59 thoughts on “August 4, 2012: Olympic Action”

  1. speaking of olympics coverage, if anyone wants to give me a heads-up on when NBC will air any of Bolt's races, I'd appreciate it.
    If I have to go look, I will, but if someone knows, would save me the work.

    1. all i know is NBC just showed serena williams destroy maria sharapova (whom i like as she kinda looks like one of my exes [one of the good ones])

    2. Bolt ran a 10.09 (9th) in the 100M today and he runs in the semis tomorrow afternoon, our time. The 200m races starts on the seventh.

      1. Finally, the start of Athletics!

        sadly, I missed the micro-coverage of the shot put last night. Apparently, the highlight was the interview with Reese Hoffa afterwards.

        1. It turns out that I can watch pretty much anything on the iPad. I will be so into the Athletics.

  2. Mrs. Twayn and I have an anniversary coming up next month so I just got a couple of Jason Mraz tickets. We love Jason, but I f***ing loathe Ticketmaster. Just having to buy tickets through that bloodsucking vampire squid of a company is enough to dissuade me from going out for anything ever again in my life. Not only do they gouge you for about 25% of the face value of the tickets you buy, they provide the absolute worst online buying experience in the history of e-commerce . I had the choice of having tickets mailed to me at no additional cost (I damn near fainted at that) or paying $2.50 for the privilege of printing my own tickets at home with my own paper and my own ink (which ounce for ounce costs more than cocaine).

    Oh, that feels much better. Thank you. Rant complete.

    1. they provide the absolute worst online buying experience in the history of e-commerce

      Yeah, MLB's single game ticket system is a contender for the title as well.

      The last time I purchased anything from ticketmaster was 2009 to see the Hold Steady in London. The laws in Europe must be different because the service fee was a flat 2Β£ for the total transaction not a per ticket service fee. I would go further, but that leads into the forbidden zone.

    2. I don't get the print at home charges either. Stub hub charges $5.95 to print tix at home. I can't see why there is any cost to them for allowing me to print tix at home. I think they make a little money by mailing tix out so they are trying to recoup those fees. It's a racket that's for sure.

          1. I think he faltered a little with the "is enough to dissuade me from going out for anything ever again in my life" line. You can go out for beer without encountering the Big Squid, so this was a little sloppy. 1/10 point deduction there.

            1. But this judge would award 1/10 of a point for an LTE that contains "loathe", "bloodsucking", "gouge", and "cocaine". WGOM Olympic materiel.

  3. Scott Diamond this season: 4.9 K/9, 1.3 BB/9, 1.31 GB/FB, 1.93 GO/AO
    Mark Buehrle career: 5.1 K/9, 2.0 BB/9, .85 GB/FB, 1.18 GO/AO

    Buehrle has never had a season in which he's allowed more ground balls than fly balls (i.e. GB/FB > 1.0, his best was .99).

    1. He’s slipped on banana peels, run the wrong way and been disqualified for riding a scooter, a Segway, a golf cart, a zip line and a rickshaw.

      Maybe next time he should try impersonating his distant cousin.

    2. I hope I'm not crossing the line, but that is the stupidest opinion article ever. The Nats have added to the list of things that are certain: Death, Taxes, and Teddy Roosevelt losing his mascot races. I was freaking out when it looked like his relay team would win the race at the all-star game. "Teddy can't win! He just can't!" Luckily, he's an evil mascot and decided that he'd rather beat the sausage than win the race.

      I have never come close to attending a Nats game, but when I do, I'm looking forward to him continuing his losing streak.

      Wapo can go cry to their mommies about how it's not fair. But don't publish the whining.

  4. There's nothing like finding a 40+ year old part on a truck in the very back row of a salvage yard to make a Saturday morning feel successful. I might be able to buy an overdrive transmission with the money I saved.

      1. The trip itself was great; it's an incredible country and visiting it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. The last month has been pretty brutal, however.

    1. That's funny because I happened to find a parking brake bracket on a 1999 Golf from the righ, rear side in which the wheel just happened to be removed at that exact same salvage yard a few months ack. Saed me about $80 since I didn't have to buy a whole new caliper.

  5. Signed up for a 1/2 marathon a week ago, and doing a 12-week program with Fleet Feet to prepare for ING Hartford 1/2M in October.

    The lady that runs FF has us drinking KoolAid on running at 180 BPM cadence, which is supposed to be more efficient, effective, better for longer hauls, etc. So far it's working for me.

    This boyo now looking around for running tracks close to said clix-rate. iTunes has a field for it, but none of my songs have the data displayed.

    I've downloaded several programs that are supposed to automagically update it in iT - nein/nada/nikto on results there.

    So far I've playlisted:
    Hey Ya (OutKast)
    Tusk (FW Mac)
    In da Club (50 Cent) NSFW
    Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)
    Here Comes My Baby (Cat Stevens) - is he still alive?
    Bright Side of the Road (V Morrison)
    Tesselate (Tokyo Police Club)
    Yeah (Rising Fawn)
    Barely Breathing (H Steady)
    Golden Phone (Micachu)
    Masiteladi (Amadou & Mariam)
    Do You Remember (Ane Brun) Kool Norwegian chick, me likey

    If you have any, send them over.

      1. Yeah, exactly. I used to double time or do triplets in my head and get pretty much any song to work out as close to the cadence I wanted. And then there's this: (see 8:15 for end results)
        httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv45umOEUeA

  6. Well, what do you know? A feature on a non-American athlete? Of course, he trains in the US.

  7. Swimming is basically over. I fear I missed the 50M freestyle. Dang, that's awesome.

    Kinda bummed to hear SBG's report of Bolt's 9th place finish. I'll probably never see anything like the 2008 100M again.

    1. That 10K was fun to watch with the kids. Talked with the kids about how people from all over the world compete at running and jumping, but it's the same 8 or so countries for swimming and gymnastics. Got to watch the profiled Brit and the American come in 1-2.

      I anticipated just before the announcers did that a sprint to the finish would be coming soon and the question was who had enough left in their tank despite running 6 miles at the front of the pack.

  8. Haha, GB in a soccer shootout. This'll end well.

    And FYI - The BBC Sport twitter feed is about 30 seconds ahead of NBC's stream, so be careful.

      1. Couldn't have said it better myself:

    1. they could have avoided PK's if that one dude would have converted in the 1st half

  9. No Willingham in the starting lineup tonight. He DH'ed the last 2 games. Gardy says he is getting a breather, but I wonder if he is hurt.

  10. New experiences department: I went to a tractor pull this afternoon. I've lived most of my life in rural South Dakota, but I'd never been to a tractor pull before.

      1. It was better than I thought it would be. Which is not to say it was enjoyable, just that I had extremely low expectations. I was merely bored, rather than bored to death like I thought I'd be.

      1. Good luck on that. The event lasts half an hour and with the athlete feature and the warm-ups, it's probably nearly an hour. That's too much precious prime-time real estate when we could have Seacrest reading tweets from celebrities to gymnasts.

        Had I thought that NBC might rebroadcast it, I might have spoiler-tagged my discussion of the results above.

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