Holy .... ahhh, what's the word I'm looking for .... shit! They're real!!!
I've come across a couple of news articles about these double toilets.... there are apparently several of them. I just don't understand wtf anyone was thinking when they built these things..... What is the reasoning behind them??!
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
Holy .... ahhh, what's the word I'm looking for .... shit! They're real!!!
I've come across a couple of news articles about these double toilets.... there are apparently several of them. I just don't understand wtf anyone was thinking when they built these things..... What is the reasoning behind them??!
It's a new opportunity to make friends and have interesting conversation.
Apparantly shower curtains are a hot commodity on Sochi black market. I knew Mother Russia wouldn't fail my expections. The next several weeks are going to be awesome.
I'm going to say the chance of a grandstand collapsing are 50 / 50 as of this point.
Yep. I'm nervous about these Olympics.... I will be watching with baited breath to see what goes disastrously wrong rather than to see who wins gold. 8-|
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
by Bruce Arthur Feb 04, 2014 - 9:39 AM EST Last Updated: Feb 04, 2014 - 12:17 PM EST SOCHI, Russia — As a rule, nobody wants to hear journalists complain about travel, which is fair. Travel, if you are lucky, is a part of the job. It’s like complaining about traffic, but somewhere else.
At the Olympics, though, the standard is different, because the Olympics are a comprehensive test. The venues, security, the athletes, transportation, the media, everything. Not every Games reflects on its nation in the same way — Atlanta, for instance, wasn’t so much a pan-American project in 1996 as it was a local disaster, in so many ways.
But Sochi, like Beijing, is different; it is a hideously complex logistical test of how efficiently a country, directed from on high, can pull the whole thing off with nearly unlimited resources. And by that measure, Sochi, its Olympic facilities built practically from scratch, is having some trouble.
“In general, it is done,” said one media hotel worker who has spent the past two years in Sochi, after coming from Siberia. “But the details are not done. And the details are everything.”
She talked about how the bureaucracy had delayed construction, and how the construction companies hadn’t always been paid on time, and weather had delayed matters, too. Oh, and corruption. She was asked what would happen if Putin had ordered it be completed, and she said, “Oh, if Putin says it, it will be done.”
Well, Putin arrived Tuesday. Everyone look busy.
In Beijing, every detail was nailed down. They violated all kinds of human rights to do it, of course, but it was an expression of China’s ruthless efficiency. It showed what the country can do, when it wants to.
Sochi? Well, three of the nine mountain hotels have not been completed, and the IOC estimate that 97 per cent of the rooms are ready appears to ignore the little things.
Almost every room is missing something: lightbulbs, TVs, lamps, chairs, curtains, wifi, heat, hot water. Shower curtains are a valuable piece of the future black market here. (One American photographer was simply told, “You will not get a shower curtain.”)
Of course, the Olympics are also the Olympics of the world’s various body odours, depending on your country and its personal grooming standards, so that might just mean that for the first time, we’re all in the stew together.
Hotel reservations are lost, then found, if you’re lucky. German photographer Joerg Reuter arrived in the mountains and found the first room offered to him to be full of construction debris, with yellow-brown water and appliances that didn’t work.
The next room had construction workers still sleeping in it. The third room had a stray dog in it. Reuter was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “When I came out of the elevator, there was the dog. I said, ‘Right, that’s it.’”
(They are reportedly now killing the numerous stray dogs here, which makes every adorable mutt you see the hero of a Disney movie, directed by Quentin Tarantino. At a press conference Tuesday, Sochi 2014 spokeswoman Alexandra Kosterina said “There is a special service that catches the stray dogs and this, as far as I know, they have a special shelter for the stray dogs, and make a medical examination of them. Like pest control.” It was not comforting.)
But the hotels are where the Russian Games are visibly straining at the seams. In the Ekaterininsky Kvartal hotel, the elevator is broken and the stairway is unlit, with stairs of varying and unpredictable heights.
Outside the Chistya Prudy, there is a bag of concrete in a palm tree, leaking grey down the trunk. Inside, some of the electrical outlets are just plates screwed into drywall.
Sports Illustrated’s Brian Cazeneuve had to clamber through a window to get out of his hotel on Tuesday morning, since the doors were all unexpectedly locked. Chris Stevenson of Sun Media was without electricity for the first day.
My Postmedia colleague Cam Cole’s bathtub came loose from the wall, and therefore rocks like a ship. He has a shower curtain, though. In the Rosa Khutor section of the mountains, Stacy St. Clair of the Chicago Tribune was told by the front desk that if the water worked, “do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.” When it did come out of the tap, it looked like a lot like cloudy urine.
Oh, and one journalist in the Omega hotel complex had to refuse a colleague’s request to stay a night in the second twin bed because … well, there’s no easy way to say this, but when the first journalist arrived, someone had left an indeterminate amount of semen on the sheets of the second bed, and those sheets had been taken away for cleaning, and hadn’t come back.
Now, this is not a complaint. Most of the time, it doesn’t really matter. It’s inconvenience, for sponsors and officials and journos together, and most journalists are laughing when they can, and as Bonnie D. Ford of ESPN.com put it, at least it keeps your mind off the whole potential terrorism thing.
But it is a measure of how well this country has nailed down this massive project, how closely it has accomplished its mission, and what we have is a sea of little failures that give rise to the spectre of bigger ones. The Boston Globe drove a local car within a couple hundred feet of the Main Press Centre Tuesday, which is a proximity unthinkable in previous Olympics. It could make a person think about the terrorism thing again.
