( How just about everything relates to skating for me )

By the way, check out this book: Robert's Snowflakes (official site here), by Grace Lin.


(I prefer the logo to the actual cover art)

The book's for fundraising, specifically, for cancer, under, would you believe it, The Jimmy Fund. The Jimmy who inspired the Jimmy Fund was a twelve-year-old cancer patient by the name of Einar Gustafson, who was given the name Jimmy to protect his identity. Fortunately, he survived cancer.

The Jimmy fund has been behind events such as An Evening with Champions, a skating exhibition for the fund dating since 1970. "In past years, Scott Hamilton, Kristi Yamaguchi, Brian Boitano, Paul Wylie, Michelle Kwan, Oksana Baiul, Nancy Kerrigan and many other renowned skaters have contributed their time and talent to raise awareness and financial support for the Jimmy Fund." I know that Scott Hamilton himself lost his mother to cancer and fought cancer successfully himself.

I'm incredibly thrilled about finding Figure Skating in Singapore (that does appear to be the site title). It links several other noteworthy sites, so it's worth a visit!

Figure Skating Blogs
1. Figure Skating Blog
2. Boot and Blade

Not a blog, but a site for figure skating fiction: SkateFic. I also love the random skate facts that get posted on each page. I get terribly giggly at the soap opera section. And the melodrama section. And also at Whispers on the Ice: a Serialized Figure Skating Novel, because it is, with some amendments, the het version of Blades of Glory. Fire and Ice? An athelete whose solo-skating days are over? Or the chapter The Right Partner? Quite A Pair had me laughing hysterically.

Sasha Cohen, the figure skater, is going to be in a movie (pictures at link). She has an amazing official website here.

This arises from my borrowing every single available book on figure skating the national libraries have on loan (am now resorting to the Used Book Collection, even). To my great delight, last Sunday I found
Sasha Cohen: Fire on Ice (Revised Edition): Autobiography of a Champion Figure Skater. My nation's figure skating literature seems to be frozen in time around the 1998 Olympics and before: case in point, it has Frozen In Time, a book on the legacy of the 1961 US figure-skating team plane crash.

( List of the Figure Skating Literature I've Borrowed and Read from Our Libraries )

So it was a happy surprise to find the Sasha book - as something written in this century. This is the revised edition: 206 pages, plus twelve full-colour insets of Sasha performing, Sasha and family, plus throughout the book are black-and-white pictures of her. It's written in first-person perspective. An interesting read, though towards the end of the book, the constant competitions and the lack of substantial commentary on them made the last section of the book repetitive. Still, an enjoyable book.

Sasha owns a red-point cat named Mia (scroll down all the way to the bottom, last photo on the right here).

( Mia the Cat )

I think I've found the figure skater that could be younger!Jimmy! Except this one radiates more control and masculinity than Jimmy. His name is Franz Streubel, and he's a junior German skater. Very junior:

Inspired by this original post:

( Have You Had Your Frost Flakes This Morning? )

( Lookin's free, but owning... that's gonna cost ya. )

Thanks to yunafire's post and great work here, the Blades Bonus DVD extras are available! ♥

A LITTLE IMAGE-HEAVY
( Blades of Glory Bonus DVD Extras - Screencaps )

( Tips on getting around download limits )

DVD Reviews
♪Blades of Glory on DVD: CBS intro on the DVD and movie, and short clips from a Will-Jon CBS interview.
♪homoerotic dancing sequences between the pair are certainly worthy of a 6.0 for artistic impression..
♪BBC review: What Ferrell learned? "Ice is very hard." And Hector? Jimmy is "like an angel, covered in dreams...".
♪Very detailed description of all the Blades extras.

☆ Actual skaters reacting to Blades of Glory, Part 1, and Part 2. It has the top pairs team in the US, as well as Johnny Weir, and Sasha Cohen! Comes with extras from the movie, like Jimmy shouting "You... jerk!" You can just see him trying to think of the worst possible word he can use to describe someone and coming up with THAT. And it has the push-up scene! ;) And when Coach asks what they have that no one else has, Chazz says, "Matching baloney ponies?"

☆ ☆ ☆ Blades of Glory DVD Review, set out like a judicial verdict, with the charge, opening statement, submissions, and EVERYTHING! ♥ The site is incredibly amusing: updates are listed as "legal briefs", the staff are judges, and the upcoming reviews list is the "docket". *LAUGHS SO HARD* I liked the review of the Heroes Season 1 DVD, incidentally. As well as the one for Dexter.

☆ Will Ferrell's Skating Double: great feature on how Blades was filmed with skating doubles.

And On the Skating Front
♡ Johnny Weir/Rudy Galindo triple-axel throw: closest we're gonna get to a real-life Blades of Glory! ;)

♥ Shizuka Arakawa "You Raise Me Up" 2006 Champions On Ice: I think this is the Lena Park version that's on Romeo X Juliet!

♪ Blades of Glory: If I Was Gay

Scott Hamilton Interview on Blades of Glory. Oh my God, Scott Hamilton's old! It's kinda crazy 'cause all my skating literature has been when-Scott-Hamilton was fifteen-years-younger.

Shows on MTV here on the 17th of June, Sunday, at 1pm. Apparently it comes in some 45 minutes into the show, and features Sasha Baron Cohen demanding if Will Ferrell broke Jon Heder's heart too.

Cannot wait.

Joy! Have found the Blades of Glory section on Fanfiction.Net! It's not so much actual ff.net section as stories in the Miscellaneous Movies section that gets dredged up with the Search function, but hey! ♥ There are stories I haven't read before, so it's all good!

When It Happens makes me go all giggly and happy inside. Maybe it's just the exhaustion of the work-week and freedom talking, but yeah! *rainbows* And man, I can't not love an author who says they love feedback more than Jimmy loves Skittles. ♥ Also, Never Let Go. I'm just a sucker for stories in which Chazz calls Jimmy Princess and proceeds to lay on the baaaad pickup lines 'til kingdom come.

Blades of Glory Deleted Scenes. Extras in the official music video - which is also slashy as all-get-out, and in this amazing gallery.

Also, the tags that I'm investigating at the moment: screencaps, and fanmixes. ♥

Screencaps are here, here, and here.

As you'd probably be able to tell, Blades of Glory has pretty much eaten up my mind, and I'm enjoying it. *grin* This will be a Blades of Glory-centric journal: a place for my fanthoughts and everything else I love about the movie and the fandom. *grin*

Went to watch Blades of Glory with mangy_mongrel - had a lot of fun, also because MJ was a great person to watch it with. This, this and this are my favourite reviews. The lines were a riot - though I think it could've been primarily overall-happy that had me loving them so much.

MJ and I both wandered if there was fanfiction upon walking out of the cinema, and an investigation around LJ has vindicated my faith in fandom's ability to make something for everyone. blades_of_glory is the main community (I think fully half the posts are friends-locked), but - *cough* - like-minded individuals might do well to take a look at bogslash, bog_rps, bog100 and chazzjimmy.

Authors who write a great deal of Blades of Glory fic that doesn't get to the community:
severity_fics, gixi, and citizenjess.

Amazing Blades Gallery.

And because an character need only be: 1. blond, 2. blue-eyed (green's fabulous, too!), 3. pretty/uke, 4. able to speak Japanese (this one only an optional plus if #1-3 are met) to get me interested: here's ( more about Jon Heder. )

( Favourite Blades of Glory fic )

( Blond Jokes and Jimmy McElroy. )

( Things That Actually Happened In the Movie. )