A few more...

observations about the Winter Olympics, in particular NBC's coverage of it, before the whole thing retreats from our memories.

° Most of my most ardent feelings come from figure skating, because that's the winter sport I've followed the most closely. My brother and I used to watch it with our mother, and now I watch with my wife. When I refer to the broadcast team of Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic as a "train wreck," I do so based on some decades of watching figure skating.

I don't have the same points of reference for other winter sports. I really enjoy the biathlon because of its juxtaposition of cross-country skiing (a sport which, as a marathon runner, I can relate to) and shooting (which I can't relate to at all). To me it's like running as hard as I can for 15 minutes, then stopping to thread five needles as fast as possible, then running some more. (I also have to admit to a fondness for sports that are abstracted out of real things. One can see where the biathlon simulates something a soldier might have to do. Similarly, I have a great affection for modern pentathlon. Until figure skaters can shoot lasers out of their sequins, it's difficult to find the real activity there.)

But I don't "get" biathlon well enough to determine whether NBC's Chad Salmela is doing a good job. There's no obvious screeching about the mundane, no crying, and a reasonable amount of information (most of it about ski wax), so I'd guess he's doing OK. But I'm not really sure.

With skating, however, I know enough to know that we're being poorly served by the current analysts. Bezic and Hamilton offer almost nothing in the way of insight; it's just their emotions spilling out the airwaves, and I'm honestly not very interested in how they feel about things. As I wrote before, I want either information to help me understand the event better, or a sense of what it is to be there experiencing it for myself. I get neither from the screaming and the crying and the rampant self-indulgence.

The saddest thing is that NBC has better people on staff. Tom Hammond, a generally competent play-by-play guy in many sports, sinks to the level of his co-commentators. He could easily be replaced by Andrea Joyce (who's done a fine understated job hosting the Grand Prix events televised on NBC's Universal Sports) or Terry Gannon (who did figure skating for 14 years on ABC, understands the sport, and knows a lot of the players).

The Universal Sports coverage has been illuminating, as we have heard Joyce working with a few different color commentators, each of whom has surpassed Bezic or Hamilton. I only caught Michael Weiss once, but he, while unpolished, did a nice job and shows real potential. Paul Wylie gives a nice analytical look at what's going on. And Peter Carruthers, Joyce's most frequent partner, has become quite good. (Just a few years ago, he wasn't particularly good at all, talking way too much about a skater's "lack of concentration," but he's rounded into someone who can emphasize the important aspects of a routine without hyperbole or Hamilton-esque screaming.) Any of them would be better choices than Bezic/Hamilton.

º A lot has been made about the new skating scoring system. Very simply, they replaced a system in which each judge gave a mark for technical execution and another for artistry, with a system in which each element (jump, spin, step sequence) gets a value, then is judged as +3 to -3, and includes five presentation areas for which scores are given a 0 to 10 ranking. There are various weights given, the numbers are added together, and the score rolls out. (A more detailed treatment can be found here.)

[A word about the usual description of the system. It's often termed "mathematically complex." It's not. The system is based on multiplication and addition, and any reasonably smart 4th-grader could handle its complexity. What's complex is how the numbers are arrived at, and the motivation behind the calculations.]

What's odd is that they took a system which was faulted for a lack of accountability and transparency and replaced it with a system that has almost none of either. The scores that are used are not identified by judge, and the numbers they put down seem arbitrary.

The system does, however, replace two numbers per judge with a whole lot of numbers per judge, and demonstrates what I like to call the "false certainty of more data." Anyone who has seen a work performance evaluation system in which there are weights and measurements and defined criteria, all of which are used to come up with one number that reflects an employee's performance for the year, knows what I'm talking about. Each skater ends up with a whole bunch of numbers to look at, but that specificity doesn't imply greater accuracy. Any judge can still show systematic bias; instead of being clear ("The Russian judge only gave 5.2?"), that bias is buried under a mass of GOEs and base values and factors, but it can still easily be there.

º There was a lot made about the "world record" performance of Kim Yu-Na in winning the ladies' gold medal. Unfortunately, the code of points changes each year, the required elements change, and so forth. World records, national records, personal bests, all are meaningless within a system that revamps its rules each year. It's as if high jump records were kept, but the length of an inch changed each year. The records would be irrelevant, just as they are today in figure skating.

º Also in figure skating - there were some comments on the under-rotation of jumps, especially when it turned out that US hopeful Rachael Flatt had been marked down twice in her long program for failure to complete her triple flip. Bezic and Hamilton were indignant, arguing that the judges were "tough" on Flatt (indignation which seemed to come mostly from their inability to see it).

Here's the rule: if, upon slow-motion review, it is decided that the skater was more than a quarter-turn away from completing a revolution, the skater gets credit for the next smaller jump (a triple loop becomes a double loop, for example). The points are correspondingly less, so the skater will not score as high.

This debate is ludicrous. My feeling is that there shouldn't even be a quarter-turn leeway. If you complete three revolutions (not 2-3/4), you've done a triple. Anything less, it's a double. It's the only way figure skating can be considered a sport, not a dance on ice. There's no "almost" clause in any other real sport.

º Listening to NBC's coverage, one would think there was a new nation called "North America." Especially as the first week full of United States success gave way to a second week dominated by Canadian gold, there seemed to be a push to appropriate Canada's victories as, somehow, ours. This was particularly true in the ice dancing final, as a lot was made of the "first gold medal in ice dance earned by a North American team."

It may be noteworthy that Russia lost what was once a lock for a gold medal (only two exceptions, 1984 and 2002, versus 7 golds for various incarnations of Russia), but it isn't clear that "North America" has finally found the magic. The gold and silver medal-winning teams were coached by skaters who came up in the Soviet system, so it's not as if we've found some kind of capitalist magic. It hardly constituted a "Miracle on Ice."

And it isn't clear at all that, NBC notwithstanding, we in the 50 states should take a huge amount of pride in the victories of a non-entity called "North America."

º In general, I think that many of the problems NBC has in covering the Games is their omnipresent hope of finding a transcendent moment. We're supposed to believe that these athletes come to the Olympics and do the impossible (and NBC's there to capture it for us). Michael Phelps wins 8 gold medals in swimming and, despite the essentially repetitive nature of what he's doing, is instantly touted as the greatest Olympian of all time. Usain Bolt sets sprinting world records - because he happens to do it at the Olympics, he's an instant immortal.

