Crazy

Watching baseball on Fox and a NCAA BCS title game ad came on, finishing with a shot of two players looking at the National Championship trophy. The two teams represented? USC and - Missouri.

Of course, that's not looking like a great choice this week (although I guess the Tigers could be right back in position if they somehow pull out a win this weekend) but as a Missouri alum, it's pretty odd to see anybody put the Tigers in line for a Championship.

Michael Phelps' .01 second win last night will get some play on the highlight reels for a while (I assume - since I've been at the tennis until past midnight most nights, I haven't actually watched much of the prime-time coverage). I've been checking out a few different outlets' documentation of the finish, and the most startling thing is how different the finish looks depending on where the cameras were set.

The overhead TV camera makes it look as though Cavic beat Phelps to the wall. But Sports Illustrated had a camera underwater, right between the two lanes, and the frame-by-frame look at the finish seems to give Phelps the slight edge.

Shame the super-super-slow-mo footage swimming authorities looked at wasn't released...

olympics update

I have determined that the Air Pistol events might be the worst possible event to televise. In this case, it actually needs commentary. Because all eight contestants shoot at the same time, I can't figure out how they determine which one to keep the camera on.
However, it's so bizarrly bad I'm captivated.


To recap: live video of team archery - good. Live video of individual air pistol - bad.

More to come, I'm sure.

olympic obscurity

My favorite thing about the Olympics is always the really obscure sports, the ones you usually never see, but only read about happening in the previews when some publication picks the medalists in every event.

As the Olympics have gone on, each year there has been more time devoted to televised sports (I remember when it was a big deal that NBC was going to be showing events on more than one channel for the Games) but all that time is still filled with things like gymnastics, swimming and the rest of the sports I'm not particularly interested in (although this morning I did actually get to watch part of a team handball match, which is possibly the most obscure of all the Olympic sports, in this country at least).

But tonight I've discovered the live video feeds on NBCOlympics.com. As I type, I'm watching a qualifying round of team archery. Just a live video feed (thankfully with multiple camera angles, rather than just one camera turned on and left) with out any announcers. Just a little text box of live updated play-by-play. In other words, perfect.

I'm going to have to see how the live video works throughout the games, but for now it appears to be exactly what I've always wanted - the ability to watch whatever sport I want, with no annoying voices except the venue's PA announcer, and some unobtrusive informative commentary in text form.

(And I've been typing long enough that China has now beaten India in the team archery match).

It's this sort of thing that makes me wish I was still in college, when I could have shifted my schedule and devoted large chunks of the calendar to watching the Olympic stuff I've never seen before. (Seriously, have you ever seen archery televised? And it's interesting to watch. It quick-moving, and the scoring is easy to understand.) Now I'm going to have to do with sneaking in some watching here and there, during a week when I'm already going to be sleep-deprived because I'm working a day job and covering tennis every night this week.

What I'm really looking forward to, though, is the next winter Olympics. If I don't make it to Vancouver, you can bet I'll be watching all the curling rounds online.

spanish can be fun!

Sometimes it's nice to have a Spanish translator in the house. Like last night, when I was catching up on the 30 Rock season finale via Hulu

The plot revolved around cheap Mexican cheese curls Liz Lemon found at a grocery. The name: Sabor de Soledad. The translation, which I never would have bothered to find out, but made the whole thing far more funny: Taste of Loneliness.

they finally started to get something right

Lately, I've been watching most of my TV via the computer. The Internet is the poor man's Tivo (I miss having a DVR). Everything's out there, if you know how to look, but it's not always easy.

If the show I'm looking for is up on a network site, I generally head there first. But too often, I've had trouble streaming or got stuck in a loop of advertising, or the player just wasn't very good. I have my display hooked up to my TV, but on at least one network site, for a while it kicked me out of full screen mode every time it pulled up an ad in between segments. No good. So I often headed to BitTorrent, where I could find shows for downloading. That, however, takes time (along with the usual objection from the copyright holder).

But I've been plesantly surprised by Hulu, the new site from NBC and Fox for TV online. It's easy to find full episodes or clips of shows, the player seems to work well and I haven't had any streaming problems (yet). And since most of the US shows I'm looking for are on either NBC or Fox (or a site under their corporate umbrellas) I'm quite happy.

Especially when I figured out they've been putting up old shows as well. How can you beat episodes of the A-Team? I've never even seen Fantasy Island but I might watch one, just so I know what all the references are about. The episode lists are spotty, but I'm working on the (possibly fatal) assumption that content will be added as the site grows and the full-episode lists will grow to fill in the gaps.

And if you're the sort of person that has Gerald McRaney withdrawals, there's even 50-something episodes of Major Dad available.


(and by the way, I can't believe it's been a month since I posted last. That's no way to hang on to either of my readers....)

kiwi humour

I thought I'd posted this a long time ago, but they came up in conversation recently and I realized they hadn't made it onto my corner of the internet:

One of our favorite aspects of New Zealand culture was the willingness to poke fun at themselves, and just about anything else. It even manifested itself in a government advertising campaign for home safety. The ACC - Accident Compensation Commission - pays for all medical bills resulting in any accidents, for anyone in New Zealand. (This takes the place of personal injury lawsuits, which are generally not allowed in the New Zealand court system). The ACC put out a series of TV ads to try to lower accident rates around the home, but the ads have a serious black humor to them.

