I don’t know if anyone has been paying attention, but there’s been some interesting background music being played at the Olympic games this year. In the beach volleyball games, in between points, they played Naruto theme music a couple times. And just now, as NBC introduced the men’s basketball gold medal match, they played theme music from The Prince of Egypt.
Congratulations to Michael Phelps on winning his eighth Olympic gold medal and making everyone at NBC wish they could have his baby.
First of all, let me say that I never signed up for DirecTV. It’s one of the mandatory “features” provided by my apartment, along with the four unique home phone numbers that I never use. So, there I am watching the Euro 2008 finals between España and Deutschland when, shortly after Spain scores her first goal, the TV goes blank, and all I see on the TV for the next 30 minutes is “Searching for Satellite Signal…” Later the signal would come back, but only sporadically, making it impossible to watch. So, I basically watched the rest of the match on justin.tv. The lesson to be learned here is, don’t buy DirecTV service unless you’re willing to risk losing your broadcast signal at the most inopportune times.
Anyway, as I’m typing this now, I’m still listening to the hyper Spanish commentators on the Internet stream which, I assume, is coming from a Spanish source (ya, there are Spanish commercials coming on now). Man those Spaniards are crazy about their football. I’m glad Spain won. Their style of play was a lot more entertaining to watch than that of the Germans.
… acting like a baby after her loss to Justine Henin at the US Open, which included a lovely breadstick in the second set. Why am I not surprised?
My coworker holds the opinion that baseball is not a sport. He calls it a game. According to him, any activity where overweight, unfit people can be superstars (i.e. Babe Ruth), or where people can play back-to-back games without breaking a sweat (i.e. doubleheaders), does not qualify to be called a sport. I found this an interesting point of view, as baseball is one of America’s most traditional and favorite pastime “sports,” and if you ask any average person on the street if they consider baseball a sport, they’d probably say, “of course!” On the other hand, if you asked about, say, golf for example, you’d probably get more people agreeing that it’s more of a game than a sport.
So I decided to look up the number of calories burned playing baseball compared to playing golf. The numbers vary slightly depending on your source of information, but overall all sources I’ve seen agree that golf burns more calories per hour than baseball. As for skill involved, it’s easy to argue that golf requires as much skill as, if not more than, baseball. So, no offense to any baseball players out there, but even though I enjoy watching Chien Ming Wang pitch for the Yankees, I have to agree with my coworker: baseball is not a sport, it’s a game.
Looks like I returned home from vacation to a nice surprise– I came in first in my Fantasy Football Pick’em league! Now we’re proceeding to the playoffs pick’em, the rules being 10 points for picking a winning team, regardless of spread, and 5 bonus points if the winning team is an underdog. That said, here are my picks for this weekend:
Let’s see how well I do. Vacation photos are still in queue. (These things take time, because I’m very particular about image contrast, color balance, saturation, noise reduction…)
With my parents visiting I figured this would be a good time to visit the US Open. I was able to get first row courtside tickets for Arthur Ashe stadium from the concierge at the Ritz Carlton Central Park for Sunday’s day session. Thanks to the rainout on Saturday, we were able to see Andre Agassi play Benjamin Becker in what would be Andre’s final match of his career. (Read on …)
I guess they’re no longer a secret, now that the NYTimes has published an article about them. I imagine the back stairs and dark hallways of Grand Central are soon going to be filled with people searching for these courts.
Surprisingly, my World Cup round of 16 predictions were all spot on– the teams I predicted to move on to the quarterfinals have all advanced, and so here are my predictions for the next round:
Germany vs. Argentina: I know Germany has the home court advantage, and that may be enough to get them past Argnetina, but Argentina is still my favorite team, so I’m going to have to pick them over Germany.
Italy vs. Ukraine: Italy wins over Ukraine in another close but boring game.
England vs. Portugal: England may be a proud soccer nation, but her run ends here. Portugal just has too many good players on its team. Besides, if you need Beckham to score for you in an international game, you know you’re in trouble.
Brazil vs. France: Do I even need to say anything here?
I’m hoping for an Argentina vs. Brazil final match but wouldn’t be surprised of Germany knocked them out in the quarterfinals. Still, I’m picking them to advance past Germany and Italy in the semis.