Thanks to the miracle of the BBC streaming video I have now seen some live weightlifting – the mens’ 62kg finals. I can report that I was – as someone in the comments mentioned – quite wrong about the lack of tactics: but the […]

I saw a minute of the Basketball game between the USA and China today. Gosh Basketball is dull. Look at all the things I thought about in that minute to try to avoid engaging with the game
a) Is giganticism a kind of disability (door frames too low e[…]

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. Howe[…]

Unlike, say, sailing, fencing is a naturally telegenic sport. Violent and shrouded in darkness with dramatically spot-lit little runways for the fencers to jab at each other, each point of a bout will take up at most a few seconds of one’s prec[…]

If you like Kurosawa’s samurai movies, it’s a very good bet that you’ll like Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s comics – it’s the closest movie/comics match this side of Sin City, which is kind of cheating given Frank[…]

“No score at the break – the mighty Brazil being held by Belgium.” We have the old problem here of commentators having stereotyped ideas fixed in their small brains before they have seen a team play. The best attempts and chances in[…]

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 […]

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 spo[…]

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 “[…]

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&#[…]