In most cases, however, success comes as a result of long hours of mastering skills. Evan Lysacek wins an Olympic gold not by transcending human performance, but by strategically simplifying his program (by omitting an attempt at a quad jump) and executing it in a way he has hundreds of times before. You can respect his ability to perform under the exaggerated pressure of an Olympics, but you can't argue that he's doing something unprecedented. The same is true of pretty much every sport. Biathlon is impressive, but success is the result of untold hours of hard training and genetic fortune, not in willing one's self to ski faster and shoot better simply because it's the Olympics.

This is where commentators get themselves into trouble. Scott Hamilton (yes, him again) is fond of talking about "muscle memory," in which a skater does something almost automatically because they've trained the move again and again in practice. But, if that's true, then what accounts for Scotty's ecstasy at the landing of a "TRIPLE LUTZ...TRIPLE TOOOOE! Ohhhhhhh!" combination? These athletes do that every day, it just isn't that amazing.

Which brings us to Joannie Rochette (whose case I've already commented on). Her mother passed away two days before Joannie was to start competing, and NBC treated it like the most remarkable thing possible. How can she possibly skate? How can she go out there?

Here's how. She's done these routines many times. She's jumping and spinning using her "muscle memory," so her performance does not depend on being in the right frame of mind. If anything, her two routines constituted seven minutes in which she didn't have to think about her mother. It's NBC which needs to portray her performances as impossible.

I don't mean to minimize Joannie's pain. I lost my mother a few years ago; while we had an oft-contentious relationship, the pain I felt was still real. And now Joannie has to go through that, and, despite its being something most of us have to deal with eventually, I wish she didn't.

But we shouldn't ignore the context. Had she dropped out of the Olympics, no one would have blamed her, but NBC would at best have treated it as a footnote and moved on. Joannie would not have received thousands of texts and messages of support, she would not have become the icon of the Olympic spirit (and, of course, not been overscored in her long program). I'd suggest we take a moment and consider the kind of coverage an Estonian biathlete would have received in the same circumstance: pretty much none.

NBC has decided that the Olympic Games needs these kinds of over-arching narratives, these personal dramas writ large, and, as long as they arise in certain sports and from certain countries (how much attention did Petra Majdic receive for winning a bronze in the cross-country sprint immediately after falling and breaking four ribs and puncturing a lung?), they'll get the full focus of the network. And maybe they're right, maybe they do need the Tonya-Nancy kind of stuff to sustain interest as they grub for ratings.

But, occasionally, I find it kind of wretched, that we can't just be left to appreciate the effort and the training and the performance, that everything has to be augmented by heaping servings of bathos. Because it's a pretty fine line between admiring the pluck of a Joannie Rochette and shamelessly using her heartbreak to pull in the Nielsens.

NBC's lost weekend

I have commented before on what a big fan of the Olympics I am (I'm sure I wrote a few posts about it in August of 2008). The Winter Games are no exception, and I watch pretty much every minute that I can. That watching is, of course, all on the big network, as I don't have cable TV, but one certainly gets one's fill from the flagship.

And the coverage was pretty much what we've come to expect. I'll probably have a post or two over the next few days about specific quibbles, but there really were no surprises. The pre-selected stars (Vonn! Ohno! White! Lysacek!) were given far more than their share of attention, and the network left some time to accommodate the stories that actually grew out of the events (Mancuso! Miller! That big bobsled guy!). Naturally, these were all Americans, as someone needs to be really special in a marquee sport to be noticed if they aren't from the 50 states (Kim Yuna! Joannie Rochette! Alexandre Bilodeau!). [Note: it really helps if they are from or train in Canada.]

This is all pretty standard stuff. What I don't understand is the series of odd decisions NBC made in their final weekend coverage. I could chalk some of it up to having to give 3 hours to a hockey game that they had not anticipated (do we really think they would have given most of Sunday afternoon to the Czech Republic vs. Finland?).

The problems actually started Thursday night in the coverage of the ladies' figure skating final. This is one of the major events of the Games, there's a massive amount of hype, and NBC gave it surprisingly short shrift. They showed a total of 9 programs, and, other than the final group of six, made curious choices as to who they showed. We "got" to see Tugba Karademir, who finished last (I wonder why NBC finds her so compelling, as they featured her four years ago), Cheltzie Lee, who finished 20th (and we saw her short program as well), and Elene Gedevanshvili, who finished 14th. Why they picked these three is beyond me.

[By the way, who finished 4th in the free skate? Laura Lepisto of Finland, who jumped from 10th after the short to 6th overall. As far as I can tell, she was never mentioned once, and was omitted from the graphic showing the final scores - we saw 1 through 5, then 7th.]

On Saturday night, NBC showed six programs in the figure skating exhibition gala. I personally don't care too much for that, but I would think it a big draw for the audience, and NBC kind of threw it away. Of course, if you had cable, you could have risen at 5:30 AM (Central Time) on Sunday and watched it on MSNBC, but I still don't grasp the rationale.

Then, Sunday afternoon, they showed almost every minute of the Men's 50K cross-country race. I like endurance athletics; had I grown up in a place with recreational skiing, I'd probably be out there myself. But watching it was not all that interesting; NBC could have cut it by about half, had a perfectly exciting event to show, and left time for other things.

Finally, there was the bizarre decision to cut abruptly from the Closing Ceremonies to Jerry Seinfeld's new show. There was almost no warning before Bob Costas told us to come back in an hour. As I get older, I find the Closing Ceremonies to be less interesting - I mean, Nickelback? Avril Lavigne? - it's like watching video of a party to which I wasn't invited. Nevertheless, it seemed like an odd choice to move so quickly from one to the other.

What a shame NBC had to end that way.

There is an "I" in Olympics

“What a gift she's given us.” - Sandra Bezic, NBC, 2/23/2010

Joannie Rochette's story is truly sad. She comes to Vancouver as a potential medalist in the ladies' figure skating event, in an Olympics held in her home country. And her mother arrives to see her skate, then passes away before the competition begins. The juxtaposition of what should be the greatest moment in this athlete's life with one of the greatest personal tragedies one can endure makes for an almost unbearable poignancy.

Rochette chooses to skate, and, in last night's short program, skates very well and ends up scoring enough points to put her in third place at this point.

As she comes off the ice, Sandra Bezic, one of NBC's skating experts, utters the quote above. I'm willing to cut her some slack, in that stupid things can be said in the excitement of the moment, but later, during the post-competition wrap-up, she essentially repeats herself.

I could spend some time unpacking this quote, but, if you can't see the fatuousness of it, no amount of explaining is going to help. To suggest that Rochette skated for us, rather than for herself, or her father (misidentified by NBC, corrected only far after they had milked the pathos out of it), or for the memory of the mother who had supported her through her quest for a dream, strikes me as amazingly inappropriate.

