Olympic withdrawal

With the closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Olympics last night, our house will now be in a brief period of loss for the next couple of nights. I always find the Olympics to be an interesting experience as a television viewer, as the magnitude of the event causes even casual sports fans to root for (or against) individual and team competitors in such relatively obscure sports as the Nordic combined (ski-jumping and cross-country skiiing), short track speed skating and bobsleigh racing (not bobsled, as we all call it). Even got my wife to watch some hockey this time around, as it helped that Team USA was playing for a gold medal yesterday.

But that's always been the mystique of the Olympics....getting people to become emotionally invested in sports and athletes about whom they would not normally give a passing thought. I credit ABC, and particularly a production executive named Roone Arledge with figuring out how to do that. ABC had already cornered the television sports market on uncommon sporting events with their Wide World of Sports program, so it was only natural that they would do likewise with the Olympic Games. "Up close and personal, the ABC way" was their Olympic motto back in the '60's and '70's, until NBC bought the rights to all Olympic Games for what seems to be twenty years.

And as a former broadcaster with friends involved in sports broadcasting I'm always interested to see and hear some folks that I might not have seen and heard since, well, the last Olympics. There are always a couple.....

But it's over, so I suppose that it's back to HGTV for the Smith household. Imagine what our Nielsen ratings book would look like......

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latest and greatest

Happy Saturday, friends!  Hope.you had a good week and are ready for some down time. I don’t consider myself an early adopter of most anything, but I suppose that’s always a little subjective.  I resisted the iPhone when it first came out, not only because I really, REALLY liked my Blackberry at the time, but also because I didn’t want to have to switch to AT&T’s cellular service, which I believe was called Cingular Wireless at the time.  I have had Verizon Wireless for a long, long time, and like their service overall.  So that didn’t interest me right away. When I finally did get my first iPhone, I was pretty well blown away, and have been an enthusiastic user of various versions of this device since.  I actually had an iPad before I had an iPhone, but learned enough with the workings of that tablet that I was able to troubleshoot for members of my work team who had iPhones.  The rest came rather naturally, of course. I was also a little slow to adapt to HDTV, which is, of course
Read more

Replacement value

Hope everyone's week is off to a good start. My premise today is rather simple.  When is it best to replace something that's older with a similar item that's newer?  What criteria do you use to make that decision?  Is it something you give a lot of thought to, or is it more impulsive? My answer, for better or worse, is that it depends. And I stand by that response. For instance, for fourteen years my car was a 2007 Honda Pilot SUV.  Bought it as a demonstrator with 4,400 miles already on it.  Went a lot of places in that car, numerous business trips to St. Louis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Nashville, Cleveland and many other destinations.  Transported me and my son to Cincinnati to see the Reds countless times, and later took along his two older children for games.  Survived a couple of multi-state baseball trips.  Went on vacation to Colorado for other lots of other weekend excursions.  I did all of the major required maintenance, but after the second timing belt was installed,
Read more

Something to think about

My friends, I hope you'll accept my apologies for being absent from this space for, oh, a good while.  My convalescence from my bout with COVID was completed some time ago, and I dived back into my work life with two hastily constructed weeks, followed by two long weeks of travel.   But since my last post I've had lots to think about a number of things, and lots of time to think about them. First topic has to be the number of mass shootings in these past few weeks.  We had a church-related school in Nashville endure a shooting by a person who was apparently a student there many years earlier.  Three children and three adults associated with the school were killed.  Then Louisville had two shooting incidents on the same day, and another last night.  And this morning's news brought details of a shooting at a sweet 16 birthday party in a small town in Alabama. President Biden says he's done everything in his power as Commander in Chief to curtail the proliferation of guns
Read more