  Spent the weekend with the folks and my sister and her family. Will is so the cutest baby right now. At the party for him, he was passed around so much and so easily that at one point Mari turned to me and asked, “Have you seen my baby lately?” The highlight of the party, however, was Spiderman. We were supposed to have a moon bounce for the kids, but we were in the middle of a monsoon, so instead the entertainment company sent over Spiderman to make balloon animals. But they sent him an hour early, before basically all the guests had arrived. So there we were, 11 adults, Spiderman and three children, two of whom were terrified.
First Spiderman and his assistant (a scruffy guy with a big grin, undoubtedly due to the fact that he wasn’t the one in tights) pulled out a jump rope for limbo. Thomas was the only one who wanted to play, so he just walked around them in circles while the rest of us cheered with undue levels of enthusiasm. Finally Mari took pity on them and she handed the mini-DV to Mom and brought Will over. Now, even though the camera was already running, and could have been left on a table and done just as good a job, this was asking a lot of Mom. She didn’t know how she was supposed to hold it, what buttons to push or how close to stand, so she kept yelling frantically at Mari that she didn’t know if she was getting it. Then she decided to push all the buttons, one of which put it on pause, making her even more frantic and loud. Mari, squatting underneath Spiderman and his jump rope with Will held out in front of her, stopped and said “Oh Jesus Christ, Mom,” before rolling her eyes and getting up to fix it.
It’s nice to see motherhood hasn’t softened her. Musings on the Olympics: The men’s basketball team lost, for the first time in the history of the Games. It was a fairly pitiful thing to watch, and it even made me a little mad. There was no sense whatsoever that they were a team: Larry Brown couldn’t get them to come to practices, so they didn’t have any plays, the guards couldn’t shoot from outside and the forwards couldn’t play the post. It’s upsetting because basketball is such an American sport – it’s big, fast and aggressive, and it’s at its best when you have amazing individual talents that understand how to complement each other to be even greater.
But this team - a group of guys who didn’t care about their performance because there was no paycheck involved - represented the side of America that I can’t stand, the one that the rest of the world faults us for. Then I watched the women’s team. It’s a lot of veterans, like Swoopes and Leslie and Staley, mixed in with the bright young things like Taurasi and Catchings. If you ask me, (and probably anyone else who’s seen her in action) Taurasi will end up the best woman ever to play the game, and I’m sure she knows it.
But she hasn’t been the standout this Olympics. She only takes a shot if she’s wide open, and even then she usually passes. Why? Taurasi says this isn’t her olympics, that she’ll have plenty more chances to wear the American jersey. But for Swoopes and Staley, it’s the last shot at something great, and so they’re the ones who should be the stars. Tear. 
