Eating Muffins

When I have been home I have been reading essays, and thus
not blogging about my birthday present, but today thre is a nice two hour break
between dance and men, and the arena has WiFi for reasonable price, so here
goes:

Dance is m favourite discipline, even though I do think that
COP is really problematic for this particular branch of figure skating. I
honestly don’t think spins and shadow skating are what dance should be about.
Anyway. The compulsary dance, as all people who read papers in Finland know was
Finnstep, a quickstep based on Rahkamo/Kokko rythm dance from 1995. As it is
completely new dance, and most of the couples only started rehearsing it after
the draw was made, it really separated couples. Bad were really, really bad and
even the good were rough around the edges. It is an interesting and really
difficult dance, it demands both smooth edges and bouncy expression. I thought
the best were Khohlova/Novitski, they were excellent especially on the first
half of the dance. My other favourite here was Carron/Jost who scated a smooth,
bouncy dance and held the rythm better than any other team. I was a bit miffed not to see them
higher.

Today was original dance, the prescribed rythms being
ballroom from 1920s to 1940s. This meant at least three sing sing sings, Bei Mir
ist du Schöns and Minnie the Moochers. You’d think there are more foxtrots,
swings, lindys and blues in the world…

My favourites continue to be the Kerrs. They had great expression and as they are the crowd favourites, their energy fed back to their performance.
It has to be noted that boy Kerr made few mistakes, and I thus was a bit
surprised that they remained ahead of Pechalat/Bourzat who had a nice and
smooth though unmemorable OD. An other team the really wows me are Carron/Jost.
I loved their OD last year I think their technique has improved leaps and
bounds. Among the disapointments were Kholova/Novitski. I reall don't think that lime green tulle is really the way to go dresswise, and the dance itself seemed competent but pretty forgettable. I was not
terrbly taken with Capellini/Lanotte either. Smooth, technially good and
increadibly boring.

No changes in the top half of the leader board, and some of
the changs lower down are caused by Domnina/Shabalin withdrawing.
Hoffman/Zavozin cambe down because Max stumbled, which is a bummer, it was a
good dance. Lithuanians stormed up from 15th to 8th with a nice dance, I
especially liked the entries to their lifts.

Next up, dinner and Men’s Free Skate.