When I was eight, playing in the backyard sandbox, my friend and I heard that sound and wondered what it was.  Looking up to the trees and seeing as well the power lines strung along the nearby road, I hypothesized that it was some kind of electrical noise from the wires.  My friend wondered why we only hear it in the summer, and I further conjectured that the summer heat caused the wires to leak electricity, or some such.

Hey, to an eight-year-old kid, it was plausible.  There’s something special about the age of eight.  It’s the age where you have a few years of elementary school under your belt, giving you the sense that you know a bunch of stuff.  What you don’t know, you can find out from a friend.  And if neither of you have an answer, you can always make one up.

I think my friend might have bought that explanation about buzzing noises caused by leaky wiring.  It was a few years before I learned the true cause: cicadas.

Walking the streets of our subdivision (which lacked sidewalks), we would often find these thin, stiff pieces of steel, usually around 5 or 6 inches long, lying near the gutters.  Where did they come from? I wondered.  A friend’s brother informed me they were car parts, some part of the suspension or leaf springs or brakes or something, and they fell off of older cars.

Again, plausible.  They were usually rusty, like the undersides of cars, and I could imagine some old Chevy (or not-so-old Gremlin) hitting a pothole and spewing these strips of metal from its fender wells.  But fifteen years later I noticed they were still around.  Couldn’t be a car part, I realised.  The technology has changed too much for these things to still be as frequent as in my youth.  It took very little research to find that they’re bristles from street sweeper brushes.

But here’s the greatest mystery — and apocryphal tale — of those long-gone summers.

One day, I and a few friends were patrolling the neighbourhood on our bikes.  We wandered over to the very edge of my allowed-without-informing-mom-in-advance range.  Perhaps a bit further than that, even; I wasn’t 100% sure I knew my way home.

We had reached a point at the eastern edge of town where one of the main avenues through the city crossed a road at the city limits and abruptly changed from a paved thoroughfare to a dusty gravel track that faded into chest-high weeds and grasses.  Beyond a rudimentary traffic barricade was a desolate, eerie land of deadly garter snakes and rusty beer cans; of gargantuan tobacco-spitting grasshoppers and dense, impenetrable second- or third-growth woodlots.

As I stood there with my cohort, pondering this unknown realm and whether the reward from its exploration outweighed the risk of getting grounded upon my return, a kid ambled out from the tall grass.  He was an older kid, but whether that meant he was 12, or 15, or more, is unclear to me now.  Someone in our party knew who he was; a classmate of an older sibling or some such.  He approached, stopped, and casually looked us over.

“You know,” he said, with a hint of a grin and a conspiratorial glance over his shoulder, “there’s a nudist colony back in those woods.”

This revelation was dumbfounding.  It was so utterly implausible that we launched into the obligatory chorus of “no way” and “yeah right.”  He insisted it was true: “I saw it myself.”  Naked people frolicking in the woods, he averred, though not in those exact terms.  “Go see for yourselves.”  And with that idle challenge, he walked away.

Did we meet that challenge?  I cannot vouch for my compadres, but I, for one, did not.  I figured I was already in enough trouble for straying this far afield.  To go beyond that point, in search of a fabled den of iniquity, was inconceivable.  My eight-year-old moralism said that if those people were depraved enough to be naked in public, there was no telling of what they might be capable — selling an eight-year-old boy into slavery, perhaps, or (worse yet) stealing his prized purple 3-speed bicycle.  I turned away, and rode home, intrigued but fearful.

Over the years, this mystery stayed in the back of my mind.  I sometimes heard further, similar rumours, reinforcing the possibility that a nudist colony really was tucked away amid the trees.  Yet by the time I was in high school that area had begun to be developed into a subdivision; the gravel road was replaced by a winding extension of the avenue, and I frequently drove through the area without spying any hint of a naked body or an enclave of debauchery.  My gentle skepticism turned to firm doubt.

