Saturday, August 25, 2012

#RandomCookieMonsterQuotes

It's now been broken into multiple posts because the large post was just too much for web browser to handle.

Week 1 (August 10-16)

Week 2 (August 17-23)

Week 3 (August 24-30)

Week 4 (August 31-September 6)

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Fake Olympic Events

I started using the twitter hashtag #FakeOlympicEvents for anything new I come up with. Here is the complete list.

From the first list:
  1. 18 hole Golf (turns out this is new in 2016)
  2. Pitch-n-Putt
  3. Mini Golf
  4. 10 pin bowling
  5. Candle pin bowling
  6. Baseball
  7. Softball
  8. Horse Racing
  9. Cross Country Running (actually across the country)
  10. Cross Country Swimming
  11. Cross Country Cycling
  12. Shuffleboard
  13. White Water Polo
  14. Kayak Jumping
  15. White Water Swimming
  16. Cliff Diving
  17. Survivor
  18. Competitive Eating
  19. Competitive Drinking
  20. Yachting
  21. Iceberg Sailing
  22. Billiards
  23. Polo
  24. Light Saber Fencing
  25. M.C. Escher painting racing
  26. Boomerang Toss

From the Second list:
  1. Coin Toss
  2. Darts
  3. Men's Synchronized Swimming
  4. Cross-season triathlon
  5. Short-track running
  6. Skateboarding
  7. Synchronized Cycling
  8. Water Wrestling
  9. H-O-R-S-E
  10. Dog Show
  11. 15 Meter dash (Swimming)
  12. 15 Meter dash (Athletics)
  13. Cricket
  14. Rugby
  15. Horseshoes

And more from twitter:
  1. Beach Tennis
  2. Jousting
  3. Tag Team Tennis
  4. Tag Team Table Tennis
  5. Cheerleading
  6. Swimming Hurdles
  7. Sword Fighting
  8. Trip-wire Hurdles
  9. BMX Bicycle Hurdles
  10. Skee Ball
  11. Water Lacrosse
  12. White Water Obstacle Course
  13. a Gymnastics event scaling the Olympic rings
  14. Dueling
  15. Dueling with Pitchforks
  16. Moat Jumping (a derivative of track and field hurdles)
  17. Swimming in circles (athletic track style)
  18. Paint gun Shooting
  19. See-saw
  20. Swings (as in backyard swing set)
  21. Volley-Tennis (tennis with Beach Volleyball rules)
  22. Cross Country Sailing
  23. Human Obstacle Course
  24. Figure 8 Cycling
  25. Fishing
  26. Sandcastle building
  27. Co-ed Naked Beach Volleyball
  28. Dynamically/Randomly Moving Hurdles
  29. Floor Hockey
  30. Javelin Catching
  31. Slow Motion Running
  32. Low Jump
  33. Limbo
  34. Race Skipping (a form of race walking)
  35. Paddle boating
  36. Rock Climbing
  37. Racquetball
  38. Squash

And there you have it. Over 6 dozen fake, rejected, would-be, could-be, or should-be Olympic Events. And I still have more for the Winter Olympics.

Olympic Broadcasting

One thing I didn't go through the other day with my criticisms is how I would broadcast the Olympics if I were NBC.

NBC Sports Network is good. They start the day at 4am and finish it at 8pm (7pm Sundays because of the early Prime Time show). That's 9am-Midnight London time. They're on the right track.

MSNBC skims a few hours off of each end to protect their morning programming and dinner time programming. There's less going on those hours. It's okay.

CNBC shows Boxing. Weekends, they have 2 live sessions, but weekdays, they have 1 taped session. There should be another NBC network picking up the slack.

Bravo shows Tennis. I would have started with a Breakfast at Wimbledon-type show at 6:30am instead of going on at 7am. There is also play on the outer courts at 6:30am (11:30am London time) that should be shown. I did like how they stayed on the air after the scheduled 3pm end time. Maybe next time, schedule 'till 4pm and have a wrap up if time permits.

NBC Olympic Soccer and NBC Olympic Basketball channels. I like these channels.

NBC. Where do I begin?
Weekends - Start at 5am. Start at 6am. Start at 9am. It doesn't matter, as long as they don't neglect live action. But show it live across the country. They didn't do that the first weekend, but did it on the middle weekend. That's a disservice to the western half of the country.
Weekdays - I get that NBC has to protect the Today Show, and probably more importantly, the morning local news broadcasts with local traffic and weather inserts. So the live action starts at 9am. But show it live on the west coast too. Sounds like a conflict in programming. Let me show you how to fix it.
  • 9am ET/6am PT - The east coast feed of NBC and the west coast feed of USA Network show live Olympics coverage.

