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Games of the XXIX LOLympiad

Apparently up to one hundred and twenty hours of sport took place every day of the Olympics. It makes me wonder why they don’t spread it out over a few months so we can watch all of it. And it makes me wonder why Channel 7 thinks it should run ten minute ad breaks. Having SBS broadcast also was good in that we had more choice, but it didn’t eventuate well - SBS decided they needed to run ads far too often for a non-commercial station, and I usually wanted to watch the sport on both channels or neither channel.

Of the sixteen days of competition, I probably went out and watched in the company of the cool kids on at least ten. It’s much better with company.

The absolute highlight of the games was Sally McLellan. There’s not much can be said of her, it has to be seen.

I think I did I dunno, I got out, did you see me? I was standing at the start and I was just… did you see how pumped I was? I was probably more pumped than I’ve ever been in my life! And I just got out, look I don’t even know how I got out, I got over the hurdles, I… like, shit! I could see the girl pass me, saw Lolo pass me… just keep running your own race keep running your own race… and I did!

Complete with running actions at the appropriate times. The greatest moment in Australian Olympic history. For. Sure.

I reactivated my facebook account just to add her as a friend. When dad saw the interview he just shook his head and muttered, “She’s a fruitcake.”

Usain Bolt on the other hand, is a complete fool. He is a great, great athlete, but simultaneously sums up all that is utterly irrelevant to humanity. Just imagine how his name would be remembered forever if he was a genuinely humble man. As it is he will be forgotten, along with every other hyperbole in a world full of hyperbole.

Probably the second best bit of the games was the 200m men’s final. Bolt won. For many years I have been fighting the urge to entertain thoughts of violence against (usually American) sprinters who prance around with their heads up… yeah you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, the American Wallace Spearmon thought he came second, though he actually came third. But he was quickly disqualified for running in his neighbour’s lane. For a full five minutes he failed to notice his disqualification and pranced around with Bolt like nobody’s business. I was glued to the television! I was so desperate to see him realise he was disqualified. In the end it wasn’t as great as it could have been, but it was still painful yet fantastic to watch.

The opening ceremony was good, but boring. The only exciting bit was when the lights went out and those drumming kids had glowing drumsticks. The closing ceremony was fairly boring, though London’s humourously pathetic part provided some entertainment, albeit the wrong type.

The Australian women’s basketball team uniform is bad bad bad. All the other teams wear the usual basketball shorts and singlet. Why does the Australian team need a tight one-piece swimsuit thing? It made watching them play fairly uncomfortable.

The beach volleyball suffers the same kind of problem. The men’s competition was good to watch, but not the women’s. The Australian Tamsin Barnett is an impressive player.

The German women’s football goalkeeper is a very angry lady. My brother and I noticed it during a game - every time the camera was on her she was yelling and gesturing and looking quite sour. After laughing at this for a few minutes we discovered that her name was Nadine Angerer. Genius.

The brand new event, Grown-ups on kids bikes (also known as BMX) was good, but so short. Each race was all of forty seconds. The results in both the men’s an women’s finals was the same - the main field all within a few seconds of each other, the Australian one minute behind them, and two DNFs. Crashes are fun though.

As Channel 7 cut away to an ad break they show a short animation and logo type screen, the type of thing you never really pay attention to. During the rowing events there was an animation that I didn’t take much notice of, until one day i realised what it was. It was an oar in water, but I had been subconsciously thinking it was a giant pair of tongs pulling a piece of paper out of a fiery swirl of chocolate. It probably says something profound about television when that’s what I had been thinking, but I had never stopped to question it, but I wouldn’t know what.

Stephanie Rice and Michael Phelps are a bit greedy. For some reason we got the impression they wanted to do these ones:

Olympic sport isn’t the greatest, though when they include cricket it will be much better. But the more I do it, the more I think that watching sport with mates is what mankind was made for.

Talking And Eating

I broke the site feeds the other week. I’ve fixed them up again now. I’ve also included a FeedBurner feed, so if you’re scared of getting lost, there’s that. I’ll try not to let it happen again.

As I tend to do with social networks, I signed up with Twitter way back when. I didn’t touch it until this week. It almost has potential. I mean, of course it’s useful, plenty of people use it. I don’t quite get it yet. Apparently they have just recently disabled the sending of text messages. When and if that comes back, it will be cool. I would love to be able to send a note to Twitter and have it be sent to a group of mates via SMS. Though that would only really work well if I could sort my followers into groups and then send a message only to that group. I can’t do that, as far as I know. It’s cool that there’s plenty of ways to talk to Twitter. If only there were as many ways for it to talk back. I dunno. Who uses Twitter? If you do, what for and how?

Maybe It’s Just the Limitation of the Medium

The Ill and the Well

Windows Ex-Explorer

The Devoted Few Tracks

At last.fm you can download a bunch of tracks from The Devoted Few. First thing you wanna do is check out Sleep Less. If you like it as much as I do then you’ll download all the rest of the tracks. If you don’t like Sleep Less then download the Patriarch remix of It’s Over, and then you’ll want to download all the rest too.

Tour Thousand and Eight

I am busy. Much busier than I have been in a long time. But that doesn’t matter, what does matter is that the Tour de France was great.

Myself and the other rad kids stayed up late and watched nearly all the stages of the tour. So much fun. There were quite a few highlights and funny incidents, which due to not being written down, have been forgotten.

A serious highlight was the doping testing. Riders were caught and ejected straight away in a targeted testing scheme, which seemed to work really well. It means that at the end of the race only two early stage results are in doubt. Riders will be more loathe to take on the man next year I think.

There were a few crashes, one spectacular fall down the side of a mountain, but the one that sticks in my mind was German-Australian Heinrich Haussler’s collision with a rather large woman who ended up splayed out on the ground like a starfish, with her top end heading down into a ditch and her feet up on the side of the road.

Unfortunately Cadel Evans couldn’t hold it together in the final stages. Team CSC Saxo Bank - namely the spittin’ Schleck brothers and one Stuart O’Grady - had Evans under the pump and he couldn’t run with Carlos Sastre when he made his break and got a lead large enough that Evans couldn’t make it up in the time trial on the second last stage. I was hoping that if Evans couldn’t take the win then Vladimir Efimkin could come up with something, simply because of the endless humour gained by yelling “Come on effing-keen!”

I was a bit sad that Mauricio Soler dropped out after stage five. After his efforts last year I would have liked to see him on the mountains again. I was thoroughly entertained by Stefan Schumacher though, who came from nowhere to take the stage wins in both the time trials. Insert pun about his namesake in the Formula 1…

Throughout the tour we refined an idea that we thought would make the tour much better. The idea was equally inspired by the picture breakup when transmitted from the motorcycles catching the action, Greg LeMond’s beast of an exercise bike, the Tour computer game advertised on the Tour de France website, our general tiredness, and the hysterical idea of using sandpaper to create road rash on cyclists who have fallen off their virtual bike. If you can’t guess from that, our idea was to make the entire tour a computer-based simulation. The idea that after a crash your bike disappears and then reappears stationary and blinking in the middle of the road may have contributed too. We figure that this way the tour can go anywhere you want it to - across the world if the organisers so decide. It also means that the organisers do not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on caravans of vehicles and numerous helicopters to get footage. The idea was confirmed as feasible when Catalyst ran an advert for a science in sport episode showing the following;

This system would also negate the need for helmets, and that’s what all the riders want. One big downside would be that Škoda would get even more control over the graffiti on the road, and we’d be left without the word ‘SEX’ with an accompanying arrow pointing towards a caravan plastered across the road. Ima totally buy me a Škoda.

The Ultimate Balance Challenge for a Boy