Finally, when I was in college, I learned the truth: there was indeed — even then — nudity happening out there, but not a “nudist colony” per se.  Hidden in what remained of the woods was a deep, roughly rectangular, spring-fed quarry pond.  To access it one would park in back of an unremarkable apartment complex, cross over a railroad embankment, and follow a series of unmarked trails that meandered through clearings and skirted low marshes.  College students, mostly, used the pond to go skinny-dipping.  Those in the know called it Bare-Ass Lake.

In the years since then, the area has continued to be developed, and “Hidden Lake Drive” now passes right by the no-longer-hidden Bare-Ass Lake, stringing together little cul-de-sacs of tidy condominiums.   The developer had a sense of humour, however, and left us with a sanitized, punning in-joke: the nearest cul-de-sac is called “Bear Lake Drive.”

But here’s the difference: I have come to think that this disruption is actually a good thing.

Sure, every time a bridge lifts there will be some people stranded, stuck on the wrong side of the river, impatient to cross and get on with their day.  So it goes.  In all the time I’ve lived in Chicago, I’ve never once been seriously inconvenienced by a bridge lift.  Sure, there have been times I’ve forgotten it was a lift day, or been surprised by an unscheduled lift, where I’ve turned a corner and discovered an enormous steel wall where I expected a clear passage. Each time, I adjusted my route and found one of umpteen other ways to cross the river and get to where I needed to go. So I can’t say I have a lot of sympathy for those who are too inflexible to find other options, or too uptight simply to relax and enjoy the show.

On Wednesday I watched yet another sailboat flotilla head out to the lake.  On this breezy, sunny spring day, there were plenty of people around. As the signal bells clanged, the gates closed, and the bridge raised to the sky, dozens crowded the railing along Wacker Drive near the Michigan Avenue bridge. Tourists raised their cameras.  Heck, so did some locals, seeing something different during an otherwise routine lunch break.  Down along the new riverwalk, people sat on benches to watch the “big event.”  At least half were locals; this was probably not their first time.

There’s a novelty to the movable bridges that doesn’t wear out. As old as the Michigan Avenue bridge is — its admirers will celebrate its 90th year next week — it remains a marvel of engineering.  It can be awe-inspiring (and perhaps a little frightening) to stand, as I did, underneath it as it opens. The near-silence with which its motors actuate the spans just adds to the stateliness of its movement.

One moment, you’re underneath a solid expanse of iron, capable of supporting untold numbers of buses, cars, and pedestrians…

…the next moment, you’re looking into the gaping maw of Lower Michigan Avenue, suddenly truncated and hanging out into open space, as the sky opens up above your head and the Tribune Tower, Wrigley Building, and other landmarks of the skyline are revealed.

Raise the bridges more often, and it becomes less of an event — a unique, uncommon occasion for people to experience together.  As often as I’ve seen the bridges move, I still find the first-timer’s exclamation of “wow! look at that!” to be contagious, and a joy worth catching.

One of the most fascinating (to me) items in the history of East Lansing, Michigan, is that it not only had a streetcar line that served the Agricultural College from Lansing, but that the line was later upgraded to an interurban service that reached all the way to Owosso.  Growing up riding CATA buses, I had no idea that this other form of public transportation had existed, some fifty-plus years earlier.  That is until, as a teenager in the mid-’80s, I saw the tracks myself — hidden beneath the pavement of M.A.C. Avenue, briefly exposed during a repaving project.

Befuddled by this inexplicable, long-buried infrastructure, and as yet unaware of the streetcar, I promptly forgot about it.  But several years later, as I started my research on city history, I came upon Chace Newman‘s 1915 map of the city and immediately noted the railroad tracks running past the college grounds and straight up M.A.C. Avenue.  I put two and two together and realised what those rusty rails had been.

I wanted to know more, but at the time my resources were more limited.  J.D. Towar informs us that the interurban reached Owosso and was popular for excursions to Pine Lake, which we now call Lake Lansing.  Newman’s map only extends to the 1915 city limits, and even then the subdivision of Avon Dale — not yet incorporated into the city — is obscured by the map legend.  The interurban line ran along the south side of Burcham Drive, but cannot be seen on the map as it reaches Hagadorn Road.

So I left it at that.  The vague “headed out past Pine Lake to Owosso” would have to suffice.

