I'm happy for Sinitsina & Katsalapov even though this program is nothing Virtue and Moir couldn't have pulled off in their sleep in 2014.

They've overcome a lot. I haven't watched them in a long long time. My last memory was a terrifying program where he was reckless and inconsiderate and she could barely keep out of his way to do her bit, so almost a decade ago now. The dynamic here is night and day from then.

 

 

I like Hubble & Donohue's program better - I think. Needs more speed or at least the appearance of speed - more sustained energy coming out of elements (which helps with the appearance of if not actual speed). Her edge comes off at the very end of the final twizzle rotation and she timed the step out with where it would be anyway - I looked twice because I thought there was a small interruption of flow. 

I don't think Papadakis & Cizeron will win gold in 2022. I think it will be Sinitsine Katsalapov, these two, and Papadakis & Cizeron bronze. The sport has made  P&C's deficiencies into features, so it's difficult for them to lose unless they visibly, to the eyes of a civilian, screw up, but that's what I'm actually expecting.

Hot mess.

This one. This is the short program. Including because I've been following her since the blog began.

Back in the day when all things Jessica Dube drove me mental, I saw Kirsten Moore-Towers as her antithesis and antidote. Now she's become her. Comes onto the ice looking like someone hurt her feelings, skates without commitment, hedges every move, can't even keep her free leg up steady in the standing split part of the pairs spin. The lift was almost as labored as 2016 KMT + M. 

Like Dube, she probably has more athletic and skating talent in her pinky finger than - I'll use Meghan Duhamel as the obvious example - but that mental maturity game is weak. She's avoiding herself like crazy. This is no shade to Duhamel.

No Shit

 From FSUniverse:

I have to quote as the image wasn't centering in the blog post:

I think she's realizes that this is her peak for earnings and building her brand and that's really what's she's putting her focus on and you can tell how hard she works at it (her schedule looks exhausting). My only issue with her over the last couple of years is as as much I love her, I think she and I have different ideas on empowering women but I think that's a whole separate and complicated discussion. I too had to unfollow her because during this ********* my tolerance for instagram "shilling" is at all time low when I'm stuck in another lockdown (Toronto) and have so many people struggling here right now. I think it's natural that she loses some of skating fanbase but gains a different fanbase to replace them.

One thing Tessa has always had as a competitor is courage. It's a shame she has none in her personal life. The need to be right is one of the most toxic personality traits someone can possess.

Terms of Engagement

I don't know why I've become more squeamish with time instead of more jaded but I'm not listening to above referenced podcast. Scott is 33 years old. Late this summer (and this summer apparently is not as likely for his "wedding" as the following summer) he will be 34. He doesn't seem pressed. 

His eldest will be going on eleven.

For about 14 years or so Scott and Tessa have had a cycle of fake relationships - Scott more than Tessa. But Scott is approaching his mid-thirties and Tessa is right behind him. Scott's been in a holding pattern with his latest ever since he announced she was a "fiancee'" in an incredibly plausible stunt executed in front of a hometown crowd all of whom knew he was lying. 

When part of your image is small town Canadian and you are most emphatically - don't you ever think differently - absolutely the straightest guy for miles, you are gonna have to get yourself married. Scott's getting a little into the old maid, Waity Katy territory now (not that I thought Waity Katy ever made sense/was fair vis a vis Kate Middleton). Even his charming fiancee', a year or so his senior, has a first marriage under her belt, so at least she got her feet wet. As their home town Hall of Fame gambit illustrated, the time for contractual girlfriend relationships has past. I don't think he can be rotating different fake fiancees in and out of his social media as he did fake girlfriends so I'm curious where they think the drop dead line is and what's next. At some point while he's still on the fresher side of 35 he has to pull the trigger in one direction or the other. Those directions seem to be bluster on through with the fake or cut the shit. Naturally their every instinct would be Option 1, but I see pitfalls. 

What I really want is the whole nine yards - fake wedding, fake marriage, and then fake kids. Although this prospect lines up perfectly with the characteristic Moir/Virtue level of taste, judgment and decency, I feel the logistics are tricky. Look at Scott buying himself an additional year and a half before he has to think about it.

The past few - more than a few - years have demonstrated we don't have to worry about the entertainment media, whose capacity for complicity is infinite.

