Future Poltergeist

Sometime in the last couple of weeks, I saw someone on Twitter (I don't remember who!) suggest that there is a better way to do the medal count board.  If you've watched the Olympics at all, you've seen the board where all the medals are totaled up.  Russia 'won' the Olympics with 33 medals.  Our U.S. came in second with 28.  In the past I've seen people try to weight the totals by giving different values to gold, silver and bronze.  This makes some obvious sense as a gold medal is more sought after than silver or bronze.  As far as I can tell, there is no consensus way to weigh them though and I'm not creating a system here.  Anyway, the idea was to sort the medals by population of the country.  Therefore smaller countries would get more credit per medal.  This makes some sense.  The larger the country, the easier it should be to find an elite individual.  So I decided to crunch some numbers.  Note: I'm going to figure medal...

Here is a list of how many medal events each winter Olympics has had.  If I had more skill, I'd present this as a graph.  2014 98 2010 86 2006 84 2002 78 1998 68 1994 61 1992 57 1988 46 1984 39 1980 38 1976 37 1972 35 1968 35 1964 34 1960 28 1956 25 1952 22 1948 22 1936 17 1932 14 1928 14 1924 16 There are now more than twice as many medal events as there were in 1988.  That's a mere 26 years ago.  At this rate, the 2042 games (set to be hosted by Dubai) will have more than 200.  The mind boggles.  Is that a crazy thing to project?  Those 26 years represent 7 different Olympics.  If you count back 7 Olympics from 1988, you get 1960, which had 28 events, or a little more than half of 1988.  And only five Olympics prior there were exactly half of that, with 14 events.  So it could happen. I'm a little disappointed at how little creativity has gone into this explosion of events.  Broadly, the only discipline that has been added ...

We're about a week into the Olympics, nearly half way through and I thought I'd talk about what I've been able to watch.  You may remember that we got rid of cable about a year ago.  That means that I've only been able to watch what is on NBC proper.  (I've also worked through the primetime viewing period four days this week so that has limited me.  Add in the kids lack of patience for dad's turn with the TV too.)  The only consistent time block I've had is at 11p. That means I've been able to watch: Some skiing.  Moguls, which I don't care for.  Downhill, which is pretty good TV.  Slaloms, which aren't that great TV.   Cross country skiing.  This doesn't seem like it should work on TV but it does.  Maybe in part because I can see my kids competing in it some time in the future. Biathlon.  More cross country skiing, but this time with the added tension of sharpshooting.  I'll admit, I don't get all of the rules h...

The Olympics are just about beginning and there is some excitement in our house.  Well, I'm excited and I plan on dragging the kids in too.  Hopefully the FP Gal will be ok.  The Opening Ceremonies will be broadcast on Friday, starting at 730p CST, but actual events will start earlier than that.  I thought I'd get some things together in one place for myself and anyone else that is curious. Sochi is ten hours ahead of us here in the Midwest.  Which means almost everything you see will be tape delayed.  I don't know how that will work in the age of Twitter and other social platforms.  I don't remember spoilers being a huge problem during the London games though. Here is a link to NBC's viewing guide .  You can also watch some events online or through your phone.  Possibly your refrigerator or toaster, depending on what model you have. I've been meaning to write about this but keep forgetting.  Do you know who does the camera work at ...

There's a very interesting article here on picking teams to cheer for.  The author is moving to NYC and casually said that he might end up a Yankees fan.  (I looked past the senseless political bashing.)  This has led him to ask questions about choosing teams.  It leads him to some interesting places. I am not saying that it is terribly difficult to start supporting a team. It’s just that it demands more than an impartial approval of the team’s merits. You need to sign up to the mission. You need to add a new commitment to the other projects that define your life. I’m not sure that there any rules about how we acquire our projects. Many of them come with growing up. Later in life we lose old ones and find new ones. It depends on what interests and attracts us, on where and how we live, on who we hang out with.   There's a lot of truth to this.  In a very real way, Viking and Packer fans are simply different.  The history of the two team...

(For the record, I've got Relia saying 'superb owl' now.  Gosh, kids are fun!) I've gone back and forth on who to pick for the big game.  Heidi is a big Seahawks fan and I'd like for her to be happy so I'll probably cheer that way.  On the other hand, Peyton Manning is one of my favorite non-Viking players so it would be nice to see him win another ring.  In other words, I'll probably be happy with either team winning. So who do I think will win?  Denver has a historically great offense.  Seattle has a great defense.  Seattle's offense is better than Denver's defense.  The Seahawks have a big edge on special teams.  Given all of that, you'd think that Seattle would be a bit of a favorite. But it's so hard to bet against Peyton Manning.  He's almost certainly the best player on the field and that's tough to ignore.  Which explains why the Broncos are actually favored by a few points.  I guess I'm picking the Seahawks, but ...