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Monday Morning Cute: Training for Rio de Janeiro, 2016
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Tag Archives: Olympics
This Week in WTF, August 10, 2012
– Rep. Steve King (R-Idiocracy) found the microfiche of President Obama’s 1961 birth announcement in two Hawaiian newspapers. While he can’t deny the likely authenticity of these announcements, he also cannot rule out the possibility that he is insane (that is the only explanation I can think of for Rep. King’s subsequent wild-eyed speculation):
We went down into the Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers in Hawaii each of which had published the birth of Barack Obama. It would have been awfully hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they keep of all the newspapers published. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on.
No word yet on whether he has considered the possibility of time travel. Or space aliens. Or improbable quantum fluctuations creating Barack Obama, fully formed, from a pile of aluminum recycling.
– Fox News doesn’t think our Olympic champions are being patriotic enough, because they don’t compete decked out from head to toe in American flag regalia or something. Our athletes should do it to show how America is exceptional, and also because other nations do it, but America is still exceptional, because shut up. (If you can make it through then entire almost-5-minute clip from Fox News in the linked article, you are made of stronger stuff than I.)
– Bryan Fischer compares kidnapping children from gay or lesbian parents to freeing slaves, thus failing at both American history and basic human decency. I wish I was making this story up.
Photo credit: ‘Oahu’ by Earth Sciences and Image Analysis, NASA-Johnson Space Center [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
This Week in WTF, August 3, 2012
– Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron disses presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney:
“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”
– So does London Mayor Boris Johnson.
– Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) likens the Obamacare contraception mandate to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. No really, this happened.
– A former Chick-fil-A employee is suing the company because of reasons:
Former Chick-fil-A employee Brenda Honeycutt is suing the company for gender discrimination, alleging that owner and operator of Duluth, Georgia’s Chick-fil-As, Jeff Howard, fired her so that she could be a “stay home mother” despite her “satisfactory-to-above-satisfactory employment history with the company.
“During the Plaintiff’s employment, Defendant Howard routinely made comments to the Plaintiff suggesting that as a mother she should stay home with her children,” the lawsuit states.
– A church in Mississippi, one of the states composing our allegedly post-racial nation, refused to marry a couple because they are black:
A black couple in Crystal Springs, Mississippi says that a predominantly white Baptist church refused to let them get married because of their race.
Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson told WLBT that the day before they were to be married, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs informed them the ceremony would have to be moved due to the reaction of some white church members — even though the couple had attended the church regularly.
“The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if [the pastor] went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church,” Charles Wilson explained.
We have to respect the delicate feelings of “some white church members,” amirite? I can’t wait to hear if there’s a non-discriminatory explanation.
– A small airplane towing a banner with a marriage proposal crashed in Rhode Island, after the pilot had to ditch. The pilot was found uninjured, after his apparently genius 8 year-old son helped the Coast Guard locate him. No word on whether the intended recipient of the proposal said yes.
– A puppeteer on a Christian-themed children’s show in Florida is arrested for conspiracy to kidnap children and, uh, other stuff. It sounds like police have evidence of some pretty heinous stuff, but it is not clear exactly what he actually did regarding the kidnapping conspiracy charge, versus what he just talked about doing. Technically, “extensive Internet chats about eating children” are not illegal in and of themselves without taking a furher step……you know, I don’t really want to talk about this.
– Some Breitbartian named John Nolte thinks that a new Skittles ad promotes bestiality or something. In other words don’t chase your Chick-fil-A sandwich with Skittles. Or Oreos. I’ll have to get back to you on which candies and cookies have the Almighty’s stamp of approval.
Photo credit: ‘Russia stamp no. 1030 – 2012 Summer Olympics bid’ by Russian Post/Beltyukov V., painter [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Odd Olympic Editing
With live streaming of most events, NBC seems to be doing a pretty good job of allowing us to see as much of the Olympics as possible. With one major exception: they omitted a musical number in the opening ceremonies in favor of a bland interview with a rather bland athlete. The musical number may or may not have been a tribute to the victims of the July 7, 2005 terror attacks in London. Why NBC would omit that is still beyond me, but NBC’s explanation defies comprehension:
When asked about editing the song-and-dance performance, an NBC Sports spokesman responded in a statement: “Our program is tailored for the U.S. television audience. It’s a credit to [opening ceremony producer] Danny Boyle that it required so little editing.”
I’m not sure if this is a way of damning Danny Boyle with faint praise, or if I should feel insulted that NBC doesn’t think I, as an American, could normally understand British television without the help of Danny Boyle and NBC. Either way, this is fishy.
NBC has exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, and it seems like we are subject to trademark warnings in almost every commercial break. Given that, you’d think they would at least have the courtesy not to blatantly edit something as major as the opening ceremony.
Admit it, this does not contribute to the game itself in any way
Sports viewers, by and large, tend to be male. Statistical support or no, that is the conventional wisdom.
Male television viewers, by and large, tend to like certain things. These things are also part of conventional wisdom, statistical support or no: violence, beer, boobs. (This is not an exhaustive list, by the way.)
So how do marketers get more people (i.e. guys) to watch the Olympics?
Violence: there’s only so much you can do to make Olympic sports more violent, and the potential cost in international relations probably outweighs any benefit to ratings.
Beer: even the most hardcore boozehound would probably agree that the middle of a mountain biking run or a swim meet is not the best time to down a few.
Boobs: Hmmmmm…tell me more……
(h/t to Ragen) Let’s face it, there is no athletic advantage to wearing skimpy outfits, unless the knowledge that lots of people are staring at your bum improves your game. As Aussie blogger Lauredhel said in preparation for the 2008 Olympics:
No. It’s not about faster, higher, stronger. Women in sports are promoted as sexualised bodies for ogling; men are promoted as performers.
She offered a side-by-side comparison of male and female athletic outfits for the Australian teams, such as:
In case you can’t see the image, on the left is a male beach volleyball player in a comfortably-baggy jersey and shorts that reach at least halfway down his thighs. On the right are two female players with remarkable abs. We know this because we can see all of them, and can offer a clinic description of the muscle tone in their thighs.
Not quite a year ago, the Badminton World Federation, trying to combat the problem of no one ever watching badminton, tried to mandate that female players wear skirts. They quickly ditched that rule in the face of massive criticism. They need to either find a different way to drum up interest in the sport, or just admit that few people enjoy watching a sport with a game piece called a shuttlecock.
Now, it would not add anything to my experience of watching the Olympics to put male athletes into similarly-revealing uniforms, nor would it add anything to the actual performance of the Games themselves.
But neither would it take away from my experience of watching the Olympics (or their performance) to put female athletes into uniforms that make a bit more athletic sense. Plus, it’s not about me. There is some evidence that all this sexifying is turning girls away from getting involved in sports at all, and that’s bad in and of itself.
If I want to see beautiful ripped women in skimpy clothes in various states of sweatiness, Rule 34 dictates that it is available to me at any time on the internet. If I want to see world-class displays of athletic prowess, that only happens a few times a decade.
Consider this an example of my point and/or eye candy. Here’s Croatian high jumper Blanka Vlašić in Greece in 2009. She probably could have performed just as well with a bit more clothes on and still done a sexy dance:
All of this said, I am sure I will still watch beach volleyball this summer.