Tellin' It Like It Is

Bob Harris may have a weird preference for the Kona side of Hawai'i Island (I won't say inexplicable, because that's just a given when Kona is preferred to Hilo), and he may not post often or regularly, but when he does, he can be counted upon to post something good. For example:

What I forgot, of course, is that unusually few Americans are even watching the Olympics this year, partly because NBC always manages to make the games almost completely unwatchable, interrupting a perfectly enjoyable three-hour block of Visa card commercials with short bursts of actual athletics. These are terribly distracting from the main subject of the Olympics, which is of course Bob Costas. I understand that for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, NBC is planning not to show any events at all, but merely let Bob Costas sit around a studio with friends, strumming a guitar, while Visa card ads play continuously on three cable networks. This will finally eliminate all those pesky images of world-class athletes which so vex the Olympic viewer.

You may read the entire post here.

I have been avoiding the Olympics for years because of all the commercials and talking heads and pointless "human interest" stories that NBC seems to think are so much more interesting than actual events. (Not that the Olympics couldn't be spruced up a bit: I think they should make the alpine ski runs cross the Biathlon course. That'd be some good watchin'.) But I did watch me a few Olympic moments this year, and I have to give NBC one eensy-weensy kudo: rather than make us watch a whole hour (crammed, of course, into four hours — see above) of straight figure skating, for example, they switched events about every hour (TV time; 15 minutes in event time), so we weren't stuck with an entire evening o' crap. (On the other hand, we had to watch said evening in its, well, entirety to catch the brief spells of non-crap.)

And, à propos of this Bob Harris posting, I gotta mention my own recent reason for having not so much confidence in our air-travel infrastructure: according to the electronic ticket kiosk (where you print out your e-ticket boarding passes at the airport), my trip from Virginia to Hilo, Hawaii, involved an international flight. (Yet at no point in my entire trip was I asked to produce my passport... .)