But I'm not surprised.

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There are, I think, two schools of thought as to how sports commentary should work. There are those who believe that the role of the analyst is to, well, analyze and explain and teach. The audience should gain insight into how these accomplishments are done, into what distinctions are made by judges, into what separates mediocre from good from excellent. The analyst, who was a practitioner or teacher or both (Bezic herself was an excellent pairs skater with her brother, then became a top choreographer), can lead us through even unfamiliar sports and, while not necessarily deluging us with minutiae, lead us into a greater understanding and appreciation of these feats.

I'm reminded of the great Al DeRogatis, who called football for NBC in the '60s and '70s. He had been a fine player, and, in the booth, broke down football in great technical detail, allowing the viewer to understand some of the intricacies of the game. One could learn a lot from DeRogatis. But after 1975, he was out, because the new breed of broadcaster had come.

The other kind of commentator is the one who attempts to create excitement, who tries to convey a picture of what it feels like to be there. He or she might sprinkle in the occasional technical term to prove their bona fides, but that's mere seasoning in the stew of emotion that they're trying to cook up. (In football, they might mention a Cover 2 defense, but they'll never take the time, or risk viewer boredom, by actually explaining what that is.)

There are some who can play both roles. John Madden, particularly in his early days as a broadcaster, could convey with a kind of verbal shorthand what the game felt like ("Boom"), but also provide some real insight broken into 15 to 20-second chunks.

But that's all gravy, especially in something like the Olympics where we thrill to events to which we'll pay absolutely no attention until 3 years and 50 weeks from now when the next Winter Games come along. I'm certain that NBC is making a concerted effort to provide us with 99% feel, 1% information, and that's the way they're going to do it (and perhaps they have research to indicate that they get higher ratings when they handle it that way).

The problem is, of course, that facts can get in the way of the narrative excitement. Snowboardcross and skicross are the two newest additions to the Winter Olympics, and they can be exciting in the final rounds when four athletes are on the course at the same time, jostling for position.

However, qualifying for these sports is really, really boring. A course that presents numerous challenges when two competitors are an elbow shove away from each other seems to be of little interest when only one person is going down. But, in NBC terms, these sports are NEW! EXCITING! THRILL RIDES! So we're not told that the men have 33 skicrossers competing for, yes, 32 positions. The women, 35 for 32. The announcers were careful to stay away from mentioning that nothing much is at stake.
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So we end up with powerful incentives to "go surface," to hype and emotionalize everything instead of explaining. NBC hires nominal experts, then has them ignore their expertise in favor of creating a word picture of the experience.

But what happens when they hire people who can't do that, who have impressive resumes but no ability to convey the ambiance of the competition?

We know what happens - we the viewers are subjected to the train wreck that is the team of Sandra Bezic and Scott Hamilton. Hamilton, a man I think very highly of for his personal story and his charitable work, is possibly the worst "analyst" working for any major sports network. Bezic is better only because she shuts up more often (with execrable lapses like the quote above).

The problem, I think, is that they don't the narrative gifts to deliver to us a sense of what it's like to be there. Instead, they substitute their own feelings. So we don't get, "Triple lutz, triple toe loop, well done with a small turnout on the landing." We get Hamilton's "TRIPLE LUTZ...TRIPLE TOE...OH, HE FOUGHT FOR IT, BUT HE GOT IT!!!" And that's actually a high point in content for our Scotty.

Everything is filtered through the prism of their emotions. To some, it might seem more vivid, but it far more often comes off as information-free blather that appeals neither to our brains (because there's no content) nor to our hearts (because we really don't care how Sandra and Scott feel about things).

One might have thought this reached its peak in the 2002 Olympics, when Bezic told us she was "ashamed for our sport" when her favored fellow Canadian pairs team was, in her opinion, underscored. National jingoism aside, this was the apotheosis of her self-importance, as scandal, duplicate gold medals, and a new judging system followed. It's hard to avoid feeling that Bezic began to overestimate her impact after this, leading her to think that she really was a major mover and shaker in figure skating.

So we end up with the most subjective look possible, one which asks us to think more about the announcers than about the event. And we get fatuous quotes like the one from Bezic, which tells us nothing except that she feels that Joannie Rochette skated for the good of Sandra Bezic. And the "we" just makes it worse, as this hack "analyst" attempts to include us in this most inappropriate feeling possible.

NBC really needs to take a look at this team and see if there isn't some talent somewhere that could do a halfway-competent job.

Is there no shame?

In celebrity/political news:

When he was indicted, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich went to Disney World. Now that he’s been arraigned on federal corruption charges, Blagojevich wants to head off to the jungles of Costa Rica.

Blagojevich has signed on to do the “Survivor”-style reality show “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” that’s to be filmed in June in Costa Rica.

The prime-time NBC program will pay contestants up to $80,000 an episode. Until they’re voted off, anyway.

Celebrity? An elected representative of the people who has abused the power of his office (even if we ignore the specific charges against him), who has accomplished very little other than self-aggrandizement, who preposterously believed that he would become President one day, this man is a celebrity?

There are families that would love to make $80,000 a year, and this pompous, laughable, despicable figure is going to make this per episode (and rub shoulders with the likes of Nancy Kerrigan - whoo!) after abusing the trust of the people who gave him what fame he has.

He clearly has no shame, no self-awareness. But what does this say about the people who will be watching?

A worthwhile hour

For me to write about a television show that has finished its run for the year, and won't be back for nine months, seems pointless. But Friday Night Lights, which had its season finale on NBC on Friday, is performing at such a high level that I'm going to call it out before memory fades.

You can find plenty of tributes to FNL on the Web - it's a real critical favorite - and I don't need to recount most of that. The actors, led by Kyle Chandler (and hasn't he done a nice job of overcoming his work on What About Joan; how has he kept his name off the IMDB page for that stinker?) and the writers have created complex, believable characters. The style, featuring handheld cameras and, apparently, improvisation, gives an intimacy to the show that's hard to match.

But I also like how issues are woven into the show through telling stories, rather than by didactically hitting the viewer over the head (the way this blog does sometimes, unfortunately). The conflict between the needs of education and the mania for the football team (a less artistic presentation here) was illustrated through the means of a booster-desired Jumbotron screen in the face of teacher cutbacks. That didn't come to a neat, happy resolution, which is pretty real.

