11 August 08
How to Cover the Olympics on Television
Yesterday as we congregated at 7 am for our birding outing the mother of one of our younger participants said, bleary-eyed, how hard it was for her to get up because she was hooked on the Olympics. “But it would go much faster if they cut out the advertising,” she said in her sleepy Kiwi accent.
Well, yes, it would. Numenius and I don’t have a TV and regularly deplore American coverage of, say, soccer events where the actual match is interrupted for ads. I don’t think this happens as much as it used to but it’s irritating to the point of madness and we watch Univisión, in Spanish, for soccer, at one of the local Mexican restaurants. (I notice ESPN has at least hired British commentators for soccer, who discuss the match and not which high school the striker’s grandmother attended, a clear improvement.)
Our dinner at Fuzio’s last night was outdoors, but the TV was on inside and featured nonstop non-coverage of the Olympics. This is more or less how it goes:
a) Only ever show events in which Americans are predicted to win a medal. (You don’t want to embarrass those predicted to do less well by showing their failure on primetime. The thought that people might be interested in the sport inherently—gasp—never occurs to the programmers, apparently.)
b) Only ever show the performances of these predicted American medal winners and at most their two closest rivals (you want to be “fair and balanced,” after all). The exception to this is when more than one American is predicted to win a medal, in which case you show their “interaction,” taking pains to elaborate on their team spirit or their rivalry, depending.
c) Only ever allow 15 seconds out of every 15 minutes to show an actual “event” (well, the tiny piece of it featuring the performances as outlined in [b], above). The remainder of the 15-minute chunk is broken down as follows:
- Advertising.
- Fancy Olympics swirling golden graphics that wrap around before and after anything else, such as advertising.
- A talking head, either in the studio (male, in a somber suit) surrounded by golden swirling graphics, or in the sweltering Beijing smog (female, in a pretty printed suit), giving their no doubt finest insights into the event that has just been or is just about to be shown for 15 seconds.
- The sob story. The athlete, the athlete’s grandmother’s corns that prevented her from getting gold in 1948, the fact that the athlete was dropped on the head as a small child. The sob story can last way beyond 15 seconds: some last even 5 minutes, an apparent lifetime in TV. The sob story can be repeated many times over the course of a day’s Olympic “coverage.” It is of far greater importance than the event itself, even when the gold medal is won by an American, who is then shown welling up as the stars and stripes are raised (with the voiceover repeating the sob story). (The sob story can be extended to any athlete of any nationality who doesn’t win his or her event and can be captured on camera crying, whether or not they had a difficult childhood. Since most athletes don’t, in fact, win, the number of sob stories available increases exponentially over the course of two weeks, leading to a scheduling crisis and the emergency hiring of a sob-story über-editor who overdoses on pizza and Red Bull and who needs, and gets, some quiet time at the end of August.)
- The raising of the aforementioned stars and stripes.
- More advertising, bracketed by golden swirling graphics. The advertising can and frequently does pick up on a sob story or on a pseudo-sob-story, the raising of the stars and stripes, and the teared-up athlete on the podium. (It never focuses on the losing kind of sob story, however.)
- Irrelevant local color, such as footage of the Great Wall, zooming in on white people buying, you guessed it, Coca Cola: see, they’re capitalists like us really.
I am at an absolute loss to see how people who are avid Olympics followers—and it seems there are a lot of them—can keep their sanity or even their dinner when pelted with this insulting cack. Even more mystifying is how the athletes themselves can tolerate the inane interview questions or the fact that they don’t stage a massive Free-Tibet-Style Protest against NBC (or CBS or ABC in other years; let’s be fair and balanced, here). The athletes love their sports — revere them, respect their rivals, have trained their entire lives for this moment — and it must be infuriating to watch their work being trivialized so moronically, or even worse, to be forced to participate in the trivialization. I’d go nuts.
The sad thing, folks, is this: there are some really superb sports commentators in the United States. Some of them are even still alive. They must watch this dreck and weep, providing yet more material for the ravenous sob-story writers. You can just see it now: “Jon Miller, forced to watch twenty minutes of Olympics coverage, collapsed in a tearful heap and required sedation. He used to be a much-admired baseball commentator…”
11 August 08
Anniversary
Our fifth wedding anniversary was today! We celebrated by cycling into town for pasta and salad dinner at the Fuzio bistro, followed by ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s. I had mint chocolate chunk, Pica had coffee chunk.
