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Every time the Olympic Games come to a close, there’s always that twinge of sadness, of let-down.  It’s to be expected, for it is a melancholy moment when the torch is extinguished.  As each Olympics has ended I’ve always felt the same way: “Is that all? Over so soon? It feels like we were just getting started!”

I used to think this feeling of dissatisfaction, of un-satiation, was normal — but no longer.  I’ve come to realize that, along with exemplary sportsmanship, tales of tragedy and triumph, and edge-of-one’s-seat finishes, there’s another common factor to every Olympics I have ever watched: the dismal television coverage of the National Broadcasting Company. Read more…

In the wake of the Super Bowl, with a slate of advertising that was among the weakest ever, Google is getting all the press for having the “best ad.” Never mind that “Parisian Love” wasn’t a new ad premiered for the game, and had already been available on YouTube for three months. It’s a cute ad (or perhaps une annonce très mignon), in its minimalist way, and certainly does a fine job of showing off Google’s core competency.  Still, it was not my favourite ad of the day.

In every review I’ve seen, the Kia Sorento ad — with a gang of oversized toys (Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba, a teddy bear, a sock monkey, a robot, and what looked to me like a cheap Halloween-costume amalgam of Hamburglar and Cousin Itt) on the loose in Vegas — gets nary a mention.

Maybe that has something to do with the ad blitz Kia ran in the weeks leading up to the game.  Over and over they played 15-second teaser versions using clips of the bowling and bull-riding scenes, cut short with a “see us in the 3rd quarter of the big game” placard.  But the teasers played so often, by the time the complete ad finally rolled around, people might have already been over it.

Too bad, because it’s a fun one.  Certainly the music track, “How You Like Me Now” by The Heavy, was the best of any ad all day.  The visuals were at least mildly absurd, and even if the toys’ antics were somewhat mainstream, at least the ad led the viewer to think: “hey, that thing has plenty of room for an enormous cyclopean red rubber alien and four of his friends, maybe it has enough space for me and my fishing buddies.”  So in my opinion, the ad worked, both as entertainment and as sales pitch.

Okay, in retrospect the reveal is a plainly obvious one.  Of course it’s all the sock monkey’s dream.  Still, I’ll admit to having laughed out loud at it.  What can I say — I like monkeys, and I like trouble-making monkeys.  That’s how I roll, having been raised on Curious George.

As I watched and thought to myself cheerily, “that’s a bad monkey,” I realised there’s a subtext to this ad.  It’s probably unintentional, but I hope it’s not.

About midway through the ad, the monkey gets a tattoo.  It’s stitched on, which is easily the best sight gag of the ad.  It’s a classic tattoo: the name “Mom” in a heart.  It’s funny, and yes, tame.

Except that sock monkeys don’t really have mothers.  They’re created out of whole cloth, pardon the pun.

Here’s what I think: the sock monkey has the hots for the blonde soccer mom that’s driving the Sorento at the end of the ad.

Bad monkey!

Jeopardy! held its annual Teen Tournament a couple of weeks ago. As usual, the contestants were frightfully brainy kids who know way too much for their ages, and as usual I was impressed by their knowledge.

As usual, however, their wagering strategy left much to be desired. I dearly wish that someone would provide the crème-de-la-crème of our high schoolers with some rudimentary tutoring in this subject so that they wouldn’t look like complete fools when placing their bets — even as they answer esoterica that would befuddle most adults.

Here’s an analysis of the 2008 tournament. Although I name names, this is not meant as criticism of the individuals; although they provide the specific examples, they are merely illustrations of the general norm.

To begin, Zia was a complete juggernaut during the quarterfinals. He had 15,600 after the first round, and a neat (and impressive) 50,000 going into the final round. With the second-place guy (Nick) holding 15,600, Zia was a runaway — he needed to wager nothing in order to move on. But I guess he figured “what the heck, might as well see how much I could pile on,” so he tried to bet as much as he safely could.

Except that he goofed on the math. He bet 19,399 instead of 18,399, and when he got it wrong he had 30,601 rather than 31,601. If Nick had bet it all and gotten it right, he would have had 31,600 and won. In that case, Zia would have pulled a Clavin, all for a basic error in subtraction. There’s no reason to make a simple mistake like this, given that contestants have essentially unlimited time to ponder their wagers.

Nick, too, wagered poorly. Qualification for the semifinals includes four wild card spots, and in past years 15,000 has been about the bare minimum needed to have any hope for a wild card (this year, the fourth-place wild card had 13,000, although the median for the four wild cards was 19,600). It turns out that Nick’s 15,800 would have given him the fourth wild card, although he would not have known that at the time. Regardless, betting 5,800 was probably ill-advised, since by getting it wrong he took himself completely out of the wild card race. Unless he was very confident of the final category, he would have been better off leaving it alone.

