Fuzzypictures's Weblog

i am very disappointed in the coverage that NBC is providing us here in america and who knows where else, on the olympics. my background having been involved in network television for CBS i have a pretty good idea of what it takes to produce a remote show. usually the network sends it’s best people out from NYC to supervise and run the technical aspect of coverage.

the essence of television, where it shines best is in live coverage of events. think back to world changing events you remember and ask yourself how do you remember it? most likely it will have been on a television set somewhere. i remember landing our on the moon, where i was and who i was with and remarking how the landing looked exactly like stanley kubrick’s 2001 a space odyssey to dennis sitting on the couch next to me.  do we remember where we were when we got the news of NASA’s challenger explosion?  i was in a network control room watching it every time it aired for over 12 hours that day.

my wife and i got so bored with the opening ceremonies that we turned it off as did our grandchildren ages 14 & 12 at their house.  groucho marx once remarked about how educational television was that ‘ every time it comes on he leaves the room to read a book’ but one can’t fault NBC for this boring event. it’s the other coverage or lack of that bothers me.

to me the olympics are the best of the best people competing in a sport. i for one would like to see the winners even if they aren’t americans on the podiums. hey what about seeing all three together, are the networks so afraid of another raised fist demonstration by the winners. it’s the contestants stage to do with as they want, their moment in the sun  to show the world something about them, they earned it. so if they want to make a political statement why not?

  isn’t this a political statement? reminds me of the cookie monster in a way doesn’t it?

so what we are getting is an edited american version of world competition  and winners faces in close-up. don’t you just        love how some american winners silently  mouth the words to the star spangle banner , it seems so artificial to me. but then  again i know the words, some may not and need a refresher course.

if you’ve gotten this far with me i am going into the individual posting of scoring. i noticed the final contestant in women’s and men’s gymnastics personal scores weren’t posted on screen, only the winning teams  score as if the individuals score wasn’t worth seeing. well not here in america no matter who the winner was. yes there has always been metal count and tooting your horn but hey these people are the ones who are fillers between the all important commercial breaks.  i haven’t timed it but normal television shows are only 21 minutes long these days. i remember the days when the shows were 46 minutes long. those long five minutes   have been lost.

what about the post game interviews with winded american athletes by corespondents asking silly questions. most europeans i know can speak at least three languages where we can only manage one sometimes not very well at that. so we only get interviews with the americans because of the dumbing down of the correspondent. great…… lets show the world how uneducated we really are. you’d think that NBC could find an interpreter to speak with the winner in their own language. it doesn’t take much to ask in russian or chinese how did it feel out there when?

so i am not even watching the best of the best nor counting metals. but wait NBC isn’t even showing all the events what about gymnastics like rings? see another article here. if these people are the best of the best in sports coverage along with tape delay then i think this network is in big trouble. least we now know of the twitter flap over Guy Adams who shared Gary Zenkel NBC Olympics president email address and had his twitter account suspended only to be reinstated after world got out.

i guess i am not mainstream america in that i see so much money being spend on sports and salaries when people are starving on the streets of the world. what a cruel fearful world we live in, when we are all only a step away from destitute. where we only get to see the winners in close-up fearful they to might do something embarrassing. television is a neat place with neat homes and nice people using bright shiny products.

what we get for our money is a nice neat boring world scrubbed clean by some network bosses not wanting to show a world as it is or could be. i’d rather read a book.

and what about the london 2012 olympic  fonts they must have been jobed out to the lowest bidder who had a total lack of typographic training.  i think graphic high should be able to do a better job than this. and all of this 4 years after the chinese olympics. is the west really in deep do do or what? if the chinese weren’t doing such terrible things and planning more to the tibetans i might consider moving there, except for lithium? or kiss your arses good by tibet. as lithium is used in battery production which we seemed to be needing more and more of, oh well you get the drift.

say good night gracie

thanks for flying with me. jene