Brain Drippings

As the Olympics draw nearer the end a few things have coalesced: The Shani Davis incident, Emily Hughes, Bode Miller, Lindsey Jacobellis, Janica Kostelic, the Austrian Team and their coach, Michelle Kwan, and a host of others. It’s anyone’s guess what story will finally capture the attention of the world press, though I feel fairly confident it won’t be the story that deserves it. Let’s start with Shani Davis. He is a excellent speed-skater who made the Olympic team for several events, including the team pursuit event. Two days before the event he informed the team he would not compete in that event. Now, there could be many reasons for not wanting to compete, but there is simply no excuse for waiting until the last minute to make that decision. Contrast that with how Michelle Kwan behaved; putting her team and her sport in front of herself. Shani Davis deprived himself and three of his teammates a nearly certain Gold Medal in the event because he had an event, not the next day, but two days later. He chose himself. That’s fine, and I don’t fault him for that. After all, most people would. But I still say Michelle deserves praise and recognition for her behavior. The coverage continues to be abysmal. I could go on for pages about how poor a job NBC does, but what’s the point? They are safe with a long term contract and have no reason to change their ways, even in the face of getting their asses handed to them by the likes of American Idol in the ratings.

Once again NBC covers the Olympic games, and once again their coverage of the games falls to new depths of suckage. Coverage focuses on the American competitors to the exclusion of everyone else, and there is a constant barrage of badly converted measurements to try and obfuscate that ‘confusing’ metric system. This conversion is not as appallingly bad as in the Summer Olympics, where track and field events never even tell you the actual measurements and instead convert ever jump and throw to feet and inches, but is still bad. A example from Saturday’s tape-delayed (Yes, the US is apparently the only country in the world where live sporting events are delayed many hours so that the coverage of the ‘premier’ events—skating and those where the US might win medals—happen in Prime Time) pairs ice skating. When the Russian couple completed their short program NBC cut immediately to commercial. Despite promising to return with their scores when NBC returned from the break all we were told was that the Russian team was in second place. Nice, eh? NBC’s tape-delaying means that the entire Internet is basically completely off-limits unless you want to know the results 6 or 8 or maybe even 10 hours in advance. If the IOC had a spine, they would insist that all coverage be live. The only bright spot is that curling is not a premier event, so I usually get to watch that live. Expect the tape-delays in 2008 (Beijing) to occasionally exceed 24 hours.

The recent publication of ‘blasphemous’ cartoons in the European Press has highlighted the differences in the concepts of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press between Europe and the US. Sure, if those same cartoons had been published here there would have been controversy, but I seriously doubt that would have evolved into burning down embassies and murder. Naive, perhaps. The various comments further highlight the division between the US and Europe. For example the Pope said that “Freedom of Speech does not imply the freedom to offend.” Well, of course it does. In fact, I would say that the freedom to offend is the most essential and important portion of the whole Freedom of Speech thing. There have, as far a s I know, been no bombing, burning, or murders in response to the The Arab European League’s publication of cartoons offensive to christians and jews (the current cartoon makes fun of the 6 million people killed in the Nazi concentration camps). Click the picture for a link to all 12 of the cartoons that have led to so much death and destruction at the hands of the intolerant and fundamentalist arm of the Muslim faith. Although, really, since none of the cartoons are funny, it’s kind of a waste of time. Of course the protest is not that the cartoons are not funny, but rather that they dare to portray Mohammed. Period. For the record, the idea for the cartoons came about because an author, Kåre Bluitgen, unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his children’s book about Mohammed; or those who would would only work anonymously.