5 Things on a Friday: The Case of the Roll-Up Television

Happy Friday, everyone.

The good news is that the ludicrously frigid cold that has enveloped the Northeast for the past month of so seems finally to have passed.  The bad news is that it is supposed to rain all damn day today, potentially ruining what otherwise would have been a truly excellent ski weekend in the Berkshires.

Will we, or won't we?

Argh.

5 Things on a Friday: the Dark Lords of Sport

Happy Friday, folks.  I hope everyone out there in Internet Land is having a day.

I'm reusing this one.  Hope you don't mind.

Let's get it on!

Friday Mad Science: The Curious Case of Ryan Lochte

Rio officials said that a security guard did brandish a weapon at American swimmers, but “there was no robbery” https://t.co/xMip4CQG4F

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 19, 2016

Friday Mad Science: Phelps is King

What a 200 IM last night by the greatest swimmer of all time!  Phelps took the butterfly out easy, looked a little uncomfortable but held serve on the backstroke, and I told my wife, "If they can't put pressure on him in the breaststroke, he's going to destroy this field when they hit the freestyle."

That is exactly what happened.

Odds & Ends: Olympics (Day 1)

First off, I heard "Bang Your Head" yesterday on my way to the train, and it's been stuck in my brains ever since.  It's got to be the toughest heavy metal song ever written, so here you go:

Five Things on a Friday: The Cosmic Olympic Edition

I’ve only really got two things on my mind this week--the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Olympics.  Take that for what it’s worth.

1. Guardians Trailer Feedback.

The trailer for this summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie premiered on Tuesday night, and then I ran it on the blog on Wednesday morning.  I liked the trailer tremendously, of course, but beyond that, here’re my initial thoughts:

Five Things on a Friday: Winter Olympic Edition

Happy Friday!  Hope you guys had a good week.

Let’s get to it.

1. I Feel Bad for Shaun White.

White in 2008, before his corporate
makeover.

Snowboarding legend Shaun White went to the Olympics this year to win his third gold medal and to cement his legacy in the sport—if such was actually needed.  For more than a decade, White has been Michael Jordan to a sport full of righteous dudes, which maybe explains both his dominance in the sport and the fact that his fellow snowboarders don’t seem to like him very much.  Personally, I don’t care what his competitors think; if he’s the only one who cares enough about winning to take the sport seriously and train like an athlete, then he deserves to win.  

Except that he didn’t.  In fact, his entire Olympic experience looks pretty miserable so far.

Water Polo Update

If you're looking for something to watch on the Olympics today, the USA's women's team plays for gold this afternoon at 3 pm.  I somehow managed to miss their semi-final game against Australian on Tuesday, but they won it by a goal in what was supposed to be a pretty exciting game.  This game promises to be a good one, too.  The Americans are playing Spain, and from what I've seen of that Spanish team, it's a really good team despite the fact that this is the first time that the Spanish have fielded a women's water polo team.

If the USA wins today, it'll be America's first ever gold medal in women's water polo.  The match is gonna be carried live on NBC.  Or you can watch it online.

If you're wondering, the men got clobbered yesterday in their quarter-final round match against Croatia.  I don't know what to say about that.  I mean, the USA men's team looked really, really good in the early parts of the tournament, but then they lost by five goals to Serbia, and after that, they fell apart.  Hungary beat them something like 8-2, and Croatia yesterday beat them by a similar score.  Depressing.

The US hasn't won a gold in water polo since 1904.  But last Olympics they surprised and won silver, and this year the squad was a favorite to medal once again.  They went through three games undefeated and looking strong before suddenly falling apart.  It's strange to see a whole team slide like that, but there you have it.

Friday Mad Science: Super-Geek Edition

First piece of news this week: Peter Jackson has decided to split his movie adaptation of The Hobbit again, making the film into a trilogy.  I trust Jackson as a director, but I gotta say that this decision seems a little weird to me.  I mean, I can see making the book into two movies because the book itself exists in a bunch of distinct pieces which don’t necessarily have all that much to do with each other.  With that in mind, I personally would build the first movie around the beginning of the journey and the encounters with the goblins and use the company’s escape from the goblin kingdom under the mountains as the first movie’s climax.  That would set the stage for a second movie in which the company encounters and escapes from the elves, confronts the dragon, and then fights the Battle of Five Armies, which would, of course, tie back in with the plot of the first movie.  But if that’s the plan, where on earth is the third movie?

or "There and Back Again."

