Olympics day 16

How lucky can one guy be?
I kissed her and she kissed me.
Like a fella once said:
“Ain’t that a kick in the head?”

The room was completely black,
I hugged her and she hugged back.
Like a sailor said quote:
“Ain’t that a hole in a boat?”

My head keeps spinnin’,
I go to sleep and keep grinnin’
If this is just the beginnin’
My life is gonna be beautiful.

I’ve sunshine enough to spread,
It’s just like the fella said.
Tell me quick,
ain’t that a kick in the head?

The Rat Pack was cool, and the movie “Oceans 11″ was cool. What happened at the taekwondo match wasn’t. I won’t mention anything about hotheaded Latins or Cubans here. That would be perpetuating stereotypes on my part, and that’s something I would not want to do. Now as for the Irish…

No mention anywhere(?) regarding Team USA in the whitewater and flatwater events. Well that’s because the USA USA failed to garner a single medal of any kind in those events. Germany dominated. The Us Olympic Whitewater Team HQ is in the city where I live, and the Olympic trials were held here in a multimillion dollar whitewater training facility, actually an artifical whitewater river. If a gold medal had come of it, then I guess it would be on the front page of the local paper.

Kenya finally gets a gold medal in the men’s marathon. And sets the new Olympic record. Britannia still rules the waves in Olympic sailing.

Something else Team USA sucks at still, is trampoline. Yeah, something you could have, may have in your backyard, just like the ping pong table that may be in your garage. Millions of people here ping pong, but we still suck at that too.

Interesting just surfing through the NBC Olympics website, more interesting usually than the TV coverage. The US won its first gold medal ever in history in double trap shooting. The Olympian (hey I don’t have a training staff or iPod endorsements but I’m an Olympian too!) is currently a government issue US Army soldier at Fort Benning, Georgia. His skills are quite suitable for his day job.

Today in men’s water polo Serbia is playing Montenegro for the bronze medal. These two countries were like, the same country a year ago, as ‘Yugoslavia.’ Montenegro is a whisper of a country, having a population or around 600,000. Wonder if it would mean something for one to beat the other, aside from merely winning a medal. The US is actually playing for the gold in men’s water polo. As for women’s water polo, their wardrobe isn’t as revealing as that of other sports, so that explains why it hasn’t been as popular?

Takafumi Horie is back

Former Internet venture star Takafumi Horie is staging a comeback, but quietly, and with far less attention than he sought during his high-tech heyday a few years ago.

The vehicle for his comeback seems to be his blog, which he finally started updating earlier this month — the first time since his arrest in 2006.

If you’ve never heard of him, he’s the Japanese equivalent of Jeff Bezos, the Google founders and any other dotcom hero you can think of, rolled into one. Founder of livedoor.com, and quite brash and outspoken for a young Japanese businessman, the system had him taken out. He’s been convicted of securities fraud, and is out on bail. He may well be guilty, I don’t know. He was quite an affront to the system, but Japan needs a little some of that attitude considering the 18 year long economic snooze. Besides, he’s only acting like one of our dotcom or web 2.0 heroes.

He is much more humble now, I guess his nail got hammered down.

Peak ice

Ice production in the Arctic has apparently peaked, and those dependent on the resource are having to scramble.

Election notes

Everybody watches what America does, is it is no wonder democracy is discredited throughout the world. What should be a priority of the government, providing a better standard of living for the people, or setting up a system where preening hacks can hurl negative TV ads at each other before being elected in an interregum of several years until the next round of negative TV ads.

The Chinese don’t have a democracy, and the people are just dumb and happy, enjoying great stock market returns and burning an increasingly large share of world petroleum production. Oh, and the Olympics. There are a few disgruntled people in China, the Falun Gong cultists and some Tibetan romantics, but you know you can’t please everyone. The Thais aren’t too keen on the democracy stuff either, nor are the Indonesians. Thailand has an unpopular elected government, so with the widespread support of the public, the military took it out.