The character of Tyra, well played by Adrianne Palicki, is a young woman who has come of age over the three seasons. Tyra, as we first knew her, was lost, hiding whatever her real talents were in romance and a who-cares attitude. Then she, for various reasons, got serious about school and her future. Without spoiling the final episode, I'll just say that it makes you think about the importance we place on young people making the right decisions off the bat, regardless of what role models they have or resources they can draw on. That a clearly smart young woman as Tyra can worry about whether she can go to college, even though her last two years were filled with achievement, feels wrong, in that we expect 14-year-olds to understand that their future depends on what they do right now.

The show is not, naturally, perfect. The football sequences are pretty poor, with far too many last second victories (or losses), and a real lack of coherence. There are times when characters are far too articulate - Tyra's mom has a speech in the next-to-last episode this season that has no precedent in anything we've ever seen from this character. Lyla is #2 in her class (because we know #1 just must be a grind, no one we'd ever want to hang with).

Some of these flaws are explainable by the exigencies of television. In real life, Tyra's mom might have said something far less articulate but equally understandable by her daughter, but it needs to be unpacked for the mass audience. The football games are meant to be significant, so are bended to the needs of the show.

These things aside, FNL is a welcome change from gritty police dramas and blue-lit procedurals and ersatz reality shows. If you haven't been watching (and, according to the ratings, most of you haven't been), you can catch up on NBC or buy the DVDs. I'd strongly recommend you add this show to your list - and it's been renewed for two more seasons, so you still have a chance to jump on board (even though it won't be back on NBC until it's finished its run on DirecTV, an unusual arrangement that splits the costs and helps the show survive).

The rosiness of memory - Oscar version

This is about as untimely as can be, but I tend to write what rolls through my head, so here it is. The ads for the new Wolverine movie starring Hugh Jackman had me ruminating on the reviews of his stint as Oscar telecast host. In general, they seemed to be negative, with the most positive of them liking his personal charm but finding him unfunny; the worst branded his performance as a disaster.

I wonder what magical Oscar telecast people are remembering. I've been around long enough to remember some of the Bob Hope and Johnny Carson-hosted Oscars, and you know what? They were never drop-dead funny, never the transcendent event that people seem to think they watched when they were kids. The basic formula hasn't changed in years, and you can bring Billy Crystal out on a burro, or drop Whoopi Goldberg in from the ceiling, but the show's the same: an opening comedy bit (except for those years they started with a musical number - curse you, Rob Lowe!), award presentations preceded by unfunny banter, Best Songs (no matter how you present them, they are still usually pretty bad songs), dead people montage, and so forth.

We want to believe that the Oscars are significant, so they have to be the greatest entertainment extravaganza of all time. But it's an awards show, and they're honoring something that they cannot possibly show (there would be an interesting broadcast, show every nominee in full). The Grammys finally figured out that they were different, that they could be a music show interrupted occasionally by awards. They hand out a fraction of the total statuettes, but, because the statuettes are there, they can command amazing talent. (Then they do the odd slice-and-dice thing, where we stand to honor the once-in-a-lifetime collaboration of Yo-Yo Ma, T.I., Garth Brooks, and Jimmy Sturr, whose record was nominated in the Best Rap, Classical, Country, and Polka Song category.)

The Oscars can't do that (hey, look, it's Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet doing the famous taxicab scene from On the Waterfront - the Tonys used to try stuff like this until someone realized it's totally unwatchable), so it is all that it can be. It's an awards show, it cannot transcend that, and Hugh Jackman can pirouette around to his heart's content and it won't transform the Oscars.

So cut the telecast a break, think seriously how you might improve it (and most of the lists that come out every year would make it a lot worse), but understand the limitations come from the inherent nature of the enterprise.

Speaking of the Sunday shows

I just wrote about yesterday's Meet The Press, but I have a more general question. Why are political operatives and pollsters so often invited on these shows to talk about policy?

George Stephanopoulos had Karl Rove and Stan Greenberg on his This Week panel yesterday. Everyone knows Rove as the architect of Bush's two presidential victories; Greenberg is less widely known, but is a Democratic pollster. If George had these gentlemen on to talk about campaign strategies and their effects on the populace, that would be worthwhile, but there's no campaign now. So Rove and Greenberg are talking about the pros and cons of Obama's economic policies.

And I don't care what they think, because they're process guys, not content guys. The Peter Orszag (new director of the OMB) interview may not have been exciting (or particularly illuminating), but at least he's in the thick of the reality.

I can understand why Rove and Greenberg would want to expand their portfolios, but I can't understand why, with all the newsmakers that float around Washington on a Sunday morning, ABC would put these chaps on.

France scares me

Well, not me, but apparently Republican operative Mike Murphy thinks we all are. In his appearance yesterday on Meet The Press, he invoked France four times (by my count) as the economic model toward which we're heading under the Obama economic plan.

If we need any better example of how tired the rhetoric of the Republican party is right now, this is it. I understood, but thought ridiculous, the anger toward the French in the wake of our rush to attack Iraq. Their reluctance at that time to join our quest wasn't exactly unique, but they seemed to receive the bulk of the enmity. In retrospect, of course, the French seem to have been the prudent ones.

The Republicans cranked up the France business again during the 2004 presidential campaign, accusing John Kerry of (gasp!) speaking French. How effective that particular idea was I don't know, but it hardly seems all that significant now.

Yet Murphy raises the specter of France as the horror which must be avoided, and I don't get it at all. France may have a higher level of government spending than we do, but so do lots of countries. They're hurting in the current global financial troubles, but many countries are doing worse. If Murphy wants to terrify us into rejecting the president's initiatives, he should warn that we'll become Iceland or Zimbabwe, not France.

And this guy is still an important voice in the Republican party...I don't get it.

What is, where have the Jeopardy writers gone?

I've mentioned before that I generally only watch Final Jeopardy, as I don't find the questions in the first two rounds interesting enough. (Even then I only catch 2 or 3 a week; I guess Jeopardy isn't quite must-see TV for me.)

It seems to me, based on my limited sampling, that the Final Jeopardy questions are a lot easier this season than they have been previously. For every one that requires you to know who Damon Runyon was ("He was also the U.S.'s best-paid sportswriter, with stories of people like Chicago O'Brien & Jack the Bookie"), there seem to be quite a few that are fairly simple ("On Oct. 14, 1947 in the Mojave Desert the first of these sounds was made by man; it was the byproduct of another first" - What is a sonic boom?).

Well, now that I've said that, I'll probably strike out on ten in a row. Bring it on, Alex.

[I was able to get the exact wording of the questions, um, answers, from the excellent Jeopardy fan site, J! Archive.]

