meta -1:30
Screenshot
- {Staying with friend after friend instead of getting your own place} COUCH.
- {Checking out site after site} WEB.
- {Just flipping around for something to watch} CHANNEL.
- {Googling your own name} EGO.
- {Fun activity at a concert (but be careful!)} CROWD. last weekend my children attended their first-ever pop music concert (for a band i had never heard of until quite recently). i didn’t ask them if they did any crowd surfing.
- {Riding the waves with nothing to ride on} BODY.
as if it were not yet abundantly clear that the answer was, in fact, just SURFING, one other clue hinted at the instructions: {2024 Olympic sport (but not our meta answer)} KITE. now, i did not actually know about KITE as an olympic sport (it’s a kind of sailing), but it was clear enough that the instructions were asking for an olympic sport. as it happened, i spent quite a few hours yesterday watching the medal round of the men’s and women’s surfing competition. it’s interesting, if a little bit capricious—men’s gold medal favorite gabriel medina of brazil, who went viral last week for his epic ride in round 3, capped by an instantly iconic photo, spent the last 20 minutes of his semifinal match against australia’s jack robinson waiting for a wave that just never came. it was a viewing experience not unlike waiting for an MBTA bus. but the moments when the surfers were actually surfing were, in general, quite thrilling.
after a tough july, i’m glad to be back on the proverbial surfboard to start august. how’d you all find this one?
I don’t know if it was intentional but I like how the title also hints at how it’s difficult to watch the Olympic events you want (if you don’t have Peacock). Neat callback to last month’s NBC meta, too.
Thanks, joon — 536 correct answers and 0 incorrect. Gold medals 4 every1!!!
KITE was missing its surfing, too (the sport is called kite-surfing, which sounds like an activity I would be unlikely to enjoy).
Completely agree with the ‘difficult’ comment, especially if you’d like to time-shift and record some of the events. Other than that, though, I’d really like to know how the title fits the solution.
SURFING is missing from the theme answers, so you literally cannot see it.
I thought it was both that SURFING is missing from the theme answers, and also that when a surfer is in the tube of the wave (the real action) you cant really see them.