If voting in the US presidential elections in November, it is best just to go to the candidates’ websites and read their position papers (zzzzz), wait till election day (better yet early voting) and pull the lever, fill in the lines, or touch the screen. That’s because what passes as an election campaign is so silly and irrelevant it will just pickle your brain. It is not fun anymore. Here’s an example of the latest campaign issues:

Rep charge: “Obama is a weak candidate, so he had to pick an experienced running mate, Joe Biden, to make up for his lack of qualification.” OK, so what of our current president in 2000? Why did he pick Dick Cheney. Everyone figured that Cheney would be a shadow president, which he has been.

Rep charge: “Obama picked Biden. He’s lying when he says he wants to be President because he is an outsider. Biden is a bigtime insider. Hypocrite.” Well, the people who would say this, are Washington insiders. If you aren’t a Washington insider, then you have no idea how to work the system. You do awkward things or worse not be ‘effective,’ which can then be used against you in the next election cycle. Whether you look like an ‘insider’ or not is all due to marketing.

Rep change: “Obama is associated with Weather Underground radical Ayers. So he agrees with Ayers.” Unless they can come up with a tape with something juicy like proving that Obama helped Ayers wire some bombs up, or discusses leading an armed insurrection against some government, then this is just a guilt by association charge.

Dem charge: “McCain doesn’t know how many homes he has he’s so rich, who’s the elitist.” Problem is, Americans believe in this core myth that everyone has a chance to be rich, which these days according to McCain is having $5 million US. Without this undying myth (myth in the sense of being mythological, myth in the sense that’s it’s not true) the country might disintegrate. Anyhow, Americans don’t have a problem with McCain being rich, or as the final arbiter of wealth Robin Leach says, being super-rich. Dale Earnhardt Sr is the iconic hero of the average Joe, and he didn’t hide his wealth but he acted like an average Joe. I guess the issue is then, that McCain is being a hypocrite in accusing Obama of being an ‘elitist’, when McCain himself is the ‘elitist’. But not that kind of elitist. Obama was a professor, meaning he is an egghead. That’s what Americans do not like, somebody who appears or presents themselves as being smarter that the average Joe. Americans don’t want smart people to fill the imperial presidency. Besides, John Kerry was quite wealthy, and like McCain he got it by marrying up.

Remember that the worst charges are almost never made by the candidates themselves or by the parties directly, for there are operatives who are paid to this. And they have always existed. Thomas Jefferson paid operatives to smear John Adams and the Federalists back in the 18th century.

Whether McCain can pin Obama as an elitist 60s radical Muslim who wants America to lose, and whether Obama can paint McCain as an out of touch extension of the Bush administration, depends on the marketing gurus behind the campaigns. And this will decide the election. Notice that the McCain narrative on Obama sounds a lot juicier than what I could describe as the Obama narrative on him, so advantage McCain for now.

Olympics day 15

She was only sixteen, only sixteen
I loved her so
But she was too young to fall in love
And I was too young to know

What kind of sport is it where being under 16 is an advantage in competing at an adult level?

Seems that the Team USA track and field is going through the same woes as basketball had in the first half of this decade. Team USA has still done quite well, especially in the field part, and actually leads the medal count overall in track and field. But USA is supposed to dominate the sprints, and has not. Baton dropping is the latest American sports tragedy scandal. The US has been upstaged by some little Caribbean island known more to Americans for Rastafarianism, reggae and rum, not to mention jerk barbecue and all inclusive beach resorts. Maybe the sprints mean more to them, but as might be expected there are the accusations.

So the pollution has not been an issue.

Doesn’t the basketball gold medal game seem more like an NCAA tournament first round game, a 2 vs 15 or a 3 vs 14? I mean as far as talent differential goes. Don’t expect the Redeem to show up lackadasical as a 2 ro 3 seed might in the NCAAs first round. No, the rest of the world has not ‘caught up.’

IOC says, no major league all stars, no baseball. Would MLB do as the NHL does, suspend the season so its stars can participate? In football (soccer to us) FIFA has said, no. The World Cup will not be upstaged. And doesn’t MLB put on something called the ‘World Series?’ Cuba has dominated Olympic baseball, and that of course is due to political reasons. So the IOC is dangling this carrot in front of MLB. But does the MLB have the same kind of product as the NBA or the same marketing ambitions? Maybe with the decline of baseball in the US, they should go for compromising and providing players. Team USA baseball could kick ass again, whip the Dutch 30-0 as we well should.