Scott on what I think is a morning radio show. He's asked about his best Canadian memory and unleashes a classic Scott Moir verklempt:

Ah well I mean ... don't get me emotional here on a Friday morning. Umm, Tessa and I were so blessed to be able to represent this country and to and uh any time I can think about taking her hand and skating to center ice ... it's just - now that we've had a little bit of distance looking back we realize how fortunate we really were... my favorite memory will always be uh the flag in her hand and one of her hands in mine and my hand on her shoulder and walking into the opening ceremonies of 2018 and looking back and seeing our teammates and uh - much like this campaign, knowing what this campaign and Canada represents.*

Very sweet, though the promotional pivot at the end is so on the nose it looks too much like Scott really thought he did something. I wonder if Scott has hit the stage of his public life where he's imitating his greatest hits. Just turns it on. With the added embellishment in this instance of laying it on with the accent so thick he sounds like a refugee from Fargo. That's not even Canadian..

*I'm not good visualizing three dimensions while reading in two. But Scott's holding hands with Tessa and another one of his hands is on her shoulder seems awkward.

P.S. rather than tacking on another comment just putting this P.S.

The Moirs are parochial and have a high opinion of themselves. Who you are is shown in action and the tactics during Scott and Tessa's decade and a half of lies have shown a malicious, mocking and self-satisfied stripe. There's now a Gadbois outpost stocked with Moirs and a prospective Ilderton training center. Are these people going to leave themselves on the back foot at this time? "Yeah, we scammed, lied and mocked you! Go ahead and judge us!"

I don't expect the Gadbois outpost to last that long but while it does there is no way Scott and Tessa admit anything. They probably won't admit anything on a matter of principle, but definitely not while the Moirs are up-status-ing their training careers.

Come se dice in English? Happy Ano Nuevo!

The Hilaria Baldwin expose (The Streisand Effect) is lots of fun, but it's worth mentioning the details have been out there for a long time. Her former classmates have been fact checking her actual background on different forums for years. She apparently competed around Boston in Latin Dance competitions on school breaks (not soaking up Spanish authenticity in upscale, expat-dense Mallorca, where her parents didn't relocate until 2011.). People who knew her pre-NYC knew her as Hillary Hayward Thomas and her parents as affluent Boston professionals. Never knew her to employ a wobbly Spanish accent that doesn't in the least sound Mallorqui or Catalan.

Alec Baldwin waxed creepily white-knighish in her defense on his own social media but himself has been hyping the "my wife is from Spain" meme for years in interviews. I don't think he was catfished - he knew. An adorable, "exotic" "European" (I threw out my TV! Who ees Alejandro Baldwin? Haf some vegan soup! I don't like drama!") younger wife whose NYU attendance thus makes her "internationally" educated is a more marketable credential than a basic trust fund baby from Boston.

She can rename herself what she wants. OTOH, gambits such as claiming she's mistaken for the nanny when she's out with her kids ("We need to do better") while her WASP ancestry pre-dates the Mayflower and she grew up on Boston's Beacon Hill*, or using MLK day as a social media teaching moment about color by holding her spray-tanned arm against her daughter's pale one makes the concepts of offensive, entitled and audacity feel inadequate.

Her facade got blown up via her response to an Amy Schumer tweet in which she neglected to use her accent, prompting another twitter account to comment on her "decades long grift" pretending to be Spanish. The floodgates opened and twitter came with receipts. I don't know why that was the tipping point.

Tessa Virtue connection - Nivea sponsored Hilaria Baldwin's most recent miscarriage post (the one prior to the birth of her fifth child). So there's the standards. I didn't know the sponsored post game had gone that low.

Naturally, Hilaria has been hyping projects based on the importance of one's individual authenticity and comfort in one's own skin. Like other influencers we know.

Right wing publications like The Federalist love to take the foibles of virtue signaling left wing celebrity progressives to undermine progressive values, but these observations about the corrupt entertainment media are not wrong: 

Domenech and Jashinksy agree that the media’s role in attempting to defend the celebrity shows publications’ corruption and unwillingness to provide accurate coverage to their audiences. 

***

In the aughts, bloggers like Perez Hilton earned a lot of money and a lot of backlash for harsh coverage of celebrities. Some of that backlash was warranted. But now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Rather than treating celebrities neutrally, the entertainment media treats them reflexively as protagonists. (See: the early coverage of Jussie Smollett’s hoax.)

No surprise Hilaria's "defense" has been gaslighty, but people aren't having it. That's because the media isn't helping her, absent the predictable NY Times. I didn't think the media would go in this hard on Baldwin, but she's been wading in cultural appropriation waters for one, and for two, I don't believe the media actively knew differently about her. For three, once on the scent, acquiring receipts takes no effort - poof, here's her yearbook, the home where she grew up, a few quotes from former neighbors. Baldwin was able to perpetuate her scam for over a decade because the media just took what she said about her background on face value. 