Late last year, I noticed an interesting marking on the OpenStreetMap wiki atlas: a dotted line denoted “Interurban Pathway.”  “Holy cow!” I exclaimed, or words to that effect.  “That must be the old interurban right-of-way!”  As that map shows, the railway continued straight along Burcham Drive, past Park Lake Road, and went on without bend at least as far as Okemos Road.  With new-found excitement, I started to track down further information on the line, slowly piecing together its route through old maps and vague references in newspapers and history books.  As recently as two days ago I sent an e-mail to someone at the city, ingenuously asking, “I think maybe that thing, near your thing, might possibly be part of an old interurban right-of-way… do you know anything about this?”

Little did I realise that this obscure (to me) “Interurban Pathway” on OpenStreetMap was in fact a rails-to-trails project of Meridian Charter Township, and was paved with a twelve-foot-wide strip of asphalt in 2007.

Well, duh.  Maybe if I still lived near East Lansing I’d have half a clue these things were happening.  Turns out, this summer the township and the county road commission will extend the pathway along the interurban right-of-way by another mile or so, out to Marsh Road.  I wonder if they’ll find any remnants of the old railbed.

You have the ugliest front yard on [this street] — probably in all of Chicago.  Garbage all over.  Bottes all over.  Get your lazy Ukranian asses moving and clean up your garbage dump. It is repulsive.  All the other neighbors take pride in the neighborhood.  You are absolute pigs.

[All misspellings and emphasis — in purple highlighter, no less — are in the original.]

In what way exactly did you expect us to respond to this angry, hateful, anonymous missive?  Did you think we would leap up and run to the yard, tools in hand, and make drastic changes?  Tear it all up and put down a nice, even layer of sod?  Because truth be told, my initial reaction was to respond to your anger in kind, and decide that under no circumstances would I undertake any effort that might bring you any satisfaction.

Not that I would anyway.  You see, the front garden is not my bailiwick — it is under the direction of my septuagenarian mother-in-law.  You have attacked a senior citizen.  She is, far from being lazy, one of the most hard-working and industrious people you could meet, at any age.  Her gardening style may be a bit unconventional, perhaps, and her budget is limited, but her results have been both interesting and beautiful.  We offer to help, but more often than not she prefers to do the work herself.

The garden you see is not the result of laziness, it is a work in progress.  The “bott[l]es” you mention, unless they were the transitory garbage of passing drunks — a commonality of any urban environment, and something we clean up whenever we see it — were probably the Mason jars that she had upended over the shoots of tender perennials, as impromptu “cold frames” to protect them from late-season frosts.  Meanwhile, the area near the street — which is city property — is still recovering from the city workers who cut down a dead tree last year, but left the roots behind.  (And who got off their asses and called the city about that tree?  Yes.  We did.)

Sure, in early spring the lack of grass makes it appear as if nothing is growing there, but that could not be further from the truth. It’s late April now and things are changing rapidly. The ground cover is filling in neatly between plantings.  The hostas are sprouting thick and healthy.  A neat row of day lilies is getting ready to do its thing.  The rhododendrons are blooming now, and the roses will later.  All this did not occur without significant effort.

Is our front yard a boring, generic mass of lawn, like that of every other house on the block?  No — and I’m glad it’s not.  If you want dull, thoughtless uniformity, I know of more than a few suburbs that might suit you.

Your accusation of laziness, and your implication of unneighborliness, are without any merit.  Who has stood in the street in drenching rains, working to clear blocked drains along the entire block before the curbs overflow and dump rainwater and sewage into nearby basements — drains that have clogged with debris that remains in the gutters thanks to other residents who have been either too lazy, too self-absorbed, or too oblivious to move their vehicles on street sweeping days?  That would be me.  To my knowledge only one other neighbor on the block has even attempted to pick up what the street sweeper could not reach.

By the way, we are not Ukrainian; but would be proud if we were, for on the whole they have shown themselves to be good people who have been both friendly and welcoming to us.  This neighborhood is called Ukrainian Village for a reason.  If you have a problem with Ukrainians, you are most assuredly in the wrong place, and you need to go somewhere else.  The sooner the better.

