ONE BAD DIVE

On Wednesday August 7, in Paris, US diver Alison Gibson's feet hit the diving board in the preliminaries on the three-meter board dive. Her score was 0.0. Her Olympic games were effectively over with her first dive. Four years of training...and her feet hit the board- something she later said had never happened to her. 

Knowing she could not advance, Alison Gibson did not quit. She did not withdraw. She competed, finishing 28th out of 28 divers. 

And then she said this: 

“My feet were bleeding, my heels were painfully bruised from hitting the board, and everybody on the pool deck thought I was going to scratch. But I didn’t scratch. I kept my chin up and I kept fighting until the end of that event,” she said in a voiceover. “This was far from the outcome I wanted, but I fought with everything I had to represent my country as well as I could and I'm proud of that.”

“Our worth is not defined by one painful moment,” she said in the caption of the post. “I am who I am because of the journey it took to get here. And I will not let the shame and pain of this moment define me and my worth.”

Beautiful Press Conference

On Thursday, the former president gave a press conference at Mar a Lago (Motto: "The most beautiful perfect place in the universe. No one has ever seen a more beautiful, perfect place than this." )

Do not let the fake press reports that the press conference was a meandering morass of half-baked platitudes and lies given by a confused 78-year-old man. Fake news.

Nope.

The real reviews are that this was a beautiful press conference. A perfect press conference. Indeed many people are saying they have never seen a more beautiful and perfect press conference. This beautiful press conference was so perfect that is caused many people to reminisce about his perfect phone call with the Ukranian president- the one that started impeachment inquires. 

It is interesting that in the history of the presidency, we do not recall anyone ever before rating a phone call. For example, when Kennedy called Kruschev, there is no rating of the call by anyone that we can find. No ratings of any calls by Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Obama. And yet, people were moved beyond all to call that phone call beautiful and perfect- much like his press conference this week. 

Just sayin... that it occurs to us people have different ways of dealing with failures. The best of us own it, and refused to be defined by it- and fight on. The worst of us lie about it and say non0sensical things like citing others calling their failures perfect and beautiful. 

One thing we agree on- if you ask people- no one has seen anything like this performance. And not in a good way.