The Nutcracker

I have admitted before that I am absolutely unqualified to comment on dance.  My connections to the art are a roughly 10-year subscription to the Joffrey Ballet, and that I often do a flexibility workout taken from the New York City Ballet Workout book (which I recommend highly; I gather there are a couple of DVDs as well, I can't comment on them).  So I have a strange relationship with dance; I have almost no ability to compare one dancer or company with another, but I do know what a fondu or an arabesque is.

All that said, this is my blog, so I can make a comment without knowing much of anything.  I've seen the Joffrey production of The Nutcracker quite a few times, and, the other night, I watched the current PBS show with the San Francisco Ballet.  From this limited perspective, I enjoyed the PBS show, but not anywhere near as much as did the commenters at the web site.  I recognize the danger here, comparing something on TV I've seen once to something I've seen live 10 or so times (dance really does suffer when it's seen on the screen, as the depth gets flattened almost intolerably).

One thing I have noticed is that there is far more of a star hierarchy at most ballet companies than there is at the Joffrey.  Whether San Francisco or ABT, there seems to be a bewildering array of titles, principal, soloist, corps, and so forth, whereas the Joffrey is more nominally egalitarian.  Obviously there are stars, like the recently departed and much missed Maia Wilkins, but a dancer who is a flower in The Nutcracker might show up in the spring program as the star of a dance.  It's my impression that we don't see that in most other companies.  The result: the corps at the Joffrey is of far higher quality.  The wife and I saw ABT dance Swan Lake a few years ago, and I was amazed at the lack of unison in the corps, something you almost never see with the Joffrey.

The same was true in the SF Ballet Nutcracker, anything with an ensemble was shaky, with none of the precision I've come to expect.  In the minor roles there are also some problems; for example, one of the dancers in the Arabian coffee piece seemed to have major problems with landing relatively simple jumps.  And I have to believe that affects the choreography.  Gerald Arpino (who, sadly, we lost this year) created a couple of the ensemble dances in Robert Joffrey's Nutcracker, most notably the Waltz of the Flowers, which is a wondrous piece with non-stop movement and stagecraft.  In comparison, the San Francisco version is woeful indeed, with long solo turns by the Sugar Plum Fairy alternating with the aforementioned questionable ensemble work.  I wonder if Arpino knew that he would have a strong ensemble, so the Waltz became a non-star turn, while the SF choreographer knew he had to work around a less-outstanding corps.

To continue with the negative comparisons, the second acts are quite different in staging.  In the Joffrey version, the stage is full, with a great density of people and movement.  The SF version, in contrast, is far more stark, with all the business focused on whoever's dancing at the moment - the rest of the vast stage is empty.  Maybe that's a matter of taste.  If your major concern is a focus on the principals, you might not want a lot of stage business.  Personally, I prefer the swirl of activity, the sense of continuity that comes from, for example, having Clara onstage at all times observing what is, after all, supposed to be her dream.

Look, I don't want to be overly negative here.  I'm fortunate in that I live close enough to see the Joffrey production, and many don't have that opportunity.  The San Francisco version is lovely, and there is some superior individual dancing (this Nutcracker Prince guy is very good, though he looks distractingly like Justin Long, Mac from the PC vs. Mac commercials).  If you like The Nutcracker, this is a fine presentation, well worth your time at the holidays.

Review - A TV Guide to Life

Quite a few people found their way to the Internet site, Television Without Pity, in the early days of the Web. It was a fun look at many television shows, becoming known for its recaps and articles, each of which came laden with heavy doses of snark (a word that they may well have the credit for spreading the widest).

It was bought in early 2007 by a unit of NBC, and, after a year (which some theorize was contractual), the founders left (along with the great recapper Miss Alli). For those of us who enjoyed it, there isn't quite the same spark to it. There are still good reasons to go, but, for me at least, it's no longer a must-visit.

One of the pleasures still to be found (and there is still some very sharp writing) is Jeff Alexander, alias M. Giant. Alexander has taken his insight and put it between the covers of A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know from Watching Television (2008). And the book is a really fun read, a very pleasant diversion. You won't get the insights of a McLuhan or a Postman here; you will get an affectionate but realistic look at some of the conventions of television (though there is less snark than I might have expected).

There's not really a lot of analysis to be done in this review. Alexander illustrates some of the "peculiarities" of television plotting, exposing their conventions in a humorous way. I won't spoil it for you, but I will give one example that made me laugh out loud. In a discussion of the oft-noted TV phenomenon of "hot sitcom wives...[with] tubby, schlubby husbands," he gives us:

Meanwhile, over on the one-hour-drama beat, Dennis Franz was working his way inexorably up the NYPD Blue hotness ladder like some kind of romance-oriented version of Richard III.

One very good choice that Alexander makes is that he doesn't drive the "I learned about life from TV" meme into the ground. While it is very funny when he contrasts the reality of his school experience to what he had expected based on Little House on the Prairie, a little of that "I thought this because of television, but life was different" goes a long way. Fortunately, he settles into a look at various genres and situations without interjecting himself into the discussion too much.

You'll get the most out of this book if you've seen the shows Alexander writes about, of course, but, sadly, most of us have watched enough TV to enjoy this book thoroughly. You may wonder why you watched some of the shows you did, you may finally getting around to questioning just how realistic Good Times really was, and you'll have a good time reading the book.

The Chicago Tribune

You don't blog for a little over a day, and what happens? Your city becomes the center of the media world, what with the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company and the arrest of the governor of your state, Rod Blagojevich, on corruption charges, not to mention the sit-in going on at a window manufacturer that doesn't want to pay its workers their severance and vacation pay.

As I was asked by a faithful reader for my take on the bankruptcy, I'll offer it with the caveat that I really don't have much novel to say. When a company takes on debt that is equivalent to nine times its cash flow, it's going to run into problems. Essentially, Sam Zell, real estate mogul, bet the health of the newspaper on the economy, gambling that he would be able to sell enough pieces to cover the massive debt.

And he was wrong. But he's still a genius, because he used a whole lot of Other People's Money to make the purchase, so he probably won't lose a whole lot personally. That's what counts for genius in this day and age, not an ability to make something work, but the ability to push the risk off on someone else. (John Thain of Merrill Lynch is not a failure because he ran his company into the ground. No, he's a failure because he didn't figure out a way to make his bonus automatic and legally impregnable; now he's had to back off from his "request" for, first, $30 million, then $10 million - though it's interesting to watch the spin as he has now "withdrawn his request.")

So we in Chicago watch and wait to see how Chapter 11 plays out for the Trib. What comes to my mind, though, is the extent to which I, and others, care about this. Republic Windows & Doors, the subject of the aforementioned sit-in, is apparently failing, and, while I'm concerned that the workers get what they're owed, I don't feel anything in particular about the company itself.