2 August 08
1 August 08
28 July 08
Summer Doesn't Wait
The beans the earwigs the ground squirrels the almonds the squashed plums the parched lilies the flooded field the half-drowned gophers the bunnies the mockingbird the Swainson’s hawks the moon the swallow brood the laundry the clutter the cooking the pickling the biking the daydreams the not enough sketching.
The nearly August. Gulp.
15 July 08
Three Weddings and a Baby Shower
Three invitations arrived last Friday. One, the wedding of some friends for whom I had designed the invitations, so not unexpected, but fun to receive all the same. The second, two dear friends will wed ten years to the day after they met. Thanks to California’s recent supreme court ruling, they can, legally, get married now. The third was to a baby shower, a couple expecting twins. They will get married the following day: the first lesbian shotgun wedding I’ve been invited to… Busy August, folks.
1 July 08
Hands Free?
Today the hand-held cellphone while driving ban takes effect in California. The law was poorly worded — text messaging, for instance, which is obviously much more dangerous than merely talking, is not mentioned — but this is a welcome start. (I’m of the opinion that talking on the phone, hands free or not, should be forbidden while driving, because the lapse of concentration is analogous to having had between one and two drinks regardless, but nobody asked me.)
While cycling to work this morning I saw a cyclist pedalling in the other direction, holding her cellphone and talking into it. I guess the ban doesn’t affect bikes, then.
30 June 08
One-Nil
Lots of sports action these past couple of days decided by the score of one to zero. In Oakland last night, the San Francisco Giants beat the Oakland A’s 1-0 behind the stellar pitching of Tim Lincecum who struck out 11, giving up 5 hits. The Giants only produced two hits, but that was enough to win. Lincecum’s record is now 9-1 with an ERA of 2.38.
Also last night, the L.A. Angels lost to the Dodgers 1-0. The Dodgers however never got a hit in the game. The only run came on a fielding error by the Angels’ pitcher. This is only the fifth time since 1900 that a major league team has won a game without getting a hit. The Angels however made up for it this afternoon and beat the Dodgers 1-0. Both teams got hits.
Best of all, Spain beat Germany today 1-0 in the finals of Euro 2008. We watched the match over at Mariachi’s. About 25 others were paying attention to the match in our favorite taqueria, most of them rooting for Spain. The decisive moment of course was striker Fernando Torres getting by defender Phillipe Lahm and getting his foot on the ball just before the arrival of goalie Jens Lehmann. Torres is 24, Lehmann is 38, playing in his last European championship — we thought that the age difference might have been a key factor, Torres having just more speed than the goalie. Pica has been thrilled the whole rest of the day by the result; the Spanish team just achieved something which hasn’t happened since she was growing up in Spain. And the team is young and talented — what’s next?
29 June 08
Big Day
My birding buddies threw a party for me yesterday morning to celebrate my 700th ABA bird. We met at 7 to wander around Lake Solano, enjoying multiple and gorgeous views of pileated woodpeckers (and multiple views of peacock chicks, which was cause for a bit less joy, that place is going to be overrun in no time). A few later risers joined us for a potluck breakfast at 9…. the sketch at left was done by Sue, who was with us on the Sierra Valley trip two weeks ago, which she presented to me. Other Sue brought flowers. Shucks, guys.
This was followed by a wedding in the evening. A former coworker and her sweetie got married out at Phillips Winery (food by the fabulous Magpie Caterers ). The funnest part was running into the flower girl at the hairdresser; she was having multiple curls applied to her head and fell asleep in the process. (I begged a pen and paper from the gals and sketched her; I had to beg another pen from the wedding bus driver, having forgotten mine at home.)
Sunday’s big dayness involves the Spain/Germany final. We’ll be at Mariachi at 11:45 if anyone wants to join us…
25 May 08
The Damn Big Boiler
Sometime in the early 1970s, a girls’ boarding school in the British midlands burned down. The “progressive” independent school of Abbotsholme decided to become co-ed and integrate the hapless St. Vincents’ girls.
We ran about in the nick and had communal baths and did lots of things that we thought were outrageous (some of which really were, others not so much) and experimented wildly and generally lived a Hogwartian lifestyle minus the magic.
Today I met up with a friend from that time and immersed myself in a hot tub in Berkeley with her. It’s been thirty years, pretty much. Our bodies aren’t as lithe, but we have a jump on those kids: a little bit of wisdom. Oh but it goes a long way…