Another Nail in the Coffin

Friday morning... and I'm off today.  The dogs let me sleep in until 0530 - wow! but then they started jumping around on the bed - that was 180 pounds plus of a canine 'good morning.'
I had a $5200 carpet sale go through yesterday from a customer who could easily afford the expense, his shiny, black wingtips sang of 'money.'
Also, measurements came back for a customer and his wife who are buying blinds - so I designed their blinds... basic price came to a little over $2200 for basic blinds.  He hyphenates his last name, which seemed odd for a man, so I Google'd him, evidently he's a prominent bankruptcy attorney so I'm betting they gussy up those blinds a bit.
Since I was up this AM I started watching the opening ceremonies from Pyeongchang.  All of a sudden the stream stopped and I received a message asking me to verify my cable company - I don't have a cable company which ended the 'live stream' from NBC Sports.  My first thought was that this was the result of the Idiot Jerk, and the Republicans, trying to eliminate Net Neutrality; where you need to have a 'service provider' to use the Internet.  I have FIOS, but I don't have cable.  And I'm pretty sure that whole Net Neutrality thing is locked up in the courts.  So this was most likely NBC Sports being stupid.
And what about Wall Street yesterday... oooohhh.  Now it seems as though there are those who have decided that this is a... market correction.  I believe are defined by losses up to and including 10%.  However, if the Market continues to drop - then this is something other than a 'correction.'  Problems abound.  The government is going to have to borrow $1 Trillion to pay for that wonderful Republican Tax Cut.  Lower unemployment leads to higher prices and inflation, which means we need a certain level of unemployment; it also leads to interest rates going up.
And, unfortunately for the majority of Americans, we have a numb nut in the White House, a Jerk who took credit for the Stock Market going up, who now has to deal with the fact that every point the Dow drops means another nail in the Republican Coffin.

I bet there will be dancing at this wake.

Stupid NBC Sports craps on both the Tour de France and Amgen

When NBC Sports decides to drop a turd on the American cyclists, they drop a big one.  I checked out their sports network to see if they were broadcasting at least a highlight show of the Paris-Nice race and saw they weren't.  Their coverage of the race begins at midnight, Eastern Standard time.  Hey, dumb shits at NBC Sports, I don't own a DVR.  Back when the network used to be Versus they broadcast a lot of cycling, but since it became NBC Sports those moments are becoming few far between.  Maybe some moron executive believes cycling to be slightly un-American.  Most likely, however, it's simply a ratings issue.  I suspect that of all the sports networks, non of which are ratings giants, NBC Sports pulls in an average amount of viewers, and they do have to pay Dan Patrick; that guy seems to be all over the place.  This means there might be a few thousand more people watching college basketball then there would be watching Paris-Nice.

Of course their stupidity goes beyond that, it becomes incredulously dumb.  This is how they note times for the races they will be broadcasting (my highlight).

"This TV schedule is subject to change and all times are considered ET. All events are same day delay or next day delay except for Amgen Tour de France, Tour of California, USA Pro Cycling Challenge, and Paris Roubaix."

Holy Shit!  Amgen is now sponsoring the Tour de France! Someone must have their head up their ass at NBC Sports.  Not only do they insult the Tour de France, they insult Amgen.  Of course, maybe they believe I'm the only one out here who looks at their cycling website, which would be fricking stupid.  Of course, for all I know this copy was written by Dan Patrick.

NBC Sports disappoints with Tour Down Under coverage

Now, while I have to admit Australia is a long way away, there is no reason why NBC Sports needed to give it such crappy coverage.  Those of us who like cycling got basically a half hour per day for highlights.  That's it.  Those half hours?  They were not even broadcast at a set time, say like 5 PM everyday.  No, one day it was at 1:30 PM, the next day at 3:30PM, talk about stupid programming.
On February 10 they will dedicate one complete hour to the six day race.  Boy, I'll bet that's going to be chock full of sprints and chases!

For those of you who missed it, here are the top three winners.

Now, I'll admit the Tour Down Under does not have the prestige of the Tour De France, but let's give cyclists their due.  Of course, cycling has always gotten short shrift here in the United States.  It's not American, not the way major league baseball is, or football, or hockey... well the NHL did kind of shit in their pants this year, didn't they.  In fact, recently the only cycling news people were even talking about was that American embarrassment, Lance Armstrong.  Of course, why should he really be considered an embarrassment?  It seems as though every news feed I get names players of major league sports who have used performance enhancing drugs.  

The real problem is that we want to dominate.  We need to be number one.  All you need to do is watch the Olympics to understand.  We wouldn't send athletes if we weren't winning a lot of gold medals.  To see how right I am, compare the Olympics with the World Cup.  Our soccer players go out and bust their asses, but when it comes to coverage our Sports Networks only provide a video feed when the Americans are playing.  This is not the case in the other countries of the world where there are actual rivalries; not so with the United States.  I suspect the only reason we send a team at all is because we feel it's necessary.  Sure, we'd like them to win, but very few here really care, after all, it's only the World Cup.  It's the same thing with cycling, a sport that, because we don't dominate, we really don't care to watch.  