I really only have one question for you.  Who has brought more ugliness into the world: my family, with our front yard filled with flowering plants; or you, with your hateful, insulting, race-baiting, poison-pen postcard?

On the right, the fancy filtration unit dispenses both chilled drinking water and hot water for tea, instant soup, etc.  As a safety measure, to get hot water from the unit one must push two buttons at once: the red button above the graphic of a steaming glass — and another button labeled “hot safety”.

Of course it’s meant to keep children from scalding themselves.  I suppose that justifies its intent, if not its necessity.

As an aside, this safety feature defeated our lead programmer, who is brilliant and intelligent and tech-savvy, but who skipped the hilariously elementary (example: “Take one coffee filter…” [hold filter up for all to see]) orientation session for these appliances.

On the left, the coffee maker will also dispense hot water for tea — via a big, red-handled spigot.

If a child walked up to these two machines, what’s the first thing they’d do?  Press the little red button — or pull the big red handle?

I’m not saying the coffee maker’s spigot is unsafe.  Not many (if any) children spend time in our offices, so it’s a moot point.  And if nothing else it enabled that aforementioned staffer to get hot water for her tea.

The filtration unit is not, however, exempt from my ridicule.  See that blue light that shines down on whatever container you’re filling?  At first I thought it might be one of those ultraviolet lamps that kill bacteria.  Not so.  This light is decorative — in fact, it’s not merely decorative, it’s purely decorative.

Why? Because if it had any function at all, it would make a lot of sense, while dispensing hot water, for that light to turn red.  But no, it doesn’t.  Instead, it’s counterintuitive: dispense piping-hot — nay, scalding — water that glows with a light that stays cool, cool blue.

The site performs a simple task: it takes a phrase of 250 characters or less and passes it through the Google Translator, from English to another language and back to English again, over and over.  In the process, the original words and meaning are completely mangled.  As the site explains, “Machine translations are useful for getting a general idea about what text written in a foreign language means.”  But beyond that “general idea” — watch out!

Song lyrics are good fodder; it seems like their meter and prose are prone to very odd results.  So, after a few small tests, I fed it the chorus of the Michigan State University Fight Song.  Bad Translator responded with:

“Michigan, my son, ‘Sparta’ We see a strong team that won the game! Less! Less! Less! You can see a weak team and the sport and the game won! ‘Just below! Crew! University of Michigan Winners!’”

It starts out pretty good, but finishes horribly — somehow the word “State” has been lost.  To a Spartan, there’s little worse than being conflated with that other university, down the road in Ann Arbor (something that other school has attempted many times in the past 150 years or so).

So I tried again, using the alma mater, “MSU Shadows”:

“University of Michigan, in a cool, dark, black pine Plyushchev faith, our Alma mater, distribution of time dog wallpaper, admiration, respect and love the sound of the University of Michigan.”

Ouch! Again, it has converted my school’s name to (ahem) those other guys. And, insultingly, it managed to expand “MSU” into “Michigan State University” before obliterating “State” and flipping it around (ptui).  But still, this is great fun.  I mean, who the heck is Plyushchev?  And who can beat the absurd surrealism of the “distribution of time dog wallpaper”?

Smarting from the co-optation of two songs dear to my heart, I decided turnabout is fair play, and fed it the fight song of that other school, “The Victors”.  And that’s when I fell out of my chair, laughing.

Hot! This cream is a problem!
Long live the fighters,
if in the interests of the Hot!
Michigan best pilot!

Hot! This cream is a problem!
Long live the fighters,
if in the interests of the Hot!
Uesutotshanpyon Michigan!

Holy crap, that’s funny.  I imagine that opening line preceded by a spit-take — someone taking the first tentative slurp of a cup of steaming coffee, then suddenly spewing it out in a cloud of mist and shouting an indignant non sequitur, “Hot! This cream is a problem!”

Then, a left turn: the original lyrics’ notion of supporting one’s warriors is retained — but only if that troublesome cup of coffee approves!  “If in the interests of the Hot”… if not, well, too bad fighters, you’re at the mercy of that oh-so-fickle Hot.