Maybe in a project this size, in this $51-billion Xanadu, not everything could be completed. We’re not even getting into the sidewalks that dive, or the open manholes because the covers are being stolen, or the piles of construction waste all over the city, or the tumbled earth where grass was supposed to be. The whole thing was built on a swamp, and when it rains, there will be mud. But it’s a bit of a mess, either way.
I'm really looking forward to the hockey tournament. Its going to be hard for anybody to beat Canada. Shea Weber is playing as well as any D I have ever seen and they have better F than anybody.
I'm really looking forward to the hockey tournament. Its going to be hard for anybody to beat Canada. Shea Weber is playing as well as any D I have ever seen and they have better F than anybody.
I'm not too confident about Canada's chances of winning gold again. Canada and the USA are at a disadvantage with the bigger ice surface. But here's hoping!
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
I'm really looking forward to the hockey tournament. Its going to be hard for anybody to beat Canada. Shea Weber is playing as well as any D I have ever seen and they have better F than anybody.
I'm not too confident about Canada's chances of winning gold again. Canada and the USA are at a disadvantage with the bigger ice surface. But here's hoping!
The only things I see slowing them down are hot goalie or a game where they take few too many dumb penalties. Weber Doughty The two St Louis guys Keith Vlasic Subban
Put those 7 guys in any order you want no other country can match it. The forwards might not be as good as the Russians offensively but they are better two ways guys. Goalies are as good as anybody's but at least 5 countries have goalies capable of stealing a single game.
Well as a Canucks goalie, Luongo tends to get psyched out pretty easily. I'm always concerned about how he'll do. When he's hot he's hot, and while he held it together for the Olympic final in 2010, he has choked so many times in his NHL games because he's not exactly psychologically solid when things get tight. Most Vancouverites don't have all that much faith in him anymore, but hope for the best and cross our fingers and toes.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
I really thought/hoped he was going to piss his pants in the gold medal game in 2010 but he did ok. You're right I could see him falling apart vs the Russians but I really think with the D you have they should really limit the pressure on Luongo. I still think it's a better team if they find a place for St Louis and take Seabrook instead of Hamhuis but I have never been a huge Dan Hamhuis fan so I'm probably a little biased.
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hedonist
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I didn't mention China - just shaking my head at ol' Russia.
Lol, no, I know you didn't mention China; I wasn't meaning that as a direct reply to you. I was just saying that China wasn't any better, meaning to say that this isn't anything new. In other words, the IOC really doesn't seem to mind choosing hosts with terrible human rights records and a tendency to kill stray dogs.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
For the ridiculous amount of money spent on these Olympics, you'd think they would at least be ready. They're still working on hotels??? I have a feeling these olympics are going to be a clusterfuck.
I'm really looking forward to the hockey tournament. Its going to be hard for anybody to beat Canada. Shea Weber is playing as well as any D I have ever seen and they have better F than anybody.
I'm not too confident about Canada's chances of winning gold again. Canada and the USA are at a disadvantage with the bigger ice surface. But here's hoping!
But I think Sweden will take it \m/ So the honor of lighting the Olympic fire will go to Putin's girlfriend? I've read so somewhere..
Drinking at 7:30 am to watch the US Hockey team is going to be rough. It's every four years, so what the hell...
It looks like the Men's Final will be at 4am on Sunday, Feb 23rd. That is perfect! We can drink all morning (or Saturday night and Sunday morning, depending on your stamina), have a nap, be hungover all Sunday afternoon, and be totally fine for bedtime and Monday morning work time. It's like the Hockey and Booze gods got together and came up with a plan. :-bd <:-P Of course, this will obviously only work for Canadians, since they will be playing Russia in the final.
Post edited by PJ_Soul on
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
Drinking at 7:30 am to watch the US Hockey team is going to be rough. It's every four years, so what the hell...
It looks like the Men's Final will be at 4am on Sunday, Feb 23rd. That is perfect! We can drink all morning (or Saturday night and Sunday morning, depending on your stamina), have a nap, be hungover all Sunday afternoon, and be totally fine for bedtime and Monday morning work time. It's like the Hockey and Booze gods got together and come up with a plan. :-bd <:-P </p>
So glad I'm 3 hours ahead of you. I can't pull an all nighter anymore
Plus, Canada won't be in the Gold medal game anyway
I've met Rob
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DEGENERATE FUK
This place is dead
"THERE ARE NO CLIQUES, ONLY THOSE WHO DON'T JOIN THE FUN" - Empty circa 2015
"Kfsbho&$thncds" - F Me In the Brain - circa 2015
DEGENERATE FUK
This place is dead
"THERE ARE NO CLIQUES, ONLY THOSE WHO DON'T JOIN THE FUN" - Empty circa 2015
"Kfsbho&$thncds" - F Me In the Brain - circa 2015
The only things I see slowing them down are hot goalie or a game where they take few too many dumb penalties.
Weber Doughty
The two St Louis guys
Keith Vlasic
Subban
Put those 7 guys in any order you want no other country can match it. The forwards might not be as good as the Russians offensively but they are better two ways guys. Goalies are as good as anybody's but at least 5 countries have goalies capable of stealing a single game.
Fuck these olympics. Im not watching
"Come to Sochi: Now free of gay people and stray dogs!"
\m/
So the honor of lighting the Olympic fire will go to Putin's girlfriend? I've read so somewhere..
DEGENERATE FUK
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"THERE ARE NO CLIQUES, ONLY THOSE WHO DON'T JOIN THE FUN" - Empty circa 2015
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Plus, Canada won't be in the Gold medal game anyway
DEGENERATE FUK
This place is dead
"THERE ARE NO CLIQUES, ONLY THOSE WHO DON'T JOIN THE FUN" - Empty circa 2015
"Kfsbho&$thncds" - F Me In the Brain - circa 2015