In the semis, Zia was not so much a juggernaut, but was still a… dreadnought at least. Toward the end of the second round, he had 28,600 when Katie hit the last Daily Double with 10,000 in the bank and 7,200 remaining on the board. She instantly made a fatal error — she never even looked at the scoreboard before declaring her wager. There was no consideration at all in her meager 2,000 bet. Here’s how I would analyze the math involved:

Zia had 28,600. Katie had 10,000. The board had 7,200 left after she hit the Double.

Assume that, all else being equal, the 3 contestants will evenly split the remaining money; therefore, each will take 2,400. This ultimately would give Zia 31,000 and Katie 12,400 (ignoring the 10,000 available to her for the Double). Going into the final, Katie could then muster 24,800 by doubling, leaving her 6,200 short. Half this amount, or 3,100, is the bare minimum she could wager to stay in the game, with the caveat that getting it wrong will take her completely out of the game.

Of course, the above math is a bit too involved to utilize mid-game. So the quick math comes from asking what it would take to get to half the leader’s amount right now, in order to stay in the game. In Katie’s case, this was 28,600 /2 – 10,000 = 4,300.

Basically, she was so far behind, she was really in the position of needing to bet big, and get it right. Fail to do either, and she’s out of the game. She failed to bet big, so even though she got it right, it was game over for her.

Then, in the finals, the soon-to-be champion Rachel nearly pulled a Clavin of her own. She had 26,801 from the first game, and 9,800 going into the second game’s final round, for a stand-pat total of 36,601. Her only competition was “Steve,” who at most would be able to muster 18,400 + 8,400 x 2 = 35,200. Rachel had already won! She could wager up to 1,400 for fun, without risking the victory.

Instead, she bet 5,000. Why, I’ll never know. But if “Steve” had bet the farm — which would have seemed pointless and might have risked losing the second-place prize to Zia (if he hadn’t been crashing and burning) — she might have snatched the championship away from Rachel. Lucky for Rachel, who managed to be the only one with the correct final answer, this would be moot.

Zia, with his balls-to-the-wall wagering style, had the most success when it came to capitalizing on Daily Doubles — even though it ultimately bit him in the behind in the last game, when a True Daily Double smacked of desperation. Still, overall I’d say he had the best attitude: what the heck, take a chance. What do you have to lose?

At least to myself, I gripe about the cable company Comcast all the time. There are so many reasons why I call it the Evil Empire. A supposedly digital cable provider should not have to require me to place decoder boxes at all my locations, yet I must because the system here is a holdover from a former cable company that Comcast took over years ago. And whenever the audio goes silent or I see that familiar pixillated freeze-frame, both signs of the signal dropping out, I just think of the rats’ nest in the back alley on the pole that carries my cable drop and say “of course.” If the rest of the system looks anything like this photo, no wonder the cable farts at least once in every hour-long program I watch.

I began to get fed up several months ago when I sent an e-mail to Comcast requesting that they carry NASA-TV. This is perhaps not the most exciting channel — even during active missions it carries long stretches of silent, seemingly static shots of Mission Control — but it’s educational, and has the most direct launch coverage. (By “direct” I mean it doesn’t have extraneous graphics and commentary stepping on the video and audio like most other news outlets are wont to do.) On top of that, it’s a government channel — so it’s free to broadcast and costs the cable company nothing except a channel slot on a system rife with unused bandwidth and duplicated feeds.

Comcast’s response? A boilerplate “we have no plans to carry this channel now or ever, but we’ll forward your request to our marketing department”… where at best it will be a single data point in a feedback survey overwhelmed by requests for the Fox Reality channel or some such crap.

Oh, by the way, both of the major players in the satellite TV market — Dish Network and DirecTV — carry NASA-TV. And Comcast doesn’t even have to worry about launching satellites.

Comcast’s “Are You Enlightened?” ad campaign… don’t get me started.

Now there’s this whole brouhaha between Comcast and the Big Ten Network. In short, BTN wants to be carried on the basic tier, Comcast wants to put it into a premium sports tier. There’s no middle ground here, and so Comcast will not carry BTN.

There are no good guys in this argument.

BTN says it wants to be in the basic tier so viewers will not have to pay extra for it, and says it will make its revenue in advertising. Yet reports say BTN is charging the cable companies $1.10 per viewer in the eight-state Big Ten region; for BTN to pretend that cable will not pass this cost on directly to the consumer is disingenuous.

Meanwhile, Comcast says BTN is taking away our right to choose our programming by making everyone pay for a service that only some will desire. Perhaps, but Comcast omits to mention that the advertising opportunity inherent in BTN would cover the carriage fee without placing the burden on the consumer.