NBC Opening Ceremony coverage sucked!

This is why I didn't really want to watch it, but I did, for about 45 minutes.  What I saw looked fairly chaotic with nincompoop commentators failing to create something cohesive out of a commercial break nightmare.  Every six minutes NBC shoved two and a half to three minutes of commercials down you throat. This is why they paid 1.8 billion to air the 2012 Olympics, not to give you the best possible coverage, but to make money.  They make money selling ad time.  Wall Street loves this.  Me?  I hate it.  When I watch something that has a narrative line I want to be able to discern that narrative line, I don't want to watch shots from fourteen different camera angles which succeed only in creating abstract  images.  Case in point, the entrance of all of those Mary Poppins'.  Dippy Viera said something to the effect of "with all this evil present look to the east," and the next second you saw them landing.  Where did the come from? Did they jump out of helicopters.

Kenneth Brannaugh read something from "The Tempest" and then you saw him wondering around, was there a purpose in his wondering?  Was he supposed to be an observer of the Industrial Revolution?  I kept thinking he looked like Abraham Lincoln without his beard.    

Watching the competitions this AM I noticed commercial breaks have been cut back, some what, they are still way too frequent, usually occurring after eight or nine minutes and they're wasting about 2 minutes of time.  How much time will I spend in front of the TV?  Not very much.  While I find the Olympics entertaining, I don't share the addiction so many others seem to have.  I don't need to win every competition to pet my ego. 

NBC Sports and the Tour de France

This is a bad year for the Tour de France on NBC Sports, not because NBC is doing anything wrong, well maybe a couple little things, but because is up against the Olympics.  Other years I could come home from work and watch a couple of hours of racing.  Now, when I come home, I turn on NBC Sports and see they Olympic trials.  The NBC prime time Tour de France broadcast doesn't begin until very, very close to my bed time.  This I can understand.  Now for the bad things.  On Sunday I got to watch the race live, good shit.  All of sudden they began a stupid fluff piece on Cavendish.  I sat stupefied watching his companion (who evidently had complained on Twitter after Mark had been criticized) explain herself.  To be honest, I don't quite remember what she said, I was too stunned to see they had inserted this bull shit into their commentary.  There were complaints that after Mark had crashed he didn't get back onto his bike and ride like the Stage winning sprinter people like to brag about.

After the crash

"He's a human being," she had complained in her Twitter and because of that she'd been brought on National Television.  No, I thought, he's a professional cyclist who's getting paid a lot of money to race his bicycle.  She needs to understand this, instead of acting like a prepubescent girl in junior high.  And, for those of you who think Cavendish is going to really go out and win stages like he did last year?  Forget it.  He was an Olympic medal.  He's going to save himself.  Olympic gold would really make him an expensive package.

Mass Effect 3 DLC / What? No fantasy TDF?

I finally watched the Mass Effect 3 DLC on Youtube.  Boring.  They said there was going to be some added filler to enlighten gamers as to what actually happens in the end.  The answer is a boring 'nothing much.'  You still end up with, of all things, a 2 second clip of someone laying in the rubble on Earth, someone who may or may not be Shepherd.  Like I said before, in 2 or 3 years Bioware is going to put another Mass Effect game, though who knows what they might call it, maybe Mass Effect Resurrection because Shepherd will rise from the rubble.

To be continued?

Next on the agenda - Cycling, the kind you do on a bicycle.  The Tour de France starts Sunday and I can't wait.  I've watched it on Versus for years.  At some point in time NBC purchased Versus and for the most part they've kept pretty true to previous years' telecast.

There is, however, one exception.  I've been going to the NBC Sports website daily to see if they were going to be running a Fantasy Cycling Challenge or at least a link to one.  So far?  Nothing.  Thousands of people used to participate and I used to be one of them.  I never expected to win and never did, but there was still a lot of fun in creating my own team, usually a team that did not include all of the "superstars" of cycling.  Remember, it's how you play the game; if you play it well and you win, well that's stupendous, if you play it well and lose, well, that's life, deal with it - it didn't cost anything.  But not this year, so far no link has been published.  I did go online to see if there were any listed and there are, but they cost money.  There's one in the UK which is free for the first 7 stages but after that you need to pay 10.5 Pounds Sterling, or about $25 per stage.  Give me a break!  Not out of my bank account.  So, this year, I will most likely just watch.  Oh, and I will not be signing up to watch the live broadcast from my tablet.  My employer would not be thrilled to find me sitting at my desk watch the race live.