  • 12pm ET/9am PT - West coast viewers are told to switch from USA Network to NBC. East coast viewers don't have any change.

  • 5pm ET/2pm PT - East coast coverage on NBC ends. West coast coverage on NBC continues. Maybe it's a replay of the first 3 hours that were on USA Network. Maybe it's 3 more hours of original coverage that's also on the east coast feed of USA Network. Maybe it's a mix of the two.

  • Prime Time - It's a flawed formula (keeping marquee events for packaged-in-primetime viewing instead of showing them live). But it seems to work.
    Late Night - Haven't seen it once this Olympics. Maybe replay it on cable in the morning.

    NBCOlympics.com. They need to stream the NBC network feed. They did that over the middle weekend when it was live to all time zones. It needs to be live and streamed all the time. There also needs to be replays of the network-produced broadcasts (for instance, NBC showed the Women's Water Polo Gold Medal match. The NBC production wasn't online. And I haven't found a replay of the NBC production). I can watch it with a simple digital antenna, but not on a computer.

    Sunday, August 5, 2012

    Things to fix on Olympic broadcasts

    The 2012 London Olympics are past the half way point. Let me point out (as a fan and watcher) more than a few things that need to be fixed. Some are on the Olympic Broadcasting Company (the "host feed" if you will) and some are on NBC (the American broadcaster).

    • In individual and double head-to-head sports (such as tennis), ALWAYS include the player's name(s) and country. use the space available on the screen. In sports where the athletes are known, we want to know who they are. In any Olympic event with one or two players per side, the players' names should be made known.
    • In swimming, I like the usage of showing the countries and what place they're in (i.e. 1st at the touch, 1st, 2nd, 3rd at the finish), but in the medal races, it should indicate the medal colors with the places (i.e. 1st in gold, maybe with OR or WR, 2nd in silver, 3rd in bronze). Track (Athletics) should do the same.
    • In track, there should be a digital line showing the finish line since the camera angle doesn't seem to be perfectly aligned on it. Actually, do this for any event with a finish line so that it stands out.
    • I saw in swimming online a graphic that showed the order of touch on the wall with the time behind the leader the first 3 positions were. I didn't see this graphic on NBC. It would be very helpful.
    • In doubles, leave spaces around the "/" between the names to make it more readable. Create space to show the names properly.
    • NBC - it's ok to package things for primetime, but let us watch live on cable too. It should help overall more than it hurts.
    • The horses should be moved to Oxygen exclusively (NBC still owns that channel, right?). They did that once, i think. Tennis has its own channel, and it works.
    • If there's a soccer match on the Soccer channel, unless it's Team USA, don't show it on MSNBC/NBCSN. Take that time to show either another soccer match, or another sport. Give the other sports some more love.
    • Online (NBCOlympics.com), tell us which feeds have NBC announcers, which ones have other announcers, and which ones have no announcers (I saw it's a choice in some feeds to hear the host feed in English, Spanish, or the natural audio once you're listening to it). And don't hide the announcers on rewinds/replays.
    • And put the NBC network feed online too. How does it hurt? I saw it on the middle weekend, but not during the week. The difference, the middle weekend, NBC was live coast-to-coast, but during the week, it's tape delayed out west. I can get NBC for free with an antenna, so the online advertising won't hurt that.
    • In tennis, and other set-based events, show the scores of each set instead of the number of sets won. I've seen that problem in tennis broadcasts outside of the U.S. outside of the Olympics. Sometimes they do it "right", and sometimes they hide the player's name and scores from other sets. No rhyme or reason to it.
    • On swimming, and probably track, either NBC or the Olympic Broadcasting host feed needs to mark somewhere on the screen which event this is (especially the race's length). Say it's the 100M freestyle (or at least say it's a 100M race).
    • For the love of God, why do we have Ryan Seacrest? And Michelle Beadle should get the midday shift on NBCSN so more people can see her.
    • Michelle Beadle should not have been used in a time slot when few people were watching. I like waking up to her, but she's off the air not long after that, and the west coasters don't even get that much of her. She should have the NBCSN mid-day slot after Willie Geist (seriously, Jim Lampley wasn't available?).