It occurs to me that there are some entities that become part of a public asset base, whose importance, real or imagined, causes them to have a life beyond their corporate charter. Clearly, that's not how a Sam Zell sees it. He may blather on about the "public trust" or whatever, but he purchased the Tribune because he thought it could make him some money, while recognizing that, if the economy went against him, he'd just walk away and leave the equivalent of a vacant lot.

Sports teams are like this, entities that take on outsized importance because of the emotional ties that people have to them. They know that, which is why they periodically blackmail governmental bodies into giving them benefits that no other private enterprise would get (the Mets and Yankees want more public support at a time when no reputable public agency should consider such a thing).

The collective television stations also have this hold on people, which is why I suspect that February's cutover to digital television is going to be taken a lot more negatively than predicted. I know that there is still a major station I'm not receiving, which is irritating; I also know I can live without it, but one wonders if they, given their problems (I'm looking at you, NBC), can afford to lose even the small numbers who are OTA and somewhat, but not very, far from the broadcast antenna.

Here's the thing: I don't have even a glimmer of a solution for the problem represented by these events. I don't want the government taking control of the Tribune, or the Chicago Cubs, or "forcing" WMAQ to boost their signal somehow (though I might bend on this one, given that government intervention is a big part of this problem), or prohibiting the move of the college football bowl games to cable. That just isn't an appropriate role for government to play.

But it is all part of how the mania to corporatize everything is making us all a little less bonded, a bit weaker. Sure, those of us who can't or won't get cable or satellite can only see about 40% of Cubs games now, but what's the big deal? Sure, the Tribune could stop publishing, leaving Chicago with only one voice in the major newspaper field. Sure, there will be any number of the elderly and the poor who will lose their televisions in a couple of months.

However, the revenue models will still play out. The BCS might lose 15% of their audience, but they'll gain more than that from ESPN. And those things that are common to us all, those things that have become shared experiences, fragment and drift away, but that's OK, because profits will be maximized and shareholders will be happy and, oh ho, how the executives will rejoice.

And we say that change is good, that progress is inevitable and always positive, and the people without voices, those who can't afford or figure out cable or the Internet, those who have already been marginalized, will slide even further out on the fringes, and will be forgotten.

TV changes

This will be a short post due to the press of events; I'll likely revisit this topic in the future.

It's no secret that people are disgusted with Congress, mainly, I think because with all the problems we have right now, these solons have essentially done nothing. Health care? Not a big enough problem to solve, I guess. Education? No Child Left Behind's got that covered, so we're going to take a pass on doing anything else. Even Iraq has been neglected, despite the bold words of Nancy Pelosi when she took over as Speaker of the House.

But they have accomplished something, which is to mandate this switch to digital television in February. It was put off a number of times because of concerns about making the change, but now it's coming, like it or not. I'm sure we've all seen the endless number of public service spots alerting us to this, but in actual practice, this seems like a pretty poorly thought-out program.

My experience: I received a converter box a few days ago, hooked it up, and there are stations that just don't come in. After plumbing the depths of the Internet, I've found that one major station plans to move to a different frequency when they make the switch, so there's no real way to know if it will come in on February 18. (I'll leave aside for now the odd nature of these $40 government coupons, which have basically guaranteed that the price of the boxes won't drop below $40 - more profit for the box makers).

Got a VCR? Use it fully, taping one show while watching another? Wait until you see how that needs to be hooked up, and you'll still lose functionality.

15% of all people in the U.S. rely on over-the-air television. Each of those people must now presumably become hardware testers, and, as I have already pointed out, the test can't really be completed when some stations haven't cut over to their final configurations yet. Of course, those tend to be clustered in the demographics of the elderly and the poor, so there isn't a whole lot of political clout there. (And, of course, testing is irrelevant since the change is coming whether the test succeeds or fails.)

I know that this is being billed as a necessity because the government wants to sell off the bandwidth for oodles of bucks, but this seems just as much a giveaway to the cable providers and satellite companies. I realize that the kind of folks who choose to stay over-the-air or can't afford cable don't matter too much, but it seems odd to compel them to either go through the challenge of buying and installing new equipment, or pay money they may not have to keep something they already have. I feel for the older people who are going to have some big-time problems in three months.

[I'll leave this for another day, but the same kind of indifference is being shown by such bodies as the NCAA, given their willingness to sell the rights to the football bowl games to ESPN. Again, we're talking about 15% of the populace, not so small a number. But these millions of people will have a lot more time come New Year's Day 2011. At least they can console themselves that head coaches will command higher salaries.]

Some notes on Election Night 2008

I skipped around a bit on the coverage last night, but was as usual limited to the broadcast networks.

I can see why some people feel that the media has favored Obama. I don't think that's true, McCain seems particularly liked by anyone who has covered him before. It's been pretty interesting watching the pundits as McCain's campaign slipped into incoherence and, at times, nastiness try to justify it by saying he doesn't seem like the real John McCain. Guys and gals, maybe this is the real John McCain, but you were just too enthralled by his off-the-record comments and apparent openness to notice. Anyway, our local Chicago stations in particular seemed to feature endless helpings of giddiness. Channel 5's (the NBC affiliate) Marion Brooks seemed amped beyond 11, and was only a little more enthusiastic than others. But a lot of this probably has to do with excitement over the local connection, since there's a tendency for our "journalists" to go ga-ga any time something national happens to our little burg (I'm joking, but our reporters seem surprised whenever a big story has something to do with Chicago, an attitude which makes us look pretty small-town).

The sets were interesting, and demonstrated that the national networks aren't hurting for money. Ann Curry's Grecian temple was chroma-keyed (and why didn't they change her dress color each time they went back to her, that would have been glamor at its best) but still expensive-looking. NBC and ABC in particular seemed to be football field-sized, and the graphics were impressive.

But ABC's choice to put their pundits (Will, Brazile, Dowd, and Roberts) over at a table by the window looked odd. They looked uncomfortable and marginal way over there by themselves, though it was gracious of Diane Sawyer to wander over and visit them once (the queen descends from her regal throne to visit her subjects).

And you've got to love PBS, showing they're being responsible with donations from "Viewers Like You" by putting Jim Lehrer, Mark Shields, and David Brooks at what looked like a small card table.

