway, it was the first time I have seen fans suggesting that P&C are full of themselves. In some respects, why shouldn't they be. They know it's not what their blades are doing that gets them on the podium, so they must have decided it's legit mystical, which is perfectly ok for a sanctioned Olympic sport.

There's a lot in the article about how movement in the ranks is more possible now, without ever mentioning the superior skating skills upon which rapid upward movement is meant to be based. It's all a big mystery, per P&C and the interviewer. The interviewer attempts to say they are admired by other skaters, but P&C mostly report how they've received messages from other skaters saying something like, "Shit, if you two can be world champions without anything in your skating or previous history suggesting it, it gives me and my partner hope! Maybe we, too, can be random but fortunate pawns in a double (Olympic) cycle, multiple-Fed-engineered, quid pro quo!"

Other stuff:

Remember this? Kind of a twist lift
at the end of Virtue & Moir's Olympic OD.
20 minutes before performing the OD 
at Worlds 2010, the vaporous figure 
skating grapevine somehow conveyed 
that this same maneuver might be illegal 
to perform at Worlds. Due to to it being 
possibly a kind of twist lift.

I remember Scott complaining about how he and Tessa try to push the envelope, but get pushback. I think he should have complained instead that he's in a recognized ISU discipline, yet a maneuver they executed at the Olympics mysteriously became possibly illegal for Worlds, but, you know, up to you. That's not how any legit sport functions.

Here it is, back. 
Say nothing else about Virtue and Moir, they like the long game. 
Astrologically speaking, they may be Taurus (Tessa)
and Virgo (Scott), but as a team it's pure Scorpio.

Iliushechina Moscovitch - quad sal at the Cricket Club.
Kirsten Moore-Towers is gnashing her teeth.

Moore-Towers wants to do a quad "yesterday." Maybe the above video was this team's only decent attempt in many tries, who knows, but it's a much better quality throw than Duhamel Radford's. They don't stop skating for half the rink before launch, it's an actual throw, not an assisted jump, and, while Lubov lands with a deep knee bend, it's not a crouch. Her carriage is open, and there's run of blade on her landing. Dylan's form at take-off is a mess - off the ice, lurching forward, and a mule kick, but the judges never seem to care what the guy does. Michael Marinaro certainly isn't going to show him up.

Even if Iliushechkina blows a jump, it didn't stop Sui Han from becoming world champions last season. Often as not, pairs results are determined by which error-strewn performance manages to grind out the most points.

Finally, Bryce Davison got married in June, an event I was skeptical would ever take place. Every photo I'd seen of the happy couple seemed awkward, IMO, and lacking conviction. There was a reserve, a stiffness. Then I read that his dearly beloved was a former skater, and I found this:

Michelle Moore prior to taking the ice for Canada in 2009.

That's one of the cutest things ever, and explains a lot.

BTW, her skating skills are excellent. Just not a strong jumper. Congratulations Bryce Davison.

P.S. Excerpt from Weaver & Poje's Beverly Smith interview:

They were gleeful when the International Skating Union announced that the rhythm in the short dance for Olympic season would be Latin. “We LOVE Latin,” Weaver said. “We love the dancing in the clubs. We loved our Latin program from 2011 to 2012. It’s one of our favourite genres and styles. So without repeating ourselves, we wanted to find a way to still be exciting and entertaining.”

*Excerpted on Goldenskate.com

Soft knees and bent knees are not synonymous. A "soft knee" is a responsive leg.

I googled "figure skating and soft knees" to get a better handle on why soft knees are important in quality figure skating. Other than when landing jumps. (Even then, getting your knee so bent your butt is practically on the ice, a la Megan Duhamel's quad throw landings, is not ideal.)* Ben Agosto spent his Grand Prix Final commentary time swooning over Papadakis & Cizeron's "soft knees."

Papadakis & Cizeron skate with their knees continually bent. Their movements are very bendy and fluttery. However, if one assumes a soft knee is an indicator of excellent stroking and superior skating skills, then why aren't P/C's soft knees getting the job done?

P&C's edges are shallow, they sometimes wobble and often lack unison. Despite meeting level requirements, their programs lack the complexity and difficulty of other ice dancers' programs. They can't extend their free legs to save their lives unless their working knees get low, and their lines seldom match. Their lifts, as with Davis White's lifts, have a widely distributed center of gravity and lots of redundancy. In sum, Papadakis & Cizeron's much praised soft knees appear to be considered an achievement unto themselves. But "soft knees" are only important insofar as they enable the powerful, stable stroking that should undergird the execution of elite choreography.

So, first, my google search produced a short post from a recreational figure skater who, when she began skating, used bent knees in hopes it wouldn't hurt as much when she fell. She had "soft knees" before she could really move on the ice. It looked nice, and she was praised, but she was not initially a strong skater.

Then I found this: The Ice Doesn't Care: Soft Knees.

