What TV SHOWS are you watching?

For me to participate lately, it has to be:

• The Game of Thrones For the Third Time channel
• The Winter Olympics channel
• The Jeopardy channel

Watched the first episode of Murderville last night. One funny scene, but the rest was eh.... I'll try another one. It's on Netflix, and has the novel concept that Will Arnett is a detective, solving a murder with a celebrity guest star who never gets a script. The guest improvs through the entire thing. The first episode has Conan O'Brien, and I was surprised to see that they literally have him playing himself. I figured the guest would be some character. Nope.

Also have watched several episodes of All of Us are Dead on Netflix. This South Korean zombie show focuses on kids trapped in a high school. The first couple of shows were average but I must say I was surprised to start enjoying it. I'll stick it out to the end.

Game of Thrones season one was the ONLY good season.

It is known.

I loved the Olympics when I was a kid. Then it got political, with the Americans boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the Soviets returning the favor in 1984. Then the drug-testing scandals kept undermining the Summer Olympics, plus there was at least one judging scandal that killed my enthusiasm for any judged events. Maybe it was skating, maybe it was gymnastics, I just don't care anymore. Now with the pandemic, I consider almost every sporting event to have an asterisk due to sick athletes. So I am definitely not watching the Winter Olympics this year.

My only significant Olympics memory is collecting these sweet medallions from boxes of Frosted Cheerios as a kid:

I started Murderville as well. I like the improv concept but I'm not sure just how improv it is. The kid for example, hard to imagine a 10 year old pulls that off in one take.

Still O'brien holds his own and I liked that ep. Ep 2 though, took a straight downhill plunge because whoever that guy is i just didn't care.

Finished Cobra Kai. Damn, that was a good season. I feel like only the Robby actor is taking the martial art training seriously but everyone seems like they are doing most of their own choreography so I appreciate that.

I'm looking forward to seeing the former roller derby skater turned Olympian speed skater do her thing. It is also funny to hear the commentators talk about how the different broom techniques in curling can help the players 'save their energy'.

Shellhead wrote: I loved the Olympics when I was a kid. Then it got political, with the Americans boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the Soviets returning the favor in 1984. Then the drug-testing scandals kept undermining the Summer Olympics, plus there was at least one judging scandal that killed my enthusiasm for any judged events. Maybe it was skating, maybe it was gymnastics, I just don't care anymore. Now with the pandemic, I consider almost every sporting event to have an asterisk due to sick athletes. So I am definitely not watching the Winter Olympics this year.

For both gymnastics and figure skating, they had to revamp scoring because everyone got too good to make the 10 (gymnastics) and 6 (skating) work. Plus figure skating threw out figures.

There was a big skating scandal about 20 years ago, well above the garden variety corruption and homerism. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Winter_Olympi...gure_skating_scandal

1984 Olympics: McDonald's had a contest, where you got scratch-offs with Olympic sports on them. If the US got gold, it was a free Big Mac. Silver was fries, and bronze was a coke. Since the Warsaw Pact countries didn't show up, the US medaled in pretty much everything. We ate free McDonald's for a couple of months.

I think your politicized Olympics are gone, sort of. Russia broke so many rules that they would have banned the whole team, except now they are "Olympians from Russia" or something. The PRC is committing a little light genocide, but nobody really wants to a) look bad like Jimmy Carter did in 1980, or b) walk away from that sweet sweet cash. Frankly, they should just say fuck it, and let the top 16 for each sport compete against each other.

I worked at McDonalds in the summer of 1984, so I vividly remember people getting free meals off those Olympic stamps. As a store employee, I wasn't allowed to redeem the stamps, so I gave mine away to friends. I was already getting at least one free meal every shift anyway.

. . . and I’ll mention that there were cheating scandals in the 60s, because eastern bloc countries were pumping male hormones into their athletes to improve their performance. New rules had to be put in place to determine if women could still be counted as women, and those thresholds continue to knock out female athletes that have taken no hormones at all.

1968 had protests from American athletes, and 1972 had a terrorist attack. The Olympics have been a scandalous political mess for decades. Even NFL owners stand in awe of the Olympic money-grab.

Those of us without cable don’t even notice the games are happening. I like watching Olympic hockey because nobody punches each other in the head, but I have no clue when they play. And I don’t care.

My eldest is super DUPER into figure skating (watching), so we got the Peacock Plus for the month or whatever so we can watch the games. The Russian athletes are competing as Russian Olympic Committee and have to use this dumb little flag and all I can think is "why?" Why did Russia even bother with the state-sponsored cheating? How many more medals were they winning/losing as a result of cheating or not? They have great athletes! What's the fucking point? It's all so idiotic. There is some 15yo phenom absolutely shattering every WR figure skating has ever had. And Russia doesn't get to preen because they didn't want to slip from silver to bronze in luge or some shit. So ridiculous.

Anyway, the winter olympics are awesome because you can go from people that skate backwards better than I walk forwards, to kids throwing themselves off a mountain to see how many times they can spin before their snowboard flies off, to the ski-then-shoot-the-fucking-gun-you've-been-carrying madness of biathlon, to the curlers that s l o w l y slide a 42-lb rock that their teammate brushes around while getting screamed at for brushing wrong all in one night. Maybe someone will die! You never know! It's like a 50:50 chance per sledding event!

I also got caught up on WESTWORLD.

From what I've been reading, most cities are wising up to the fact that they don't make money by hosting the Olympics. A few really big ones can; LA for example can make it work just by repurposing dorm rooms and reusing the Coliseum. I know Chicago failed to land it, and most people thought they dodged a bullet there.

And once again, the obligatory "NBC prime time Olympics coverage is garbage," complaint. Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir do a good job, but NBC as a whole is bad.

jeb wrote: ...There is some 15yo phenom absolutely shattering every WR figure skating has ever had.

What was the quote, "Has the highest score in every category that has a score," or something like that.

Yeah, and speaking of dwindling locations, NBC seems to be the only network will to pony up the billion dollars to broadcast. They own broadcasting rights through 2032.

RobertB wrote: From what I've been reading, most cities are wising up to the fact that they don't make money by hosting the Olympics. A few really big ones can; LA for example can make it work just by repurposing dorm rooms and reusing the Coliseum. I know Chicago failed to land it, and most people thought they dodged a bullet there.

And once again, the obligatory "NBC prime time Olympics coverage is garbage," complaint. Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir do a good job, but NBC as a whole is bad.

About 7-8 years ago Boston MA was preparing to submit a bid to host a Summer Olympics. The group spearheading the effort IIRC was led by a developer of some sort ( who would of course pocket huge contract windfalls for building all the one off facilities no doubt ) . As soon as the common folk heard about it the shit hit the fan, because there was and is no way in hell a city that relatively small could host an Olympics and the economic fallout - in a citt burned on the Big Dig fiasco - would have lasted years.

I was kind of bummed in a way - had they won the train wreck would have been fun to watch from the relative shelter of southern NH.

At this point it seems that only corrupt governments seem interested in hosting them as any sane government would either run away as fast as possible or watch the elected officials get booted out of office.