For example, every time this ad came on TV, Kirsten started laughing uncontrollably:

More of the ads can be seen here. And here's one more that wasn't on-air while we were in NZ.

kiwi humour, part II

One more for you-

This is an official Australian tourism commercial that got a ton of play in NZ our last few months there. Apparently it created some controversy in the UK, since "bloody hell" was seen to be a bit dirty:

This is a NZ take on the ad, apparently put together by a consumer advocate program:

why they dissin' Attenborough?

I didn't understand it for Planet Earth, and I don't understand it now.

I had the good fortune to see the BBC "Planet Earth" series first in New Zealand and then parts of the second season in England.

The show's release dates followed me around the world. The Discovery Channel announced it would be showing Planet Earth, all two seasons worth, a few months after we returned to the States. I'm a sucker for nature documentaries, and I hadn't seen all the newer episodes, so I made it a point to tune in.

Until I heard Sigourney Weaver's voice. The BBC version (shown everywhere but the U.S.) had David Attenborough narrating, as it was meant to be.

I don't understand the point of it all. Or rather, I understand why Discovery decided to go with Weaver, and I don't agree with any of it. Who tuned in just to hear Sigourney Weaver? As relentlessly as they hyped the series, people would have watched the first few episodes if the only soundtrack was a chimp muttering to itself.

The sad part is the marketers were probably right; they might have lost viewers over the course of the show if people were forced to listen to a foreigner rather than a recognizable celebrity voihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifce. At least the comments at Amazon seem to show a significant portion of the American population fear anything delivered in an accent. People who accidently ordered the BBC version of the DVDs complain about being unable to understand Attenborough's thick accent. I can't imagine what they'd say if they were forced to listen to a Scot for a while.

The Discovery marketers are being underhanded again this week. I caught a bit of Blue Planet last night. Once again, I didn't hear the original Attenborough narration.

Of course, Discovery is hyping the hell out of this series as From the Creators of Planet Earth, without mentioning the fact it already aired this series a few years ago. As far as I can tell with a quick search, that time around they did use Attenborough. This time, however, they hired Pierce Brosnan to supply the new narration. As Kirsten said when I told her I thought they'd changed narration, "Why would they replace him with another Brit?" Especially when they're not even using his name to sell the series?

Discovery isn't explicitly mentioning the previously-aired fact, but the promotional material does say something like "with new material." I didn't see the original episodes, but I'm guessing the cutaway interviews with the crew shown during last night's episode weren't in the original. I actually like the extra commentary - the behind the scenes stuff for these series are at least as interesting as the series themselves. But they could have shown the original episode, followed by an hour-long look at how the same episode was shot.

At any rate, if I'm right about the new stuff at least there's some sense to having a new narrator, since the episodes would have had to be re-edited. This doesn't appease my dismay about the Sigourney Weaver thing.

The only explanation for the different Planet Earth commentary I've seen (other than the crass marketing purposes we can all assume) was written anonymously in a message board on the Internet, so it must be true. The gist of it was the U.S. broadcast needed to make more time for commercials than the British broadcast, so it had to be re-edited as well. (Not that I accept this necessitated a new narration track. Shows are edit to cut length all the time - every syndicated episode of the Simpsons is a few minutes shorter than the original to allow more commercial breaks. And on a tangent: I'm amazed that in this great society of ours, such a situation is allowed to continue. I can't believe the wise heads of the networks haven't hit on the obvious remedy: make the prime time shows that much shorter to squeeze in just as many commercials as the syndicated slots do.)

I can't afford a complete DVD library of the David Attenborough series' (although I contemplated buying a bunch of them in China) so for now, I'll just be thankful I have the the Internet.

everyone decided to go for the good news

This morning, I flipped over to the news channels to see what was going on. MSNBC and CNN were blaring coverage of Alberto Gonzales' resignation. Fox News, meanwhile, was devoting a large chunk of airtime to the Georgia team's win in the Little League World Series. The focus of the segment was the Georgia kids going over and hugging the devastated Japanese players who lost the final.
Actual quote from the female Fox anchor: "Oh, look at our little American boys!"

Kirsten always complains she wouldn't watch TV if it wasn't for me, that she doesn't really like having a TV.

Yet when I told her I'd finally wired the cable into our basement bedroom, her face lit up.

It's Comcastic!

Complaining about Comcast seems to be something of a favorite subject for Washington D.C. blogs. So far, I haven't dealt with the what I'm sure is horrible Comcast customer service department (our cable internet was down the last two days, but it seemed to be a problem with our cables and router).

I have noticed one fun quirk to the Comcast cable, however. Every time it starts to look like bad weather is on the way, such as this morning when an unusally strong wind caught my attention, one - and only one - channel starts to flip into occasional static. The Weather Channel. Of course.