That's not the case with Tessa and Scott and the Canadian entertainment media which has enthusiastically cooperated with Tessa and Scott's con for well over a decade. That's where the points made by (sadly) The Federalist hit their target. CTV, for example, captioned Jackie Mascarin as Scott Moir's "fiancee'" knowing he's married to Tessa. This decades long complicity will complicate any coverage of their actual status. But we can be sure of a tidal wave of straw men and gaslighting.

Think about a guy on stage with his wife at a hometown Hall of Fame ceremony announcing his engagement to another woman while his own mom stood by lending her "authenticity" and the majority of those present knew this for the scam it was but kept their mouths shut or were denied an outlet to report what they knew. This is the sort of thing the Canadian entertainment complex has promoted and enabled. Where does that fall on the spectrum of audacity?

*Not to mention her boob implants, obvious 00 clothing size, strategically sculpted face, microbladed eyebrows, excruciatingly toned, flexible physique and blinding white, even dentistry (all $$$$ indicators) would guarantee fellow upscale mommies understood she was no nanny no matter what accent she deployed makes her claim even more comical.

Or much less than she would if her brand weren't a massive lie

I won't be able to take a comfortable breath until December 14, when the electors in U.S. states gather to cast their votes for president-elect. Although November 7 was a good day. 

Then I can figure out what Scott is doing and what's up with the rest of the figure skating world. Other things consume most of my bandwidth recently.

For now, from the latest Trashcan - Tessa and Scott thread on Fsuniverse.

We're told over and over by Tessa's PR she's the most famous woman in Canada, and also by her PR that this isn't anything she's pursued (see the obligatory "strain on her beautiful face" descriptors). But then we see she's nothing but a basic influencer with an indiscriminate roster of brand partnerships and sponsors. My favorite sponsored post remains the day she dragged her beloved late Nana out of the archives to hype the impressive 100 care packages Nivea was dangling in front of a Canadian senior citizen population of 5.9 million. For sheer oblivious vapidity that one is hard to beat.*

I've said over and over her social media is inane, some of her choices of social media "friends" more than problematic (the toxic Jessica Mulroney) and Tessa's adverb abuse renders her content nonsensical and self-parody. But, I wonder if the degree to which she and Scott have dug themselves in, continually re-digging and then occasionally upping the ante with the worst, smirk-iest, most hypocritical and unfortunately characteristic juvenile "shock" tactics has created issues behind the scenes when it comes to bigger opportunities. 

It's easy to be cynical and figure there are no boundaries, that they will be eternally enabled. Entertainment media is all PR and transactional and it also controls the narrative, with a back up from paid social media posts. But recently I've considered that maybe, professionally speaking, they've been marginalized more than they expected because they've never sought a way out of a 13 year (and counting) public deception that everyone "privately" knows about.

I mean there's the deception but that's compounded by a component lack of judgment, and also the thuggish idiocy that tarnishes their wannabe brand and is an offshoot of their faux self-representation. And the gaslighting.

They seem to operate as moving targets both in their brand affiliations and in whatever interview or podcast they've done last, never really building anything. If they were a stable unit publicly, instead of creatures of complete expediency/short term thinkers, maybe they'd experience a more significant investment in their post competitive potential.

*Nivea is a portfolio brand owned by the German conglomerate Beirsdorf AG but 100 little care packages is all it could cough up. Or - this pitifully stingy little giveaway reflected where Tessa ranks with them in a hierarchy of influencers and she's not in a position to say no thanks. In fact, she was tasked with, embarrassingly, hyping it up.

Now what about the gays?

In the universe of Skate Canada, the Mohawk is now the C step and the Choctaw is now the S step, if my once-removed (fsuniverse.com) reading of Skate Canada's email is correct.

"This is part of "work[ing] toward the decolonizing of our terminology and align[ing] with our commitment to anti-racism.""

Skate Canada needs to commit to a whole bunch of other stuff while they're at it but I'm not holding my breath.

But as to this refreshed attitude, let's hope we never see another one of these (from 2015 or thereabouts)

I remember when I saw this. I wanted to die. At the same time, everything Bourne skates has this vibe.

(Yes she was a show skater at the time but I've always seen her as exactly Skate Canada's cup of tea.)
 

Best Picture

I've got nothing for September. This photo though continues to look more like an SNL parody of their nonsense than the thing itself. Scott's acting always comes across like someone who read about the emotion he's impersonating but never actually observed or felt it. Tessa just works the posture and the.pageant persona. Not where she started but that's where she's landed.