Line of the Day

"Fuck you very much, China."

So, USA gymnast Nastia Liukin wuz on Leno last night, and she explained how she tied with Chinese gymnast He Kexin but still didn't get the gold medal for the uneven bars. As dipomatically as possible, she tried to convey the overly ellaborate scoring rules that landed her a silver and gave Kexin the gold. Here's the math, courtesy of nbcolympics.com: A complete score is now made up of two parts, A and B. The first, the A score, or the start value, is an assigned degree of difficulty. In this instance, both He and Liukin had the same start value, 7.7. The second part of a score, the B score, is an execution score. Six judges vote. The high and the low are tossed per the rules. That leaves four scores. Those four are averaged. That average becomes the B score. Add the A and B together and you get a complete score. In this instance, both He and Liukin got 16.725. Thus: onto tiebreakers. The first tiebreak is the B score. Here both got the same B score, 9.025. The next tiebreak: the judges drop the next highest deduction. That obviously leaves three judges' scores instead of four--or to be precise, the marks those three judges gave for deductions. Here, the average of those three judges' deductions for He: .933. For Liukin: .966. Liukin had a greater deduction. Thus she was second. Anyway, as Liukin was trying to explain all that in much simpler terms, Norm McDonald, sitting next to her, interrupted by saying, "Excuse me, Jay, but this all just sounds like a bunch of commie goobly-gook."