It seems obvious to me that everything from the foot of Smaug’s mountain to the end of the Battle of Five Armies has to be the bulk of the last movie, regardless of how many movies precede it.  Just as obviously, the stuff with the goblins is its own self-contained plot.  That stuff collectively takes up about half of the book, and it’s critical to the way the book’s overarching story resolves itself.  The issue, then, is what else is so important that it needs its own movie.  There’s the opening dinner party, which is overlong in the book and clearly destined to be overlong in the first movie as well.  Then there’s also a bit with trolls, a bit with worgs (before the main bit with the goblins), a bit where the dwarves get attacked by spiders in the forest, and the bit where the dwarves get captured by the elves. 

I suppose you could build a second movie around the forest, with the spiders and the elves as one contiguous plot-point, but that stuff by no means strikes me as worth a whole movie, nor is any of it particularly related to anything else.  It’s useful because it shows off Tolkien’s vision—The Hobbit could easily be considered travel-fiction, if we accept Tolkien’s imagination as an appropriate destination—but beyond that, none of that is particularly germane to the rest of the story.  It shows Bilbo’s growth into a Rogue of some renown, but otherwise it’s filler.  Turning it into the basis of an entire film seems sketchy.  Personally, I’d use it in the films the same way that Tolkien used it in the book—as a chance to develop character in support of the main points of the story.

* * *

The cover for Guardians of the Galaxy #9,
features Star Lord.

I mentioned yesterday that it looks like Brian Bendis is gonna write a new Star Lord comic, presumably as part of the build up to 2014’s Guardian’s of the Galaxy movie.  Well, this week also brought reports of a new Marvel movie-universe TV show set around SHIELD.

Intriguing idea or classic corporate over-reach?  You tell me.

* * *

In Olympic news, the fact is that Michael Phelps is still the best swimmer in the world.  No, he hasn’t been unbeatable this year, but he’s still done better than his mainmost rival, Ryan Lochte, and that’s in the year in which Lochte was finally supposed to get out from under Phelps’ shadow.

Also: the US Men’s Water Polo team is 3-0 right now and looking pretty good.  So far, I’ve managed to catch all of their matches, and I’ve enjoyed every one.  Can’t wait for the medal round.

* * *

Finally, Tim Tebow is at training camp with the New York Jets.  Not surprisingly, this is making a few headlines.  Most recently, he was seen running the Wildcat in the Jets’ goal line offense.

Personally, I’m digging the Olympics, but I’ll be more than happy when they at last give way to football season.

U.S. Men's Water Polo, Today at 2:40 pm

It's Tuesday, which means today's the day that I normally put out a new piece of my ongoing prose "webcomic" series Centurion Six.  Well, the good news is that I started working on Centurion Six again yesterday.  But the bad news is that I've not gotten far enough along to actually have anything to show you yet.  So look for an update next week, okay?

In the meantime, if you missed the U.S. Men's Water Polo team in their opening match at the Olympics, you missed a pretty good match.  You can see highlights here.  The team's next match is today at 2:40 pm EST, and I hope like heck that I have a chance to catch at least some of it--if not today then tonight.

That Road Race Sucked

Did you see the Olympic Road Race. Ugh. Highly disappointing.

Your winner, Kazakhstan's Alexander Vinokurov.  Ugh.

First off, let's say you're Team GB.   You've got only five guys, but one is the best sprinter in the world and another is the best time trialist. Plus you've got Chris Froome, who was freakin' dominant at the TdF. So why the Hell do you let 32 guys get away in the last 25 miles?  I mean, a breakaway sure, but 32 men? Ugh. Even Bradley Wiggins isn't gonna be able to chase that many dudes down, especially when it's Teejay VanGarderan who's setting the pace for the break group. When Wiggins popped, it was all over for the peloton, and they knew it.  Bottom line, they should've chased earlier... which was kind of the story of the race.

American Taylor Phinney.  He needs to learn to
chase all attacks with less than 10 km to go.

For the Americans... First off, they were never favorites. But they had two really good riders in the break, and once we'd established that the break was gonna stay away, frankly they were in good shape. But then Fabian Cancellara crashes with maybe seven miles to go, and the. Teejay popped after having pulled the break for most of the day, and suddenly we're left with Taylor Phinney, Vino, EBH, and a bunch of Spaniards and Columbians. So with 1.5 km to go, one of the Columbians attacks, Vino follows, and Phinney--who'd just taken a pull at the front of the break--decides to pull off and let someone else chase. Only no one else chases, and Vino gets away. With 5 km to go!

By 2 km, Phinney is visibly frantic, looking for a wheel to ride back into contention, but by then it's too late. Predictably, Vino bamboozles his break-mate with a half a klick to go, taking gold. Uran, a previously anonymous Columbian takes silver, and EBH beats Pinney to the line to take Bronze.  Phinney gets fourth... and four full years to contemplate why he didn't chase that one last late attack.

That's not the storyline we were looking for, folks.