Speaking of PBS, Charlie Rose was apparently shown live somewhere, but we didn't get him until 1:30 AM, well after Tavis Smiley (we have two stations that show his program, and the main one, WTTW, has pushed him this late the past few weeks, but WYCC didn't find time for him last night). It was interesting to hear Doris Kearns Goodwin tell the same story, word for word, on Charlie as she did on one of the networks. But she's a happy historian, and that counts for something.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell got involved in a conversation about Obama's financial advisors, which was probably a mistake. I think it was Brian Williams who added Paul Volcker to the list, and Andrea did not seem comfortable at all. Was that, just maybe, because Volcker is now seen as a prescient and capable Federal Reserve chairman, while Mr. Andrea Mitchell's star is fading really fast ("this crisis, however, has turned out to be much broader than anything I could
have imagined")?

And Katie Couric, it's "Grant Park," not "Grant Field." Easy mistake to make, though, and we can discuss it sometime when I go to New York, maybe while strolling through Central Field.

W's next home?

Last night Charlie Rose did one of those double-dipping things where he hosts a seminar someplace, tapes it, and uses it as a program. This one was held at Harvard Business School, where they conferred this year's Alumni Achievement Awards on five business luminaries, and had Charlie host a discussion on leadership. It may have been edited, but there was very little talk about leadership on what we saw. Instead, Charlie wanted to get these folks' views on the current economic situation.

A couple of gripes: first, is it necessary for Charlie to work something from Tom Friedman into every single business discussion he has? Once again, he told the panel that "some people" (Friedman) believe that we should give a green card to every foreigner who graduates from an American college. The panel, mercifully, didn't pick up on this with any vigor.

Second, does Jeff Immelt, head of GE, bring anything to the table? Of the five, his comments were the least incisive - it was like a fifth grader at a table of smart collegians. Perhaps his skills don't translate to that forum (and one might question his inclusion given the recent results out of GE) but, other than a few platitudes about the global marketplace, he didn't give us a lot.

But the most interesting thing to me was a statement from Anand Mahindra, an executive at Mahindra & Mahindra, the large Indian conglomerate. I'm not sure what the question was that generated his comment, but he said that many Indians were uncertain as to who they liked in our presidential election; Barack Obama was intriguing, but John McCain was perceived as a third term of Bush, and Indians had no problems with Bush, that they thought he was just fine.

The reasons Mahindra cited were offshoring, outsourcing, and the big nuclear deal the U.S. approved this month. He could also have mentioned that the U.S. took the burden for a war that has ensured the continuation of a major source of oil (and the removal of a dictator), and that we are bearing much of the cost of propping up global businesses in the current crisis.

It's an odd thing when an American president is perceived more fondly in another nation than in his own, as his policies have benefited that country more than the one whose constitution he swore to "preserve, protect and defend." I really don't see how the judgment of history (at least, U.S. history) will ever be kind to a president who has done so much to tarnish the American ideal, and has, managed to promote the interests of other countries and its people more than his own.

Before the third debate

Unfortunately, I have plans for this evening which will prevent me from watching the Obama-McCain contest live (no, it's not the Cubs game, boo, hoo). I will tape it and try to catch a look at it in the next day or two, but everyone else will have a chance to weigh in before I will.

1) What will be interesting tonight is to see if McCain continues to let his TV ads and his running mate carry his water, while he does his fake cordiality thing. Personally, I wouldn't mind if he'd just let it fly, call Obama a terrorist and a Muslim, at least by implication, and let voters see just what he's turned himself into. I think Americans have the right to see just how down and dirty the principled maverick, the war hero, can get.

2) One thing I admit I enjoy is seeing prominent commentators come around to something that I, and I'm guessing most thinking people, understood some time ago. There may be a bit of envy mixed with the triumph on my part; seeing, for example, a Matt Yglesias, well-read blogger, book author, accepted authority, wake up and see something clearly months after people of discernment (namely, me) saw it fills me with an admixture of joy and frustration.

For instance, it occurs to Matt today that tonight's debate format "is basically a farce." The questions will come from people in the audience and from the Internet, at which point Tom Brokaw and his people will comb through them and select the few that will be asked. (There won't be any followup or comments from the asker or from Brokaw. Matt is upset:

In essence, Tom Brokaw and his staff will be asking the questions. They’re sifting through a big group of people, and their pre-set questions, and picking the questions they like. Meanwhile, though, Brokaw and co. get to evade responsibility for the questions if people don’t like them — it was real people asking! And no followups, so if John McCain gets a question about his plan to cut Medicare and wants to give an answer about Bill Ayers, nobody can stop him.

And this only occurs to Yglesias now? We've seen this format before. Unless there is a magic arrow roving randomly across the audience to select the next questioner, of course there is screening going on. Does anyone really think that the questions won't end up being pretty much the same as Brokaw would have asked anyway?

This is simply more pandering to the ersatz Web 2.0 style which says that allowing people to create their own reality is somehow preferable to framing things through experience and intelligence, even when the reality itself is being framed. It's a lie, and people should stop falling into the trap of believing that this somehow brings "authenticity" to a situation.

Bush and Brian, making us laugh

The funniest part of Bush's speech last night, which I'm rapidly becoming convinced nobody but me watched, had nothing to do with the speech itself; there's really nothing at all funny about a president who neglects problems for 7-3/4 years, then tries to convince the country that we should all jump on his bandwagon now to address them.

No, it was afterwards, as Brian Williams hastily tried to make way for America's Got Talent, and he did the usual, "for more coverage of the financial crisis, turn to MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo (or does NBC own Univision), Polska TV, Oxygen, HGTV, and the Internet (you may have guessed I'm paraphrasing generously here), and also tune into your late local news (emphasis mine)."

Ha, ha, ha, Brian. The probability that my late local news will have any insight into this situation is less than zero. I knew they would cover the Trump Tower topping-off ceremony (look, the Donald noticed us, this Podunk town of Chicago), show a few baseball highlights, devote an inordinate amount of time to the weather, but Warner and Alison (fill in the names of your own ethnically-, racially-, and genderly-balanced news team here)? Give us any information about a complicated business problem? Please, Brian, I know you've met them, I've seen the ads where these seven-figure news readers swoon over breathing the same air as you.

I guess that's why Brian makes the big money, his ability to read stuff like that without dissolving into gales of laughter.

Coming up...Costas! Phelps! Mao!

I'll have more to say about NBC's coverage of the Olympics in a day or two, but I wanted to call out one thing in particular: for NBC to display the Tiananmen portrait of Mao Zedong right next to the head of Bob Costas was unconscionable, and perhaps their greatest violation of integrity while in China. (One wonders if perhaps it was a dig by the production team at big-dog Costas, but I can't prove that.)

Providing local color is one thing, but to have one of the major images of the Games be a huge rendering of one of the greatest mass murderers in the history of the world shows remarkably poor taste. I don't recall Jim McKay, during the Munich Games in 1972, sitting with his face perched next to a picture of the spritely Adolf Hitler.

