Calgary Surprised Me.

Yesterday Calgary held a plebiscite on bidding for the 2026 Winter Olympics.  56 percent of Calgarians voted no.  I had expected to see the yes side win.  The plebiscite is non-binding, but the Alberta government said provincial funding was contingent on a yes vote,  which makes sense.  A provincial election is approaching, but if the government changes it's hard to imagine the supposedly fiscally conservative United Conservative Party going against the voters, and spending a big pile of money.

Just As Well.

I haven't been watching the Winter Olympics, but I've been paying attention to the medal count.  At the time of this writing Norway is in first place with 29 medals.  Canada is third with 19.  The US?  They're in sixth place with 12.  Apparently Donald Trump isn't paying attention, since he hasn't Tweeted about it.  Which is just as well, as he'd probably go on a rant about how other countries are somehow cheating, things are stacked against the US and on and on.  After all the greatest country ever should be winning all the medals.

A Geography Lesson Shouldn't Be Needed.

This morning I went into an Affinity Credit Union to use the ATM.  As I was going about my business I briefly looked at one of the monitors they have that presents news stories and current stock market information.  It had an Associated Press article about the Olympics, with the location given as Rio de Janeiro, Argentina.   Whoops.  You'd think after all the Olympic reporting it would be pretty hard for anyone to think Rio is Argentina.  Especially someone writing material for a press service. 

The Misery Is Ending.

Soon it will all be over.  The horror that is the Olympics will leave us alone for a couple of years.  Soon we can go back to paying attention to more important things.  After all, Major League Baseball spring training starts in a couple of weeks.  Unfortunately we'll be menaced by the Summer Olympics sooner than we think.

Gold Medal For Goofiness.

Conservapedia isn't a place I've spent much time looking at.  But someone posted a link to their 2012 Olympics page, and I just couldn't help myself.  As expected it's full of some rather weird ideas, such as the statement "... the pagan origins of the Olympics have been replaced by faith-based achievement by the participating athletes."  Really?  There's a difference between pagan running and faith based running?  And of course by "faith" they mean Christianity.  It's not like pagans had faith, right?  Then there's the weird question about athletes from public schools not winning gold medals.  Of course it's not so weird if you consider that the kind of folks who write stuff for Conservapedia don't like anything run by government that doesn't involve law enforcement or the military.  I also wonder how one defines an "increasingly atheistic nation," which seems to be an obsession of the page creator.  After all the number of atheists and others that the Conservapedia crowd would consider non-believers is growing in the US as well.

In any case if there's an Olympic competition for dumb Olympic themed web pages this one would certainly be in the running,  I suspect there are worse out there.

Addenda: The word faith being in purple is due to copy-pasting that line from Conservapedia.

The Rings Are Packed Away.

Another Summer Olympics has come and gone. And I didn't watch more than a minute of it.

I'm not much of a sports fan. My viewing is generally limited to Canadian football, major league baseball, and the combat sports. Although baseball and the martial arts are represented at the Olympics I really couldn't be bothered to watch them. The professional versions provide me enough entertainment without going to the trouble of figuring out the broadcast schedule for the Olympic versions.

I didn't even watch the opening and closing ceremonies, which many people do even if they have no interest in the games. I'm definitely not a fan of overrought and contrived spectacles like those.

The Olympics themselves seem to feel more and more contrived with each passing edition. Consider the fact that the IOC has decided to drop women's softball. This comes only a few years after women's beach volleyball became an Olympic sport. Given what the uniform for the latter is it's hard not to speculate that women's softball was dropped because the uniforms just aren't sexy enough. Gotta get in those TV viewers. If you're a competitor in a less telegenic sport it might be worth your while to find ways to sex it up or you too may be on the way out the door, to be replaced by women's "fitness" competition or something like that.

One of the more amusing disconnects about the Olympics is the closing speech of the head of the IOC, who for years has called upon "the youth of the world" to assemble again in four years for the next Olympics. But not all Olympic competitors are youth. Take Canada's Ian Millar. The veteran equestrian is 61 this year. He's old enough that he could have a grandkid competing alongside him. This is his ninth Olympics. From what I can tell the shooting sports also tend to skew older, which is not a surprise given that they rely on accuracy and not sheer physical ability.

Canada won 18 medals this year, and of course the response was the inevitable. "We didn't win enough medals! What went wrong?" This is the same response after pretty much every Olympics. I suspect that if Canada were to come in second some day we'd hear the exact same whining.

There has been a lot of criticism of the Chinese for doing things like stifling protests and replacing a singer at the opening ceremonies with a better looking one. But really, does anyone think we won't see similar things in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games? You can bet people will be displaced from their homes to make room for Olympic atheletes and specatators, or even just to hide that there are "undesirable" people in Vancouver. You can bet various civil liberties will be tramped on in the name of preventing terrorism or "disruption" of the event. And you can be it's going to cost the Canadian taxpayer a lot more than was predicted.

One thing the Olympics seems to have done for me is generate some visitors. Specifically I've gotten quite a few hits in the last 2 or 3 weeks as a result of my Don Whitman obituary. Not having watched CBC's Olympic coverage I have no idea if this was because they had a tribute to Mr. Whitman, or if it was simply people not knowing he had died and trying to find out why he wasn't there like they expected.

Bad news for some baseball and softball fans. The International Olympic Committee has voted to drop the two sports from the 2012 Olympics. Amongst the factors being blamed are the problems the US major leagues are having with doping, and that baseball supposedly isn't popular enough in much of the world. The latter is rather amusing given some of the other sports that are in the Olympics, and for that matter there being a Winter Olympics when large chunks of the planet don't have any sort of winter sports tradition because they have no winter.

Website zap2it has a report on the supposed complaints sent to the FCC about the Athens Olympics broadcasts. Its amazing how much the sight of a breast can freak some people out. As for the apparent "f word" spotting its hard to imagine that anyone watching the broadcast, other than perhaps a toddler or two, hasn't heard that word in use at least once a week for most of their lives. Personally I doubt too many little kids would be watching women's volleyball anyways. The prohibited word occasionally turns up in live sports broadcasts of things like baseball, picked up via on field mics, and I doubt the FCC is going to mandate live sports been shown on a 7 second delay to prevent this.