Then, finally, that awesome word: Uesutotshanpyon.  It’s a totally non-existent word; a Google search returns zero results.  For some reason the translator, having gotten to the point where “Champions of the West” had become “West Champion”, failed to translate that phrase into Japanese and instead transliterated it phonetically.  It came back to English the same way, and remained intact through numerous other translations.  I find that hilarious.

Having taken State’s arch-rivals down a notch, I played with some other stuff.  Robert W. Service‘s “Cremation of Sam McGee” was delightful, starting off indecisive (“Sunday lunch or after work…”) and occasionally turning Mr. McGee into Montréal’s McGill University.  “O Canada” wound up being about Brazil.  The description of one of my company’s products included something about ferrets.

Bad Translator could be improved a bit.  It always runs through the languages in alphabetical order, starting with Afrikaans and ending with Yiddish.  I think it should take them in random order — then the results would be different every time.   If I were more Javascript-adept I might be able to do this myself.

After some more play, with mixed results, I gave it one of my all-time favourite songs: “Alone Again Or”, from the 1968 masterpiece album Forever Changes by Love.  It distilled the whole thing down to two lines, and while it’s terse and a bit inscrutable, it retained a sense of poetry:

I remember well, we decided
Yes, I know who I am, what people think, a little love today.

Intrigued by how much it shortened the song, I got to wondering if it could get down to one word, and what it would be.  It only needed two more iterations:

I know very little memory.

Which reduced to:

Weakness.

Probably the coup de grâce to my desire to contribute was when some douchebag from Calgary took exception to an edit I reverted as linkspam.  (It was a link to a page promoting a book he wrote, a violation of WP:ELNO #1 and #5.  Two other editors reverted subsequent attempts at adding it, seconding my stance on its unsuitability.)  He followed my Wikipedia user page to my home page, ran a whois query on my domain name to find personal data I inadvertently had left exposed, and invaded my privacy by calling my home and harassing my wife.

The coward lied to her about his name, and blocked caller i.d., but that’s okay — I know who he is.  He was stupid enough to send me a threatening e-mail from the same IP address that had been used to make the anonymous edits.  Needless to say, the book that he was trying to promote on Wikipedia will get nary a mention from me here, unless he chooses to continue his utterly inappropriate personal harassment, in which case I will out him as an asshole and do what I can to dissuade people from ever buying or reading any of his works.

What galls me too about this specific case is that I deliberately tried to say something nice while reverting: my edit summary said “No doubt an interesting book… but linkspam.”  In fact, at that point I was sufficiently curious about the book (and continue to be interested in its subject matter) that I was fully prepared to buy a copy of his book for myself, and perhaps even promote it on my site.  His reaction, however, eliminated any chance of that.

That aside, it just illustrates Wikipedia’s primary trouble: editors, operating in good faith to improve the encyclopedia, are forced to waste their time on trying to stay ahead of the constant avalanche of sheer crap that appears there.

In response, I have a concept for a new Wikipedia tool which I call Craptastic.

Many times, edits are of extremely low quality, but not so awful that they can be immediately reverted or undone.  Some examples:

• Information that seems blatantly false, but yet is also just plausible enough that it can’t be confirmed or deleted without additional research (except in BLP cases, which allow immediate removal of any uncited material).
• Lengthy additions that contain tidbits of good information buried within poorly edited paragraphs, requiring significant copy editing to extricate the good stuff.
• Details that may or may not be overly tangential or trivial, which is usually an editor’s judgment call.

In many cases, these edits might fall under one or more Wikipedia policies or guidelines, but it takes a thorough knowledge of those guidelines to wield them appropriately.  Just because I don’t like the looks of an edit doesn’t mean I can easily call it, say, a WP:COI or WP:UNDUE and revert it with confidence.

That’s where the Craptastic tool would come in.  Don’t like the looks of an edit, but can’t say exactly why?  Know an edit is iffy but don’t have the time to spruce it up?  Mark it as “craptastic”.  The edit will be added to your personal Craptastic list.

