Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

First, the closing ceremony went off on Sunday 22 without a hitch. Indeed, it was inspiring. The ceremony was designed as a tribute to Italian culture, and well as a hand-off to the not-so-far-away site of the next winter games, (2030), the French Alps  Second, this was so far as I can remember the first Olympics in which there was a public controversy that involved the rules of curling. Curling is the odd sport in which some of the athletes seem to busy themselves sweeping dust out of the way of a sliding rock. Even at Olympics time, that best of all times for recognizing odd sports, the outside world usually manages to ignore these guys. A controversy over curling?  Third, the location was not so much spread out (as they always are), it was split.  Two distinct hubs. The Milan area got the ice events, the Cortina area got the snow events. There are about 410 kilometers, or 250 miles, between the two cities.  Fourth, indulge my old-man moment. Why do the winter gam...

Going into the winter Olympics this year, there was a lot of talk about a terrorist strike, the possibility that somebody (and, given the neighborhood of Sochi, most likely some Islamicist terrorist group) would use the world-wide spotlight such games provide to showcase their own violence and their Grand Cause. Memories of Munich in 1972 and all that. I'm happy to say that it didn't happen. As Sherlock Holmes would say: the mad dogs didn't howl. That was the curious incident in the night-time. The second thing? The games offered, as they always do, remarkable examples of athleticism at its best. On February 9th, the host Russian team won the gold medal in "team trophy" figure skating, with outstanding performances by Evgeni Plushenko and Julia Lipnitskaya. On February 11, Dara Howell, of Canada, one of the three women portrayed above, won gold in the Ladies Ski Slopestyle. She came from nowhere, was favored by nobody, yet richly deserved the medal. Here is ...

For my week-by-week desk calendar through 2014, I will rely on an unflashy but serviceable volume from American Express. As with last year's Amex calendar, there are factual tidbits on each page about various destinations where I can presumably enjoy a debt-financed vacation with my Amex card. The earliest pages tell me various facts for example with reference to Mykonos, in Greece, the red dot in the map you see here.  I learn in this way that Mykonos is home to the a neighborhood known as Little Venice, "whose waterfront houses with their colorful balconies recall the quarter's Italian namesake." While Mykonos gets January, the site of this year's winter Olympics, Sochi in Russia, gets February. Events will be clustered in two distinct parts of Sochi, "a coastal cluster for indoor ice events and a mountain cluster for skiing ... in Krasnaya Polyana." Separately, my month-by-month wall calendar for the new year is entitled "Railroads: Illustratio...