Phelps’ athletic achievements make strange bedfellows with his well-publicized history of marijuana use.
So Michael Phelps is retiring as the most decorated and over-exposed athlete in Read the rest of this entry »
Archives for posts with tag: London Olympics 2012
Chinese champion Dong Dong looks at the world below, from upside-down.
The trampoline just doesn’t enjoy the same status as artistic gymnastics. It’s relegated to a status even lower than rhythmic gymnastics by most of the press. (And I have a special place in my heart for rhythmic gymnastics.) Nobody goes wild for trampolining? Maybe some network executives and the world at large should see more of Dong Dong, the Chinese Read the rest of this entry »
Matthew Mitcham exposes the insole from the Australian uniform footwear. He always brings something unique – even to a uniform.
Though his generation is guilty of turning the ukelele into a hipster accoutrement that has transgressed the line of cute and simple into unbearable and overdone, especially in ostensibly sincere but more accurately cloying covers, Matthew Mitcham has once again beaten the odds and made the instrument fleetingly fun.
He first beat the odds first four years ago in Beijing when he knocked off China’s two top divers in the final round of dives to win the gold medal in Read the rest of this entry »
I accidentally gave myself a Rorschach test while looking at the flag borne by the leader of the Russian athletes in this procession. I’ve already discussed my great displeasure in the design. Now matters are more complicated as I’ve discovered two bulbous penises engaged in what I imagine to be frottage.
Just as I reckoned that the unflattering grey Read the rest of this entry »
Team U.S.A. celebrates their gold medal in what I can only call Gulag Grey.
Why are the U.S. athletes on the podium dressed like proletariats from the Cold War Soviet Union? Did Nike want to remind us of the decadence of the bourgeoisie by putting dour grey uniforms on American athletes as they ascended the podium? Shapeless factory grey Read the rest of this entry »
Wimbledon and the Olympics have been stealing my viewing time. It sounds like I’m a sports fan but I’m not. This will end soon. I also watched the re-broadcast of the National Parks doc series on PBS and anyone who’s watched a Ken Burns series knows the time commitment involved. Losing hours a day to these events has made for another short movie list. By the way, I know that is not the real London Olympics logo but I just can’t look at it any more. It’s terrible. I like this one much better. Three word reviews continue.
78 – Persepolis – Terrific, unexpected, moving
79 – Prometheus – Effects, no story
80 – The Amazing Spiderman – Garfield beats Maguire
81 – Paper Heart – hipsters, awesome dioramas
82 – The Dark Knight Rises – good, not great
I gather Eric Perkins won this partially for playing tennis for 36 straight hours for a charity. Could NBC put him on this task indefinitely?
Like almost everyone, I hate NBC for their inept and insulting Olympics coverage. I want to see world-class athletes from not just the U.S. competing in real time every second I look at a screen, not commentators making small talk and making observations that a three-year-old child could state from looking at the television: “She fell down!”
I don’t want to hear how inarticulate the U.S. girl gymnasts (watch the interview, they’re not women) are in interviews with the banal, unqualified Ryan Seacrest. The network wants to show us, “Hey, these are just girls like your kids.”
But they’re not. They’re elite athletes who’ve foregone the better part of most kids’ childhoods to make the Olympic team. Don’t show me how they’re like the girl next door.
Show me how they’re not.
Just when I think that NBC cannot sink lower with with drivel from Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera, we have a local Minnesota correspondent to help us vicariously experience London and the Games. In the Twin Cities, that means our NBC affiliate KARE-11 has sent its sports director over – once again – to behave as an obnoxious, ignorant tourist and deliver what someone somewhere considers to be laffs.
Instead of presenting us with Olympic contenders as the girls next door, Eric Perkins insists that you take the trip to London along with him as a regular Joe.
Why can’t we send someone exceptional who will show us he is not a regular Joe? I don’t want jokes from a very, very unfunny sportscaster. I want a constant feed of information that I don’t already know or can’t plainly see being played out in front of me.
Please take this sample of his sportscaster comedy routine and time how long it takes you to cry uncle.
Instead of laughing, I am hurling hateful epithets and invectives at the screen. This is why I do not watch local news. How could such an onscreen idiot be a leader at a network station? Worse still, is he really reflective of his audience?
Do they think this joke is funny?:
“What happens if I stand by the top of that big clock, Big Ben, and ask, what time is it?”
Well, I watched the local news, heaven help me, and that’s just what he did, over and over and over, humiliating the United States with his stupidity set on repeat – a nauseating attempt at the American everyman on the street of London. “Do you know what time it is?” People look at their phones or watches instead of Big Ben. Then Eric Perkins looks at the camera in disbelief at what we’re asked to view as the dumbness of the pedestrians in his pathetic prank.
That’s the joke. We have reached the Idiocracy “Oh, my balls!” moment before, but now it’s sticking.
***
This is this dipshit’s fifth time to go to the Olympics. Maybe he does know sports, but there’s no hint of it here. And maybe he knows his audience, which is upsetting to me, because then the audience is as stupid as he comes off as.
He’s purposefully disseminating and even escalating the foreign assumption that Americans celebrate ignorance and idiocy. In fact, if he’s who we send to five different Olympics, we’re even rewarding it.
Londoners for Eric Perkins: He could also have an encounter with Luther‘s Alice. I’ll bet she mixes a mean drink.
A professional sportscaster who takes world-class athletic competition seriously deserves to be the correspondent. And I deserve to have a viewing experience that does not force my mind into the dark place, this time an irrepressible, unfortunate scenario with Eric Perkins practicing his idiot American tourist routine whilst stepping into the wrong alley of London, popping out some line in his supposedly comical British accent like, “Oh dear, a hooligan!” before one of the more twisted psychopaths from Luther pulls his own trick with something shiny, sharp, and silver, and then slips Perkins’ slippery, still warm vocal cords into a jar labelled “American.” I don’t want Perkins to die; I want him to irretrievably lose the power of speech.
I know, it’s horrible. But it’s Eric Perkins’ only chance to make me laugh.
I don’t like that the Olympics are every two years now. I just don’t. It’s less special and there’s something lost when you can’t switch between summer and winter sports at the same time. That’s a pretty neat trick.
Whether you like sports or not, I think most people are interested in the opening ceremony, especially since China’s splashy show in 2008. It really raised the bar into grand spectacle. Film director Zhang Yimou helmed that show and was aided by the Read the rest of this entry »
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