Each edit listed in Craptastic would show its “intact” percentage.  An unmodified edit would show up as 100% intact, likely in red.  A reverted edit would be 0% intact, and green.  The latter could be manually removed from the list, unless Craptastic could be smart enough to recognise when the same content returns in a subsequent edit… and flag such as possible edit warring.

Partially altered edits would have gradually lower intact percentages, giving an editor the chance to review an edit after someone else improved it, perhaps finding the problem areas less daunting at that point.

An editor who later finds a modicum of both time and gumption could check their Craptastic list and choose an edit to improve.  Craptastic teams could share their lists and perform vetting and cleanup on edits marked by others on their team.

Described like that, it almost sounds like a useful, collaborative tool.  Don’t be fooled.  To be honest, my intent in suggesting this tool is not altruistic, for it is not really intended as a means to improve editing efficiency.  In truth, what I want is a tool that would vindicate my opinions of the edits I see — to allow me to say, “oh, that’s just craptastic”… and later come back, with zero effort, to see that, sure enough, I was right.

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.

This is not the first time I’ve ranted about NBC’s Olympics coverage, and I’m not alone.  This time around I’m joined by the CEO of Business Insider, Henry Blodget, who among his several incisive articles on the topic included the most concise summary of the problem: “right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics.  It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics. And we hate NBC for that.”[Business Insider, 15 February 2010]

Blodget’s right.  Not only did NBC deliberately not show events live — even on weekend afternoons, when its potential viewers had a genuine expectation to watch them — its agreement with the IOC meant that it could actively prevent people from watching in any other way.

I used to think that maybe NBC had good reason for wanting to tape-delay the Games.  When they were in Sydney, and the action was happening in what was the middle of the night for Americans, it kind of made sense.  Kind of.  So too — but to a lesser extent — the ungodly early-morning hours Athens engendered.

But when the west coast of the United States, sitting in the same time zone as Vancouver, is forced to wait an extra three hours, while the east coast watches the smattering of evening events that NBC did carry live, just so those events will air during prime time… well, that’s just asinine.

The good news: ESPN will bid for the 2014 Winter and 2016 Summer Games, and in doing so has pledged to “discontinue the tape-delay template.”   John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content, stated the obvious: “I don’t think nonlive is sports fan-friendly.”   God bless you, ESPN.  I pray that you do everything you possibly can to win this bid.

The bad news: “With 25.2 million viewers watching the Winter Olympics in prime time, NBC Universal feels vindicated by a strategy that features tape delay of some events and shows nothing live in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.”[The New York Times, 24 February 2010]

I feel the need to respond to several of the points in the Times‘ article in turn.

“835 hours of programming, including 50 hockey games, can be challenging to navigate and [NBC has] tools in place to help direct viewers,” said one NBC marketing exec.

I take exception to both parts of this statement. It need not be “challenging to navigate”, with the proper user interface.  Moreover, NBC’s “tools” were distinctly unhelpful.  Its TV listings web page gave viewers a timetable listing the various NBC channels, with unlabeled grey boxes showing when and where Olympic content would air.  Viewers had to roll over these grey areas to trigger fly-out boxes containing info on what events were included.  This resulted in hunting through numerous fly-outs to find the event they wanted to watch, usually in vain.

One pundit wisely suggested that the better navigation tool would be a timetable of all the sports events, rather than the network channels, so viewers could start with the sport they were interested in.  The fly-out information would tell which channel was airing it.

That might work, except for one little problem: NBC shows so very little of the Games that finding an active fly-out link in that grid would be a rare island of success in a sea of futility.

“Despite the restrictions, nearly 35 million unique users have visited NBCOlympics.com and 62 million page views have been delivered to mobile devices.”

These figures do not address what percentage of those unique users visited the site in the hope of finding out how to watch the Games live, only to be sorely disappointed.  They also, in my estimation, are bolstered by the number of page views that were page refreshes caused by glitches in the Silverlight viewer.  I lost track of how many times NBC’s live feed of a curling match would either freeze completely, or go to a commercial break and never return, playing the same goddamned Lexus or Edward Jones advertisement ad nauseam et infinitum.

“NBC is expected to lose at least $200 million on the Vancouver Games.”

