mariness

"No, this was my first time seeing a bear fall out of a tree."

After making that admission, the person continued: "He's adorable though," the observer added. “He got hit by a tranquilizer dart twice and he fell.

(The bear is fine.)

Bears are making a slow but steady comeback in central Florida, and are walking into Orlando, driven by their love for human garbage. At least something loves our garbage. I'm not sure why that first sentence amused me so much, but it did.

1. First, a quick memo to AT&T: In the future, you might just want to ask NBC just how frequently your commercials will be aired, and if it's going to be about "once every ten minutes" you might want to consider investing in the funds to create a second commercial. It's not exactly that I'm against your rather pretty image of a snowboarder landing on the moon (though, even as a speculative fiction writer who likes to think of people snowboarding and skiing on the moon, I had to question some of the physics behind this, though, now that I'm on the subject, how many of you would LOVE to see a huge dome put up on the moon where we could have low gravity halfpipe competitions and REALLY see some figure skating? That's what I thought. Get to work on it, NASA. Moving on…) it's that last night I could literally sing along to this commercial, I'd seen it so many times. You might want to follow the lead of Visa, which at least presented different, if otherwise equally annoying, commercials.

2. Here's what happened in the live afternoon coverage: cross-country skiing. And a lot of it. Some people have (rightfully, as events would later prove) complained that NBC is showing only the American athletes and an occasional winner or two. This was not at all true for the cross-country skiing coverage, which featured pretty much every single athlete in the race, along with increasingly desperate attempts by the commentators to fill the air space.

Meanwhile, NBC was failing to show any live coverage of the ongoing downhill or snowboard cross races. Any - in fact, we originally assumed that the downhill had been cancelled again – instead, choosing to show taped coverage of these events after we knew the outcomes.

Now, for cross country ski fans, this was probably an excellent thing. At the same time, and not to be cruel here, is NBC really trying to tell us that they think that more people would tune in for endless cross-country skiing instead of the wild and unpredictable snowboarding? Clearly not, given that they wanted to make sure that snowboarding was shown in prime time.

3. After this, we got the local news, which reminded me just why I no longer watch the local news. Memo to the local Orlando NBC affiliate, WESH: Not enough is happening in the central Florida area to fill an hour of news. Even an hour of fluffy news. This is not, mind you, a bad thing, and a considerable improvement over the "watch that homicide" and "watch us remove this little baby alligator from a park" and "evil nail salons" segments that filled the South Florida news, but, let's just sum up the lack of news in, say, a half hour instead of an hour, shall we?

4. On the other hand, NBC, enough major world events happened last night that you should not have had problems filling up a freaking half hour of what was supposedly a world news show. Moving on!

5. The actual coverage started at 8. It went more or less like this:

Bob Costas said something uninteresting.
Commercial.
Video of one athlete.
Commercial.
Score of one athlete.
Commercial, commercial, commercial.
Touching segment about Overcoming Tragic Odds.
Commercial. Commercial. Commercial.
Bob Costas said something uninteresting.
Commercial.
Video of one athlete.
Commercial. Commercial. Commercial.
Polar bears!
Commercial. Commercial. Commercial.

Here's what we didn't see: most of the downhill racing, most of the snowboard cross, anything of the speed skating except for some tch-tching about the ice quality and video of coaches looking concerned. But, polar bears.

Now, I have to admit, I love polar bears. To the point where at least two readers of this won't go to Sea World with me any more because "you get just a little TOO into the bears." Polar bears are about the most awesome bears ever, except for cute brown bears and shy black bears and fearsome grizzly bears – I love bears. I am all about bears. And on the plus side, that schedule provided plenty of opportunity to head to the bathroom.

But the Olympics is not about bears. (Maybe it should be, but that's another entry.) It's about athletes.

Not that you'd know it from the NBC coverage.

********

On a brighter note, however, the gold and silver medalists in the pairs skating were absolutely astounding. (Pretty much everything in figure skating qualifies as something I can't and could never do, so, jaw dropping.) And I have gained a new obsession in snowboard cross which might just take over the downhill as my favorite Olympic event.