Some will say that many of the Chinese people still hold Mao in awe, that he is admired, that at worst they call him a great leader who made a few mistakes. But you have to ask yourself, if the majority of the people decided they didn't want the picture there, would it come down? Surely our acceptance of China as a sunny happy place doesn't extend to the fantasy that democratic action would bring down that picture.

I think, though, there's something larger at work here than just the cravenness of the division of a large multinational shying away from casting aspersions on any aspect of the society of a major customer. It is, rather, a tendency to collapse history into a single, easily-digested, safe point of reference. We have taken the sadly large and messy history of "Evil in the 20th Century," and collapsed it down into the person of one badly-mustached Austrian. We've taken the most unambiguous exemplar of evil, Hitler, and turned him into the sole member of his class.

It certainly makes it easier to learn history. We don't have to make judgments on Mao or Stalin; oh, they made their mistakes, but Evil = Hitler - nice, neat, and tidy.

We, as exemplified by the too-often lazy media, do this time and again. Bill Gates (no, I'm not comparing him to Hitler) is seen as the creator of the PC, when of course he was no such thing. Vinton Cerf is called the father of the Internet, which omits the reality that the American taxpayer actually is responsible for it.

I can understand why we do this when history is remote or murky. We focus our attention on a small number of Founding Fathers, on Washington and Jefferson, when there were so many more who contributed (I've been amused by the reactions to McCullough's book on John Adams, then to the miniseries; it's stark surprise that anyone else was actually around and doing stuff - perhaps Madison will be "reborn" next). We look at only a small number of British kings as being significant. Attila's the only Hun who retains serious street cred.

But Gates and the many other people who were part of the amazing rise of the computer are still around, and we don't set the record straight. Mostly this is pretty benign; I actually find Gates-worship fairly amusing for the most part. Occasionally, though, this becomes harmful, as we expect Gates to have all of the answers for our labor problems, and we let him spew self-serving poppycock to a worshipful Congress.

And it's especially harmful when we use this tendency in order to rewrite history. You can put Mao on a T-shirt, or put his poster on your dorm wall, or use him as a backdrop for Olympics coverage, but that just shows your ignorance. He was a loathsome, horrendous killer, one of the worst in the history of this planet. That he may have been slightly less loathsome than Hitler, an arguable point, doesn't mean that we should happily participate in his rehabilitation. I really think NBC blew it here.

Come on, we know what she means

Fire Joe Morgan is probably my favorite snark site, out relentlessly probing the newspapers and airways of our "sports journalists" to prick holes in their pomposity and just-plain-wrongness. And I certainly have my problems with NBC's coverage of the Olympics, out of which I will likely get at least one more post before it's over.

But laughing at Mary Carillo for this:

"Anyone will tell you how hard it is to come back from behind, but coming back from ahead can sometimes be even trickier."

is just plain wrong. In the context in which she said it, the meaning was clear. Being ahead, relaxing, letting the other team get back into the match, then having to regroup to establish momentum can indeed be harder, and that's what she meant. "Coming back" can mean returning to the prior good groove.

Redemption

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our mind.
Wo! have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them-a can-a stop-a the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say it's just a part of it:
We've got to fulfill de book.
Won't you help to sing
Dese songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever had:
Redemption songs -
All I ever had:
Redemption songs:
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom. (Bob Marley - Redemption Song)

I said yesterday (I'm not sure if my wife heard it, I may have been talking to myself - I do that a lot while contemplating Olympics coverage) that it would take no time before Al Trautwig said that Alicia Sacramone would be looking for redemption in the vault finals in gymnastics. (Alicia's the young woman who fell off the balance beam while competing in the team qualifications, possibly costing the American "women" the team gold medal.)

As it turned out, I didn't even have to wait for Al, as the announcer promoted the event by intoning, "Alicia Sacramone looks for redemption in the vault final."

Let's look at the definitions for the word "redemption" (we'll actually look at "redeem").

• To recover ownership of something by paying a sum.
• To set free, rescue or ransom.
• To save from a state of sin (and from its consequences).
• To restore the reputation or honour of oneself or something.

(By the way, these are all transitive, so Alicia can't really look for redemption, she can only hope to redeem herself.)

Neither of the first two seems to apply here, though one does wonder if the Chinese team might favor one of these ("Win gold, or your family disappears under the Three Gorges Dam!"). So we're left with one of the latter two definitions.

"Redemption" is actually one of my pet peeves, as it is a word used to describe any opportunity to do well after having done poorly. Sports announcers use it all the time now, in their usual effort to create drama where the actual drama likely suffices. I don't come from a particularly religious background, but "redemption" has, at least to me, always carried fairly strong religious overtones, one of the reasons the Bob Marley song I quoted above has such resonance.

That leads us to the third definition, that of saving someone from a state of sin. The wide receiver who drops a ball, the slugger who strikes out, Sacramone, they probably aren't being given the opportunity to do that. Given the false importance with which we weigh down our fun and games, we can't rule this out as the relevant definition, but I prefer to think we're not that quite gone.

So we come to the last, "To restore the reputation or honour of oneself or something." (Yes, it's a British definition, but it's the most concise and complete I found.) This is very likely the one that the commentators intend to use, but it is at least as irrelevant as any other.

To anyone other than gymnastics fans, Alicia Sacramone had no reputation until the NBC cameras first focused on her in Beijing. Yes, she's wearing a USA uniform, but that, in and of itself, doesn't give us the right to assign any particular expectations to her.

If she has no reputation, then there is no need for her to restore it. She owes us nothing, save perhaps an honest effort, certainly not a certain score on the balance beam. I've done nothing for Alicia Sacramone, so my job is simply to admire what she does without placing the burden of my hopes and dreams on her.

If Sacramone feels she needs to redeem herself in the eyes of her parents, who have supported her all the years of her life, or for her coach, who has given untold hours toward her success (but was paid for it), that's between her and them. My guess is that this Brown student who has also found the time to pursue a world-class gymnastics career has already paid them many times over, but that's their business.

To trot out a word of such importance and serious import, and misapply it so casually, actually makes me a bit queasy when I hear it. Alicia's accomplished more "for" the United States than most 20-year-olds, and she has a right to fail or succeed without feeling as if she's let 300 million Americans down, the vast majority of whom never heard of her before a week ago.

(By the way, there are a number of articles on the Web implying that there should be some consolation for Sacramone in being Googled for her hotness. I don't know her, of course, but I'm guessing that she's not quite so shallow as to see the search histories of adolescent minds as replacement for a lifelong dream that didn't turn out as she had hoped.)