Message from Morozombie to "MobSports"

It has recently come to my attention that a website, https://mobsports.com, has been wholesale copying and pasting the contents of this humble blog onto its own site without authoriziation or permission, and at times, even passing off my content as their own.  

For example, a search of the word "Morozombie" on "MobSports" reveals that "MobSports" has stolen multiple blog posts from this blog and reposted it on https://mobsports.com without permission: https://mobsports.com/?s=morozombie 

Adding insult to injury, however, "MobSports" has gone even further down the rabbit hole of stealing content by ripping off posts from this blog without even bothering to attribute them to me: example. 

I've never made a single cent off this blog--I've never run ads, sold subscriptions, or hawked anything, ever.  Writing for this blog has entirely been a labor of love for me.  So, to have a dubious and clearly for-profit website unabashedly steal my content to peddle their asinine ads is extremely infuriating  . . .

So, "MobSports": since you assholes have obviously been scraping this blog while stealing my content to bulk out your obviously sketchy website, hopefully this message reaches you: I am giving you one (1) week to remove all the content you've stolen from Morozombie.blogspot.com.  If you don't remove all the content you've stolen from me, I am going to pursue more drastic means of removing my content from your website, including but not limited to (1) reporting your website to Google, (2) reporting your website to your domain registrar/host (which appears to be Linode), and (3) putting you through the DMCA notice and takedown process.  

The Fall of the House of Kostornaia?

One of the most intriguing questions with respect to the ladies' women's competition this upcoming Olympic season is whether the exquisite Alena Kostornaia will return to her former fighting form and re-ascend to the topmost echelons of women's skating.  

Indeed, Ms. Kostornaia's career trajectory in the past season has been . . . tumultuous at best.  After dominating the 2019-2020 season by winning every single international event she entered with her majestic skating skills and impressively consistent triple axel, Ms. Kostornaia's career took a decidedly downward turn during the 2020-2021 season.  Let us count the ways:

2021 Worlds - Ladies Recap

The French poet Louis Aragon famously wrote that l'avenir de l'homme, c'est la femme (the future of man, is woman), but the opposite appears to be true in figure skating.  Ever since 2010, men's figure skating has been inexorably trending towards a high-risk, high-reward quads arm race in which the judges tacitly encourage a cynical type of numbers-crunching skating thinly disguised as choreography by improperly lumping together the skaters' Programs Components Scores with insufficient differentiation.  Hence we witness certain performances by the men that consist mainly of going from big jump to big jump punctuated with certain perfunctory movements here and there (as if by random chance) not only scoring insurmountably huge Technical Elements Scores, but also near-perfect Program Components Scores as well.  True, there have been events where wonderful, soulful skating has come out on top, but for a long time, these competitions have appeared to be pleasant aberrations rather than the rule. 

At long last, ladies' skating has finally followed suit during the second half of the current 2018-2022 Olympic cycle, ushered along by Eteri Tutberidze's indomitable wave of assorted Russian ladies skaters.  Undaunted by the physical realities of the post-pubescent female body, Ms. Tutberidze has revolutionized ladies skating with her emphasis on a certain type of jump technique that relies on pre-rotation, quickness of rotation, and above all, the low body weight of pre-pubescent female skaters.  Ms. Tutberidze began the revolution with the non-axel triple jumps (Julia Lipnitskaya, Evgenia Medvedeva, among others), but she has recently cornered the market on ladies' triple axels and quadruple jumps as well (Anna Shcherbakova, Elizabet Tursynbayeva, Kamila Valieva, Maiia Khromykh, among others, as well as recent Tutberidze student Alexandra Trusova).  This type of jump technique, combined with Daniil Gleikhengauz's cluttered programs utterly leeched of intangible qualities that would lend them genuine artistic or thematic heft, has dominated ladies figure skating in recent past.  All others are just trying to catch up, with varying results.  Given the high-risk, high-reward approach of the jumping arms race, the disappointingly messy, mistake-ridden ladies event at the 2021 World Championships is only a harbinger of future ladies competitions to come.  One needs only to look at the many messy men's events at the beginning stages of the quads arms race . . . 

2021 Worlds - Pairs Recap

If the pairs event at the 2021 World Figure Skating Championships stands for anything, surely it would be for the golden touch of the great Tamara Moskvina in the pairs discipline.  Last season, our newest World Champions Anastasia Mishina/Aleksandr Galliamov failed to make either the Russian world or Europeans teams.  After joining Ms. Moskvina's group last spring, however, Mishina/Galliamov have looked like a wholly new team with their newfound confidence, performance ability, and improved programs.  Likewise, although Aleksandra Boikova/Dmitrii Kozlovskii faltered in the long program here, their development under Ms. Moskvina has been excellent.  It's extraordinary how Ms. Moskvina has coached world medalists in every single decade to date since Vorobieva/Vlassov in 1977.  Are we having a 'best coach' award this season?  If so, fork it over to Tamara Moskvina!  At the very least, she should receive a nomination for not only coaching two pairs to the world podium, but also breaking the eight-year Russians pairs world title drought . . . 

The Apple of Averbukh's Eye

As I ventured over to Youtube to watch Mikahil Kolyada's The White Crow LP for about the 19301484th time during this famine of a figure skating season, a thought struck my mind like an ice pick to the skull: is Ilia Averbukh actually one of the best figure skating choreographers working today?

I know, to even suggest such a thing would undoubtedly condemn me as an unwashed neophyte among certain of the figure skating cognoscenti. After all, Mr. Averbukh is often remembered for his wacky interviews when not being denigrated for representing the worst excesses of early-2000s ice dance before the penitent wave of fresh, squeaky-clean Marina Zoueva teams cleansed ice dance of its sins.  I for one am not going to defend Jesus Christ Superstar or Fever.  Nor can I explain Mr. Averbukh's inexplicable decision to dump the legendary Marina Anissina for Irina Lobacheva.   

But judge a man by his deeds, not his choice of ice dance partner/wife.  So let's take a look at the evidence at hand here: