NBC and the Olympics

• I haven't been watching the Olympics coverage on TV. None of it. I appear to be the only person who is still bitter and angry about how horrible the coverage of the last Olympics was... You know, how many commercials they showed, how they would string you along, telling you that a particular event was going to be televised next, only to show an hour of crap before getting to the event that everyone wants to watch. I'm sick of it. I would rather not watch any of it, and just follow the results in the news.
  
  Here's someone who agrees with me: NBC has ruined the Olympics [russellbeattie.com]. From the post:

  "While trying to watch coverage tonight with my six year old son before his bedtime, we were bombarded with commercials EVERY 5 MINUTES. I timed it on my watch..."
  
  "NBC focuses on the same handful of athletes over and over again despite the 400+ in Beijing from the US alone. Yes, it's great Phelps is awesome. We fucking get it, now shut the fuck up about it already. And the general ignorance of the commentators about other countries, the lack of any coverage of those countries, combined with the mindless US-only coverage is insane."

  NBC can take their Olympics coverage and shove it right up their asses.


• The Big Picture has some incredible pictures during the fencing competition [boston.com] at the Olympics. I used to fence sabre in college, so these pictures are especially interesting to me because they remind me of a forgotten era of my life.

Social Sports Fan

I'm what I would call a social sports fan -- I watch most sports simply so that I can keep up with social conversations in the days afterward. I'm already so socially awkward that it would be completely impossible to relate to anyone if I didn't know what they were talking about.

For example, I don't really like basketball. And I almost never watch it. But I watched Game 7 of the Cavaliers-Celtics series yesterday, because that's all anyone would be talking about for the next day or so. And I didn't want to be that guy who was the only person that missed it.

I started this behavior in grad school, when I used to take spinning classes at a nearby gym. The class was at 6AM, which was perfect for the schedule that I was on at the time. And it was being run by an instructor who geared the classes towards serious cyclists (unlike most spinning classes, which are geared toward the general population that just wants some sort of aerobic exercise). I loved the classes, because I got an incredibly intense workout. I carried two water bottles, my heart rate monitor, clipless pedal shoes and an insane amount of towels with me to those classes, and was never disappointed. But it seemed like all we ever talked about in those classes was football. So, I started watching NFL games fairly regularly just so that I could keep up with the conversations.

Now I watch all kinds of crap that I wouldn't watch if I didn't have to do such cumbersome things as actually talk to other people. Considering that I watch almost no TV these days, watching all of this crap is kind of a burden.

Superbowl

At least the game was incredibly exciting. Suck it, Patriots fans!

The commercial breaks seemed to be dominated with commercials for lame TV
shows and movies that I would never even consider watching, interspersed with a
ridiculous number of embarrassingly bad local commercials (the commercials
for Kent State University sounded like they had general-MIDI music from an
early 90's video game playing in the background...).

The last few Superbowls have taught me that only beer companies and obscure internet domain name registrars can be depended upon to create entertaining commercials.

Meanwhile, I hadn't seen Tom Petty in years, so I was surprised to see that
he has hit the wall. His appearance was so bad that upon seeing and
hearing him sing, Heimlich asked me whether Willie Nelson was the halftime
show performer.

Superbowl and Comics

• I assume everyone is going to be gorging themselves on beer and chips and watching the Superbowl this weekend.
  
  While I would normally be looking forward to this weekend in anticipation of the big game, and making friendly bets with friends based on my non-existent knowledge of sports ("50 bucks says that New England wins the coin toss..."), I am more worried about the new commercials that the company I work for is debuting. Good ad campaigns are so difficult to formulate. I just hope they aren't embarassingly bad.
  
  In other news, 30 second commercial spots during the Superbowl are up to $2.7M [yahoo.com].



• Recently, a friend pointed me out to a comic strip called The Order of the Stick [giantitp.com], which pokes fun at Dungeons and Dragons and all of the obscure consequences stemming from the way that the rules have been written.
  
  
  I have found it to be totally hilarious (being a Dungeons and Dragons player myself), and have started reading them from the beginning.

Body Blading

One of the things that I was able to do last weekend (one of the first relaxing weekends in a long time), was catch up on all of the YouTube videos I have wanted to watch.

One of the videos I found was of body blading:



Essentially, a guy gets dressed up in a suit that has tons of in-line roller skate wheels, so that in virtually any position, he will be supported by the wheels. That way, he can head-first luge down a road... without the luge. It's pretty amazing.

Near the beginning of the run, the guy has to make a pretty tight turn, and he uses some ridiculous slip angles to generate the necessary cornering force. You can actually see material being left on the road from the wheels as he drifts through the turn.

Near the end, there is a tunnel section that totally reminds me of an infamous level in Test Drive 5 [wikipedia.org] (a.k.a. the best driving game EVAR). And my favorite part of the video is where he blows by a motorcyclist.

Indians Clinch Division Title

The past few days have been ridiculous -- ridiculously busy, ridiculously emotional, etc. One of the more fun things that we did was go to the Cleveland Indians game yesterday. It was the last home game of the season.


We had great tickets for the game, having gotten them weeks and weeks ago. Little did we know that it would be the game where the Indians would clinch the AL Central Division Title -- something they haven't done since that legendary team regularly won them in the 1995-2001 era.

We have gone to two games in the past week, and I'm starting to get that feeling that I had when I first moved to Cleveland. I didn't grow up in a city that had a major league baseball team, so I never really got into it. But when I moved to Cleveland in the mid-90's, it was really exciting to go to Indians games. I used to buy upper deck tickets from scalpers (remember, the entire season would be sold out in a few days) and then just stand on the home run porch the whole game. Or, I'd buy tickets to the bleachers section, and get to the park hours before the game for the chance to catch fly balls during batting practice. Those were the days.

Picture of the Indians' scoreboard from laffy4k's Flickr photostream.