You know, I hear this number a lot.  Folks used it in comparison to the perennial cash cow that is the Super Bowl.  The recurring question that was asked was, how can the Olympics lose so much money when the Super Bowl is so lucrative?

The fact of the matter is that NBC has not lost money in its last six airings of the Games.  And although it paid the IOC a lot more for the rights this year than it has for Winter Games in the past, total U.S. ad sales have steadily risen over the past four Winter Games as well.

The results of Vancouver 2010 are yet to be seen, but here’s a notion: perhaps NBC did not actually lose money on this.  Maybe that prologue was part of a plan to guilt-trip viewers into saying, “oh, poor NBC, with its pretty peacock, and its cute little Costas, and its ‘must-see’ glory days all but over, we should try to help it get back on its feet.”

“It’s very challenging to capture the American audience for 17 days,” Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics said, “and many of us have been doing this since 1992, some since 1988.”

The problem is, it’s not 1988 any more.

In the past, even as recently as the 2008 Beijing games, I tried to enter a daytime news blackout so that I might be able to watch the prime time highlight reel with some semblance of anticipation.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.  Either way, it was unfair that I might have to remain unaware of the day’s other important events simply because an ill-timed glance at a television or computer screen, or twist of the radio dial, could spoil that evening’s pending entertainment.

Now that social media are all the rage, it is virtually impossible to sustain that bubble.  And there’s absolutely no reason to do so.

I mentioned before that NBC actively prevented Americans from watching the Games live.  Only hockey and curling (and an incomplete selection of both) were available online.  If a fan tried to go through the official Vancouver 2010 web site to find a live feed of their favourite sport, even if they tried to pretend they were in another country they would ultimately run up against an IP-based blockade, with a “this site is restricted” placard instead of a live stream.

I was lucky to find a number of bootleg streams online.  I won’t mention them by name — I’m hopeful they’ll still be around for London 2012 — but they were an adequate alternative to, well, to seeing nothing at all.  Sure, the commentators were often speaking in a language I was unable to place.  And sure, their feed of Eurosport cut away from the alpine slalom events long before last-seeded Marjan Kalhor could make her historic runs.  (First Iranian woman ever in the Winter Games! and she finished all four of her runs so, technically speaking, she beat USA golden girl Lindsey “DNF” Vonn in both events!)  But even with those limitations there was nothing on NBC to compare with the immediacy of the live feeds.

In addition, after Shaun White’s coach dropped the s-bomb prior to Shaun’s “victory lap,” NBC put everything on a delay, with a censor standing by the “dump button.”  During NBC’s (surprisingly) live airing of the men’s 50K cross-country event on the final day of the Games, I found that even though the online feed had to pass through Eurosport’s transmission, get encoded by a bootlegger, travel bit-by-bit through the wires from Europe, bounce through my wireless network and get reassembled through a buffer in my video player, it was still appearing on my laptop screen a full five seconds earlier than the broadcast on the television screen.

“The market has told us loud and clear that it places the most value on the big, diverse audience that gathers in front of the television at night,” Zenkel said.

Fine.  Keep the one-size-fits-all prime time highlight package, with its inexplicable diversions of blind sled dogs and “sustainable” logging camps.  Just give actual sports fans something to watch, live, as it’s happening.  Please, NBC.

It’s important to note that what Zenkel calls “the market” is not the audience — it’s the advertisers.  No matter how many thousands of people post on Twitter with #nbcsucks and #nbcfail hashtags, NBC can call them a “vocal minority” — a statement that is, sadly, quantifiably true: TechCrunch’s analysis that shows a 73% negative rating of NBC’s coverage came from a sample of nearly 20,000 tweets and 5,700 blog posts or forum comments; this represents a mere 0.074% of NBC’s total viewer numbers.

As long as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and the rest are willing to pay them big bucks, NBC has no reason to care about dissatisfied viewers.  I suppose our only recourse as viewers is 1) not to watch, which would be a drag; and 2) boycott those advertisers.  I want to recommend the latter, yet admittedly I continue to subscribe to DirecTV and use my AT&T-locked iPhone, and I haven’t pulled the plug on my Cisco router.