Regardless, from this consumer’s standpoint Comcast is what’s preventing me from receiving BTN, and I’d at least like to choose for myself, even if having BTN might not benefit me much when it comes to watching my beloved 2007 National Champion Spartan hockey team this winter (since they’re in the CCHA, not the Big Ten).

So I finally decided to cut the cable and go with satellite. It seems to me that there’s a definite benefit in having the dish on my roof, where it’s accessible, rather than across town behind a barbed-wire fence; and in having that dish connected to my TV via cables mounted securely to my brick walls, rather than hanging out in the wind and weather on umpteen wooden poles throughout the city.

This afternoon around twenty after four p.m., during the halftime of the U-M/ND game (as usual I was rooting for the blimp, but no such luck), I reached out to pick up the phone and schedule an installation —

— and the cable went out. Seriously. Part of me (the paranoid conspiracy theorist part) decided that Comcast was watching me and knew what I was about to do, and went dark in an attempt to get me to call 1-800-COMCAST instead. I almost did, too, out of habit.

But then I thought better of it, and called for a dish.

Then I called Comcast, which tried to deter me via an automated system that said they were aware of the problem and would have it fixed by 6:33 p.m., and would I like an automated phone call telling we when the system was back on? I forced my way through to a human operator and politely demanded a credit for the day, which (as always) she agreed to readily. She also placed me on the system-restored-auto-call list.

The cable finally came back on around 8:50 p.m., for 3.5 hours of downtime.

It’s now past 11 p.m., and the automated call has not yet come through. (It finally came through at 10:40 a.m. the next day.)

I was tempted to tell the operator that I was calling on behalf of everyone whose cable had just gone out, and that I wanted Comcast to credit each of these accounts with a free day of cable. But I didn’t, for two reasons: 1) I’ll wager the computer system she’s using isn’t capable of this kind of input, and 2) those other folks can call for their own damn credit.

And I guess that my point. If you’re still suffering with Comcast cable (why?), I highly recommend that you call them every time your cable goes out, even for a few seconds. Follow the automated prompts until you get to a human being, and politely but firmly ask that they credit your account for the outage. Inform them that the outage utterly ruined whatever it was you were watching, and that it was the only program you had planned to watch today, and so the momentary loss was the equivalent of an entire day’s outage. They’ll credit your account, without argument, and well they should.

A snap assessment of this year’s crop of new ads…

The ads heavily touted in advance, those with Jessica and Federline, well, BFD.

The Toyota Tundra ads were pretty cool, if only because (at least according to the small print on the screen) they were actual demonstrations and not forgeries (unlike their previous campaign, which showed the truck surviving a meteor impact, the Loch Ness monster, etc.). Ironically, the settings were so surreal — the runway to the edge of the cliff, the giant teeter-totter — that they looked fake anyway.

E-Trade’s “things you can do with one finger” ad was pretty funny — and the music track was the only obvious use of surround sound in the entire broadcast (including the game and halftime show). For what that’s worth.

Anheuser-Busch laid an egg this year. At least 3 Bud Light ads featured people getting their beer through underhanded means, a trend I find mean-spirited. (Interesting contrast from the Miller Lite “Man Law” ads, which preach a modicum of civility. I note that Miller was completely cock-blocked from Super Bowl advertising by A-B.) The stray dog making it onto the Budweiser wagon was an obvious attempt to recapture the glory of the “Clydesdale donkey” ad of a few years ago, but it missed a key point. The donkey worked hard to pursue his dream. The dog merely got lucky, using his splattered-mud spots to sneak onto the wagon as a phony dalmatian. (On top of that, the use of the world’s most clichéd Dean Martin song was painfully trite, and the computer-generated wink at the end only made it worse.)

In fact, overall there were too many ads with computer-enhanced talking animals, which still look creepy no matter how much CPU rendering time you throw at them. And the rest of the effects-heavy ads were flashy but confused and without substance, such as those for Coca-Cola. The one exception in this department was the Garmin ad with the “evil maposaurus” and the guy who uses his GPS unit to transform into a giant silver-suited superhero to save the day. That one was pretty funny, and kitchily surreal.

The best ad of all was a Doritos ad that’s perhaps the first Super Bowl appearance of the latest hot trend in advertising: it was shot on the cheap by a fan, not a professional advertising firm. The guy driving, checking out the girl, and crashing his car — this ad had great comedic timing. A close second was the Doritos ad in the checkout line… “giddy-up.”

Expect to see a lot more advertisers turn to fan-generated content in the future. It costs them next to nothing and provides them with a broad base of untapped creativity.

Finally, I must say: oh, my… Prince may have performed the greatest Super Bowl halftime show ever.