Like this author, I know how important the leg is in horseback riding - for example, my legs naturally turn out a bit, and it is real work to keep my inner legs lying flat against the horse's side (people who are naturally bow-legged have a big advantage here). This blogger compares the soft knees important to staying in contact with your mount with the soft knees necessary to good figure skating. Applying these principles to Papadakis & Cizeron, we see the important stuff, the skating stuff, is missing.

The Ice Doesn't Care
Figure Skating for Adults.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Soft Knees
There's two things that horse back riding and skating have in common: soft knees and independence of upper and lower body.So, let's tackle 'soft knees' first.I did a lot of research on this, and all I could find were a couple of comments that 'soft knees means bent knees'.Mmmmm, no.Well, anyway, not to me.My experience has been in both riding and skating that a 'soft knee' is what I'll call a 'responsive leg'. The casual observer sees the knee bend and how it flexes. That's the obvious part. But really, I believe what's going on is much more complex.From my riding days, I learned that 'soft knees' involved the muscles of the lower back and abdomen, flexibility and strength in the hips and knees, and controlled movement of the ankle. All this has to be balanced and coordinated, otherwise you pull on the horse's mouth as your leg will get in the wrong position and throw off your balance.
Skating's very similar. You have to control the leg relative to the upper body, and to do that you need to get over the right part of the blade and that takes ever single joint below the waist. And as you move up and down, every single joint has to respond together. This is why I think defining 'soft knees' as 'bent knees' is inadequate. That's what the observer sees, but that's only the tip of the iceberg abot what's going on.
As I'm now in my 60's, I'm okay with the muscles of the back and core, the ankle bend and the hip flexion. However, my knee bend is CRAP!Still, I'd like to chime in with my amateur opinion, that 'soft knees' is something that ought to be banned from a coach's vocabulary. It's much more complex, especially in skating. I'm fortunate that my riding background is so extensive and strong, and Coach Cruella is good at getting everything coordinated both mentally and physically.

I propose that Papadakis/Cizeron have tight/weak hips, and lack strength and flexibility there and in their spines. Their bent knees are not coordinated with and moving responsively with the rest of their bodies (including, bizarrely, their ankles and feet).

*I have watched skating video of Russian 1999 World Champion Maria Butyrskaya, and her knees are as stiff and brittle as matchsticks. Observing her rigid progress across the ice, it's understandable that one would believe soft knees = bent knees. However, as the "Ice Doesn't Care" notes above, a so-called "soft knee" is just as much about the hips and the spine. We can see that Butyrskaya's hips are also tight, as is her back.

April

And screwed you out of a gold medal in Sochi. But ok, hang Marina Zoueva out to dry instead. She controls the entire ISU. What could Dore have done to set up Sochi. Am crying over Dore's passing sort of the way I did when Anton Scalia died. (Yes, I've bought my ticket to hell myself for that.)

I hope Virtue and Moir locked things up solidly with Dr. Faust before announcing their comeback. Although you'd think they'd be tapped out of things to bargain with at this point.

I see where Charlie White already expressed awe over Papadakis Cizeron, so next season will be fun.

Good to see Volozozhar Trankov smiling
despite Worlds 2016. I still have
nightmares.

The Artist Known as Hanyu.
I get what he's doing, but in terms of packaging,
Method Skating doesn't do it for me.

He's a skating version of The Red Shoes.
Plot Summary _ The Red Shoes movie

I watched a couple of Skating Lesson interviews with David Wilson. For years, in my eyes, David Wilson was just the guy who got paid to "choreograph" the same program year after year for Dube Davison. Actually, I often wondered if his last Dube Davison paycheck was 2008's Blowers Daughter, and for the rest of DD's career Annie Barabie just picked different music to skate it to. And then I saw his choreography for Yuna Kim's shows, when she did shows, and thought - that sure beats working. Fly around the world and demonstrate to champion skaters how to point to the ceiling in between arm rolls. Subsequently, I've become more familiar with his body of work, and I understand strongly how versatile and musical he is. However, in his Skating Lesson conversation, he mentioned that when Yuna won Worlds in 2013, choreographed by her new training team (no Canadians) - her "face" was missing (IOW, she was deadpan, and not facially expressive).  I don't give a fuck if the face was missing. I hate the pretense that that should matter. If the damn face matters, put it in the rulebook. Otherwise, quit this shit.

Catching up with Jessica Dube:

There was a point after her stint on The Navigator of the Seas where it appeared Jessica had not been signed by another cruise ship, and was all set to work at a gym. Happily, Liberty of the Seas has secured her services, so she's off for another six months as pretty much the highest ranking figure skater ever on the cruise ship circuit - I think most of them never competed internationally, and the previously highest ranked skaters got on the podium once at Nationals.

Abandoned again.
My heart goes out to her disillusioned dog.
He's aged ten years - in people years.

After three fake girlfriends, finally a genuine love connection.