The bottom line is, 25.2 million people — myself among them — watched the Olympics on NBC in prime time, and NBC is using that figure to claim that people want to watch the Olympics the way NBC wants them to.

Here’s the thing.  If you lock people up, with a tantalizing view of a supermarket across the street through the bars of their prison window, and once a day you give them a sandwich made of stale bread and dog feces, sooner or later some of them will wind up eating it.  A reasonable person will say it’s because the people are starving, and they have no other choice.

NBC will say it’s because people like to eat shit.

But I’ve been a casual fan of curling for twenty years — and of the Olympics for even longer — and from this uninvolved distance, perhaps it’s easier for me to read the writing on the wall than it is for some of the players, as well as some of the decorated former champions doing the commentating at this year’s Games.

It’s the dawn of a new era in curling, and I’m not only talking about the sartorial splendour of the Norwegian men, although their argyle-print pants are, one hopes, a hint of the new livelihood being brought to the sport.

The Vancouver 2010 Games have shown us the future.  The days of the smoker with a beer gut who can compete at the elite level are over. So too the days of the part-timer, the player who squeezes in practice time during lunch breaks from some full-time job.

This year curling has shown itself to be a true Olympic sport, and like all other sports at this level it’s going to require dedication, strength, stamina, and a lot of hard work:

• Weight training and a diet regimen — fast food is not “the breakfast of champions.”
• Sweepers with the upper-body strength to redeem with vigorous brushing nearly any stone, no matter how off-weight and off-line it might be.
• The mental and physical tenacity not to flinch when, as one is about to release a stone, the crowd erupts into cowbell-ringing chaos over some action two sheets away.
• The stamina to play nine games over an eight-day stretch, even if it means facing top challengers Canada and Sweden in the same day (as Debbie McCormick’s USA women did, losing both games by a combined total of 18–5).

It’s a noisy new era, too.  Take the Saturday, 20 February, women’s match between Russia and Sweden.  Sweden, led by veteran skip — and defending Olympic champion — Anette Norberg, were bested by a Russian team whose average age is 21 and whose skip is merely 19. The final score was 10–1, with Sweden forced to concede after just seven ends.  It was an utter rout.

Norberg, for one, looked distinctly perturbed by the boisterous atmosphere in Vancouver Olympic Centre.  Meanwhile the young Russians were reveling in the attention (they are, to put it mildly, quite photogenic), and are likely unfazed by anything with decibel levels not approaching those of a Moscow rave.  On top of that, in play they’re willing to take chances that more seasoned teams would not consider.

That game aside, Russia’s women were not contenders this year.  Their inexperience leads them to make strategic mistakes — but their youthful audacity often leads to spectacular results.

The World Curling Federation has expressed mixed concerns about the noise level in the Vancouver arena.  On one hand, the clamor has proved distracting and intrusive to some players; on the other hand, spectator excitement is an important necessity for the sport’s growth.  (Chalk one up for the Scots — er, I mean “Great Britain” — at being such good sports when play was interrupted by the crowd spontaneously breaking into an on-key recital of “O Canada”.  GBR skip David Murdoch called it “hilarious”, “great to see”, and “not something you’ll ever see ever again.”  He could be wrong about the latter.)

Most of all, now that it’s an Olympic sport, the champions of the past — Scotland, Canada, pretty much all of Scandinavia — have to move forward with the clear understanding that other, upstart countries have begun to take curling very, very seriously.  For one, if there’s anything the 2008 Beijing Games demonstrated, it’s that China has only one goal when it comes to all things Olympic: utter world domination.

Curling became an official Olympic sport in 1998.  Twelve years is about the right amount of time to start a crash program, develop young talent into well-trained competitors, and hand-pick a decent team.

The 2010 Games in Vancouver are the first in which China has managed to field teams, and though the men narrowly avoided joining John Shuster’s Team USA in the basement, the women are contenders and have qualified for the semi-finals.  I would only expect them both to improve substantially in the years to come, and for new challengers to arise as well.

After all, when it comes to the medal count leaderboard, a gold medal in curling is exactly the same as one from the so-called “premier” events like alpine skiing.

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!