Carel Fabritius: The Goldfinch (1654)
Good evening, Kibitzers!
There was some loose talk about snow here tomorrow, but I see that now, though it’s definitely going to be cold, it won’t quite reach freezing, so the large amount of precipitation expected will just be rain. I hope that all the hailing and tornadoing yesterday and today have missed all of you! (Most of you are safely in California, I know.)
You know I’m fascinated by figure skating, even though I know basically nothing about it — I’ve posted about it before. The 2024 World Figure Skating Championships (that’s the article about the event in general; here’s the one about 2024 specifically) just took place in Montreal, March 18-24. And so, there’s a whole new batch of brilliant skating!
They award medals in four categories: Men, Women, Pairs, and Ice Dance. (The latter two are both for two people, but ice dancing is based on ballroom dancing and doesn’t have the jumps and throws found in pairs skating.)
I’m going to start with the men’s gold medalist, nineteen-year-old Ilia Malinin, the Virginia-born child of Russian Olympic skaters. He won this contest, by nearly 25 points, by doing an unprecedented six quad jumps (spinning in the air four or 4½ times) in his “free skate” program. He is very, very good at this.
Really, this video is the whole reason I started writing this diary, and if you only watch one thing in here, I recommend this one. As always with these skating videos, the actual program is only about half the video’s length, while the rest is replays and waiting for scores. [9:59]
And mind you, the second-place winner, Yuma Kagiyama of Japan, is no slouch. This is his short program. [5:50]
The women’s gold medalist, Kaori Sakamoto of Japan, won her third consecutive World title at this event. The best video I could find of her free skate program is not a TV video; it’s taken from the stands and doesn’t have the closeup shots from a dozen cameras all around the rink. But you can still see very well what a good performance it is! [5:15]
In second place was my homegirl, seventeen-year-old Isabeau Levito of New Jersey. (She appeared in that 2022 Olympics diary, but she didn’t compete at the time because she didn’t make the 15-year-old age cutoff.) [9:11]
In pairs skating, the winners were Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps of Canada. This was particularly notable because Stellato-Dudek is forty years old, which is apparently 192 in Skater Years, and this made her the oldest female figure skater ever to win a world championship. (The fact that their music is from the Interview with the Vampire soundtrack explains much about their blood-red-crystals-at-the-throat costuming.) [8:31]
Silver medalists Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara of Japan had won the gold last year. [8:29]
Now we come to ice dance! This year’s winners were USA’s Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who appeared in that Olympics diary in 2022. This is another one I highly recommend — not that I don’t recommend them all, but this is a superb example of what ice dancing is, and how it differs from pairs skating. Also: Pink Floyd soundtrack! [9:08]
Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier took the silver medal with this dramatic Wuthering Heights program. [8:59]
We need a skating song, so here is Brandi Carlile singing River at the 2021 Kennedy Center Honors for Joni Mitchell. [3:41]
Permit me to add a couple of political ‘shorts’, neither of them songs, although they come from musical sources.
Mangy Fetlocks shares an irresistible offer for his signature bible. [1:28]
Meanwhile, Rocky Mountain Mike does his usual superb job, this time on a ‘moose and squirrel’ parody, The Adventures of Joewinkle and Malarky. [1:36]