What they should have done from the beginning, and what they've been semi-flirting with since the arrival of Baby Moir V.3, is just be all goes without saying about it. Take the question out of the interviews, and that's it. Every single fan will go along. VM could have had it exactly their own way from day 1. They chose to troll. They chose to bait and switch. They chose to gaslight. Let's see how grown-up they are in 2016-2017.

FEET ONLY from Canadablue

I'm trying to get a new banner up, but the last few images are stumping me at the moment.

This "feet only" post is brought to you by this instagram of Tessa:

I know there's a method to Tessa's instagram aesthetic (pregnancy), but what she does with her face on instagram, not only in this image, but in previous images, is getting a little:

Is she gonna start shooting botox into her face by 30? Stuff implants into her cheeks? She seems to be a fan of the look.The profiles and full faces she's instagramming don't even look like her.

If we didn't already know that Tessa herself doesn't believe a word that comes out of her mouth, or posted on her instagram:

Sure honey. Do as I say, and all that. She'll still be coming out with sound bites like that one when she starts injecting her face and lips. She'll be one of those who thinks the work is subtle. To perfectionist Tessa, "imperfection" = any physical sign that you're a human being and not a store mannequin.

And finally:

Ha ha

Skating after the jump:

Reality-based figure skating from canadablue

This skating-centric post is brought to you by more of Tessa Virtue's reality-based instagram output, and her mirror image:

It wasn't a boob day that day. Not to mention, Tessa's photoshop genie decided to slice off the entire left side of her face except for her left eye. Interesting aesthetic choice. The left of her neck also doesn't work with the right side of her neck (image left and image right).

Whoever does these "right half of the image is differently aspected than the left" jobs for Tessa got sloppy with the skirt of the dress. Follow the skirt line on the left of the image up to her hand (the heel of her right hand). That line isn't going to bend behind her, but continue up. They cut it out above her hand/wrist (well, obviously, and as well as liquifying her waist and disappearing the boobs). Not to mention, if her hand is resting on her right hip, that is some set of wide hips compared to that waist and tiny boned upper body - guess Tessa is now an extreme hour glass shape when she's not a hipless wraith.

They also messed up the skirt line in the lower right. I recognize that bend at the bottom (bottom right of the image), because, when experimenting with photoshop/liquify myself, and also on freeware, that weird bend happens all the time when I'm hasty with the radius setting. Also, obviously the edge of the wall on the right is curving inward like nobody's business, but her arm and shoulder conceal the full exent of its inward trajectory. But good job with the extremely low resolution and matching Tessa's skin tone exactly to the wood tone.

Finally, besides the obvious differences between Tessa foreground and Tessa in the mirror, it's just interesting that Tessa in the foreground has skin that's practically synthetic, while the Tessa in the mirror has a back with more realistic skin texture despite being much further away.

This is going to be a very video heavy post with canadablue's annotated ice dance comparisons, but including canadablue's "feet only" videos. I LOVE feet only.

I will add gifs, I THINK, but want to get the post out first and see if having this many video embeds creates any issues.

Before getting started, and thinking that Tanith Belbin this week decided that Paul Islam lack skating skills and you can tell because Mitch yanks and pulls her through the step sequences, and how that started me considering just how ugly, in your face obnoxious, thuggish, asshole and foul the people around this sport intend to become, and how some good skaters are embracing the New Reality (not to be confused with "reality), I looked up some proverbs about lying, and found these, some of which I've read before, and some of which I think are outmoded and/or simply don't apply to the world of skating:

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. ~Mark Twain".

I believe he's saying if you lie, you have to keep track in order to keep your story consistent. We know that with Scott and Tessa, this doesn't matter. Whatever they said last is the truth. Just delete whatever they said the time before that.

"Who lies for you will lie against you. ~Bosnian Proverb"

Oh, well this one is already happening, but not on the internet. (I'm not counting fan gossip and fan lying.)

"No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. ~Abraham Lincoln"

You don't need a good memory to be a successful liar. You don't even need to lie successfully (i.e., have people believe you). You just have to not acknowledge that you're lying and have evidence that you're lying ignored.

"Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world. ~Thomas Carlyle"

No, it's because people suck that Scott and Tessa have to lie. They're very protective.

"A half truth is a whole lie. ~Yiddish Proverb"

I don't think they agree. It's half and half. And shouldn't they get some credit for the true bits?

"Every lie is two lies — the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it. ~Robert Brault.

Eh, I don't know how many lies people tell include lying to "ourselves". I think what people tell themselves is the truth. "It's easier." "It's more convenient." "Too much trouble to change the story now."

I'm going to start off with the feet only of Papadakis & Cizeron. Thank you canadablue



This is the short dance, where they were beaten by the Shibs. Please remember skating is meant to be scored to the weakest link.

Then PI:



The Shibs:


The Shibs: when she's got skaters whose claim to distinction is, you know, actual SKATING, Marina's choreography kicks ass. This is a fantastic, exhilerating program.