Anthem Arrangements Raise A Red Flag Over Authorship - washingtonpost.com
Funny to read about this. I don’t like the version of the Star-Spangled Banner they’re playing at the Olympics, either. Sucks that it’s a rip-off, though.
Showing posts with label olympics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label olympics. Show all posts
18 August 2008
Olympic Fever 2
Thoughts from the first week of the Beijing Olympics:
- I really like the type treatment of “Beijing 2008” in the official logo.
- I like the idea that the picture of the man in the emblem is based on the Chinese character for the “jing” in “Beijing”, but the picture itself doesn’t look that cool to me.
- I can’t take volleyball seriously. Sorry. I won’t go as far as Slate does and call it not a sport, but it doesn’t look Olympic to me and, bikinis aside, I don’t think it merits prime time coverage instead of, say, bastketball.
- I wish instead of showing entire volleyball matches they’d use the time to show highlights from less popular sports. They seem to want to fool us into thinking everything is live, but viewers are pretty used to highlight reels. I think we’d be okay with it.
- I finally figured out why I don’t like women’s gymnastic floor routines: they’re forced to pretend to dance, but aren’t forced to do anything on beat. If there’s music playing, I want them to have to hit landings on rhythm. I admit I’m mostly uneducated in gymnastics, but I know music pretty well and don’t like it being there just for mood so a nymphet can prance around. In this regard I think the men are treated much more like adults who are respected athletes. Why not just let the women do actual gymnastics?
- Once you figure it out, NBC’s Olympic coverage website has lots of good stuff on it. You will have to install the Silverlight plug-in, which doesn’t run on non-Intel Macs.
- The Michael Phelps stuff really was exciting. The interview with him and Mark Spitz was amusing because it contrast Spitz, who’s clearly made a life of making inspirational speeches to young swimmers, with Phelps who could only muster cliches like “if you put your mind to it you can do anything”. I wonder how he’ll handle the burden of role modeling. Anyway, the best of his racing was the 4×100m freestyle relay, but the photo finish from Friday night was damn exciting. Sports Illustrated has a good set of pictures of that, and this piece discusses how the timekeeping technology works.
- Despite all that, Phelps’s last event couldn’t match Golden Girls spin-off Empty Nest in ratings.
12 August 2008
Olympic Fever
10 August 2008
07 August 2008
Olympic Medal Count Map - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
Olympic Medal Count Map - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
Scroll back and forth through the years to see how the diversity of the countries competing in the games changed over time.
05 June 2007
London, How do I Hate Thee? Let me Count the Ways, 1, 2... 2012
London, How do I Hate Thee? Let me Count the Ways, 1, 2… 2012
Reaction to the unveiling of the ugly, ugly logo for the 2012 Olympic games.
03 March 2006
Fast-Track Olympics Graphics
Apple fluff piece on how the on-screen graphics for the Olympics were done.
28 February 2006
On TiVo Top 10 Moments of Games Agony of Defeat Wins Out
On TiVo Top 10 Moments of Games Agony of Defeat Wins Out
Canadian skater Marie-France Dubreuil slamming to the ice was the most instant replayed moment of the games
16 February 2006
Skiing
I’ve begun to hate watching the men’s Olympic skiing events. Not because I don’t like skiing, but because of the voice. There’s some coach on that team who’s always yelling “you can do it” or “go get ‘em” or “come on, boy” at the players right before they start, and I can’t stand him.
13 February 2006
Olympic Schedule
Bravo to NBC for showing a replay of the primetime Olympics block every night at 1:30 AM. It solves the problem of having to decide between watching the Olympics and other networks’ primetime shows, like 24, which is new tonight. Most of the time networks go for an all or nothing approach. Admitting that some people might not watch your show and showing a rerun that night lets those people see it, along with anyone who happens to work during primetime instead of having to watch infomercials.
04 August 2004
The TiVolympics
PVRBlog has a good little rant on how NBC probably won’t do a good job covering the Olympics this year no matter how hard they try. It’s a tough problem: there are many more events than you can cover at any one time. Only some are very popular, but all have at least a small following. Since it’s happening in Greece, many events will occur in the middle of the night in the US, so internet reporting will beat network tape delay with the results. Here’s Matt Haughey’s suggestion:
You know what I’d do if I were NBC? Provide downloadable video of all sports, regardless of whether or not they aired on TV. Plus, I’d toss ads into them. You probably can’t air coverage of Archery on NBC in primetime, but imagine if you had every Archery event on the NBC servers. I bet companies selling bows and arrows would jump at the chance to buy an 30 second slot in a online-only video. You’d have happy fans and happy advertisers, because both NBC’s content and their advertising could reach their perfect audience: superfans.
Here’s my prediction: if in a couple months we hear NBC claim that internet downloads of pirate sports recordings cost them millions in lost revenue, know that a savvy network could have turned that kind of demand into a revenue source (via ads in downloadable video), instead of letting folks route around their damage. If NBC can’t look at someone cruising dozens of shady websites, then waiting hours to download a couple hours of shoddy video as extreme demand for something they’d happily pay for, then NBC has bigger problems than I thought.
If NBC had been thinking, they also could have plugged TiVo as the ultimate Olympics platform. Considering how much Olympics tickets cost, $99 for a TiVo box isn’t very much. They could air as many events as possible and supply very specific program data to TiVo so that viewers could set up Season Passes to certain sports. TiVo works 24 hours a day, so if a sport you cared about were on late at night it would still get recorded. Sure, people might still fast forward through the ads, but it’s better to have them fast forwarding through them then not have recorded them in the first place. (Networks would be well advised to do this with prime time television as well. Instead of worrying who’s going to win the Survivor/Friends battle this week, NBC and CBS could each rerun their primetime lineups late at night so that TiVo owners (and viewers with unusual schedules) could watch both.)
For as much time as networks spend trying to stifle new technology, none of them have realized how many hours there are between the end of the Late Late Show and the beginning of the Morning Show.
06 April 2004
NYC Cheers for Self
New York City is making a bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Today they released their campaign logo while (I can only hope) chearing for themselves in the exact same pose. Quoth the press release:
Our goal was to create a symbol for New York’s Olympic bid that would be instantly understood by anyone who saw it from anywhere around the world. The image speaks to the ethos of a city celebrating the Olympic Spirit, and nothing could say it better for New York than the image of the Statue of Liberty, with her outstretched arm holding the torch, joined to the arm of an athlete lifted in celebration.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)