Olympic Avoidance Log 2008: Day One - Rowing

I hate the Olympics. But it is everywhere (except for the fencing), so it is very easy to accidentally stumble across it. In the last Olympics I managed a personal best of racking up less than an hour of viewing, but I hope to beat it this time. However occasionally I get tricked into watching some by virtue of something interesting happening. It is rarely the sport itself.

This morning it was an explosion at the rowing. … read on …

Where Are The Lords Of COBOL?

A brief dip into news territory for FT, as the web throws up this truly extraordinary story regarding the Californian budget negotiations. DON’T YAWN YET. It appears that Arnold Schwatzeneggar’s Republic’s have been unable to fix a budget for public spending and are running blind into the new session. The solution? Pay all state employees minimum wage until it is sorted out. Not only is this a truly bonkers idea (underpaying as an incentive - rarely works as a management strategy) but it appears to be impossible to implement. Because in other cost cutting news, they are still working on a payroll system which is programmed in COBOL - programming language TO GO of the 1970’s. … read on …

I Am Curiously Humourless Orange

I am not convinced The Love Guru is fundamentally any worse than any of the Austin Powers films. At least Myers only plays one character in it (two if you count a brief cameo as himself). But the difference is that while Austin Powers was a silly spoof of Bond and the literal swinging sixties the subject matter gave it architecture: it followed a spy film plot (albeit a silly one). The Love Guru is a parody of self help gurus – This is an easy target (which he does kind of miss even so), but the big problem is there are not really any guru/self help films to parody. This means Myers ends up plugging the saffron robed character into a rather dull sports movie. The Love Guru has very little forward momentum, which means it gets stuck on its bad jokes, lots of them, and you never really care what happens. (The film is even lazier than that, with cursory scrutiny you notice that the lead characters emotional arc of The Love Guru is almost identical to that in Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery - just replace a chastity belt for Powers missing Mojo.) … read on …

Premature Sports and British Withdrawal.

Isn’t the Olympic opening ceremony tomorrow? You know, 08/08/08 = money, money, money? (Actually the games start at 8.08pm, which suggests that the first track should be a cover of the Abba tune by 808 State). What I understand the term “Opening Ceremony” to mean is that it takes place before any of the sport starts. So why have the Women’s Football games already started? Yet more proof that the Olympics are rubbish, they can’t even start on time! Of course in the UK we have no interest in the football due to the pesky Scots not allowing us to field a Team GB football team - possibly on the correct assumption that no Scot is good enough to make the team. That said the suggestion of a home nation tournament in 2011 to select a GB team for 2012 I think could be quite good fun. But then it is football, they have their own World Cup and football has never really felt like an Olympic sport to me. Unlike, say, Hitler’s favorite sport Handball - which is as Olympic as they get (pointless silly foreign sport that no-one plays). … read on …

“Olympic Pollution Watch” Watch

As an avowed Olympic hater, the talk of the polluted smog over Beijing is amusing me. Not because I think pollution is in any way funny, but clearly because the sulphurous cloud strikes me as a whole new way of talking about the “Yellow Peril”. And I am not sure what the fuss is. As far as I remember my A-Level chemistry, all the competitors will be breathing broadly the same air, so it won’t really disadvantage any of them above the rest (unless they are used to sucking in polluted gases as they train). Even better, the pollution obscures the view of the events themselves and even potentially adds a very realistic hazard to the poshboy yachting events.

No the most interesting thing about the pollution is the rabid way that the news outlets are reporting it. Here’s is the BBC’s not very scientific pollution-o-meter - a daily photo and a measurement with the astounding error margin of 20%. … read on …

Does The Pope Shit In The Woods?

The Pope’s Toilet (El Bãno Del Papa) is set up to be a droll satirical comedy about the supposed effect the Pope’s visit to a small Uruguayan town had. Based on true events, there is some humour in the small town folks dreaming of this one day windfall of pilgrims visiting their town – strategically placed near the Brazilian border (the Pope did not visit Brazil on that visit). And yet there really aren’t any jokes except at the expense of the simple folk of the town. And whilst there may be a degree of venal cunning displayed in the townsfolk’s opportunism, this has to be balanced against their abject poverty. Bearing in mind that our lead regularly cycles 60 km a day via the countryside to smuggle goods from Brazil, you can’t begrudge them a day of dreams. I don’t think the film does. But then where is the humour in someone risking their entire standing and livelihood to smuggle a toilet over the border to try and make a little bit of money out of hordes of tourists? … read on …

My Old Robots A Dustman, He Wears A Robotic Dustmans Hat

Wall-E is kind of the kids sequel version of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. In Idiocracy the world its being swamped by rubbish, and everyone is become slack jawed servants of a dumbed down society. In Wall-E the humans have left a waste strewn Earth and are drifting around in space morbidly obese in their hover chairs (at least until the idiosyncratic Hello Dolly loving robot comes and reminds them of their own humanity). Similar plots, though only one has a monster truck battle. And it isn’t the kids film!

Much has been written about the politics of Wall-E (from its anti-obesity scare tactics to its not exactly hidden green agenda). … read on …

Bob Slayed On The Motorway

Coo, first Olympics post proper and its looking forward to the 2010 Winter Olympics, in Vancouver. Yes as much as I wish the Beijing Olympics were already over, there is escape in wondering about logos of the future. Because if the Olympics are about anything, its staggeringly inappropriate logos. What with Beijing 2008’s shot man, and London 2012 “Lisa Simpson fellatio” what can the Canadians do to surprise us.
… read on …

The TranseX-Files

Most of the reviews of The X-Files: I Want To Believe have decided that it is on a par with a low quality standalone episode of the series, stretched needlessly to feature length. What intrigues me about this is that film reviewers tend not to be all that TV literate, and so I wonder if they really spent that much time exhaustively watching The X-Files. This film turns out to be something a little odder than this glib assessment; it is a mixture of paranormal investigation and Before Sunset.

What we get is Mulder and Scully acting like an old married couple, bickering when an old flame re-enters their lives. They have moved on, her to successful doctoring, him to wild man in the woods giving Grizzly Adams a run for his money in the shaggy beard stakes. The old flame returns, in this case the FBI needing their help on a paranormal case, and their cosy status quo is threatened. It becomes a weird relationship drama, showing us a how these characters have grown (or not) in the intervening ten years, throwing up new conflicts, weird work related jealousies and old reminiscences. … read on …

Announcing The Comprehensive FT Olympic Coverage (Snidely)

I hate the Olympics. Once every four years the world seems to stop –for some sort of celebration of fair play, school bullies and bizarre stage management. This seems all kinds of wrong to me, particularly in the middle of a balmy summer that grotesque mutants and posh people fill up our television schedules just for being quite good at something which is useless. Bookend the whole affair with staggering jingoism and an opening ceremony which is the last vestige of hyper-interpretive dance and I really do start to wonder the gawmping masses watching are actually pod people. So someone can throw a stick quite far. SO WHAT!

Sadly it appears that on Freaky Trigger, I am alone in this view. And so it falls to me, sipping my special edition Olympic Hatorade, to announce the comprehensive Olympic coverage on Freaky Trigger. … read on …