The IOC will vote in October 2009 in Denmark about whether to add two sports for 2016. The other sports are softball, squash, karate, roller sports, seven-on-seven rugby and golf.

No cricket?? How about chess, that would be an interesting choice maybe players moving chess pieces around would count as ‘physical exertion.’ Softball can come back now that it’s clear other countries have a chance. Roller derby, now that’s something the US should kick ass in. Ballroom dancing I guess came and went. If BMX is in, roller sports should be in. Women wrestling? Mud wrestling. Golf should be added. There are course that already exist most anywhere, and if an Olympic site doesn’t, spending money on building a tour quality course wouldn’t be very objectionable. Adding rugby for 2012 would be great for team GBR. The IOC needs to think bigger regarding the martial arts. K-1 anyone??

Team GB has passed Australia for 4th place on the overall medal count, and it will be a photo finish with Russia for 3rd place in gold. GBR has three times the gold of France, who finished a splendid second in the race for the 2012 games. Team USA is set to top the overall medal count of 2004, and should finish #1 in the overall medal count in 2008. But China will be clearly #1 in gold. Jamaica has 10 medals, meaning one medal per 270,000 citizens. Jamaica mon it is the world’s most athletic nation.

East London, best known as the setting for a long running soap opera, is getting an extreme makeover for the 2012 games. London hopes to have an Olympic park that will top Munich’s Olympic park and will give people a reason to keep going back after the games are over. Ambitious goals. London will get a modern (like the rest of the continent) transport system. Now the question of how to man the Team GB football team.

If you are a royal subject (or have ambitions to be) and are “between 16 and 25, and more than 5’11” (180cm) tall for girls or 6’3” (190cm) tall for boys,” then look into joining Team GB handball.

Wilkins Coffee Ads

I watched this ad on TV4U for Wilkins Coffee. It’s B & W 15 seconds long and features two puppets. The grumpy puppet says “I’m not going to drink any more Wilkins’s Coffee!” In response, a curtain slams down, a boom, and the curtain lifts right away. The happy puppet says “Now he’s not going to drink any more coffee!”

According to the MuppetWiki, Jim Henson made 179 of these short spots between 1958 and 1961 for the Wilkins Coffee company, a Washington, DC coffee distributor. The grumpy puppet was named Wontkins, and the cheery one Wilkins. Wontkins was the forerunner to South Park’s Kenny. He got blown up, stabbed, crushed and done in by any other means of death that Henson could think of. Cruel ads for the 1950s, but highly effective. YouTube has some other Wilkins ads. The Smithsonian has been hosting a Jim Henson exhibit.

I really appreciate these ads. They are very entertaining in a tight package. Advertisers and producers are thinking of ways to deliver short sharp videos to PDAs, here’s a thought. It’s also the debut of Jim Henson and his puppetry to a large audience.

Now the ads never mention anything about the virtues of the coffee itself, as was normal to do for their competitors (Mrs. Olsen??). What ever happened to Wilkins Coffee? There’s a Wilkins Coffee company in Birmingham, Alabama, but I don’t think that’s it.

Only in America

A Texas jury has just indicted a 1,000 pound woman, Mayra Lizbeth Rosales of Hidalgo County, Texas for capital murder in the beating death of her 2 year old nephew. This would have to be in Texas. For our UK friends she weighs more than 70 stone. She was charged with the crime back in March, it must have apparent that she just didn’t fall on the kid or something. The woman is bedridden and so apparently beat the child to death from her bed. The issue is, how do you get her to trial? She can’t fit through the door of her residence.

Now, there are precedents for this kind of the thing. The state could hire Dick Gregory to get her weight down enough so she can be moved. She could possibly make the top-20 obese people list

Believe it or not, she would not be the heaviest being ever executed in America. I said being, because there is the bizarre and infamous case of Mary the elephant, who was actually lynched in Erwin, Tennessee in 1916. There was a circus in town, and Mary got pissed and something and stomped her handler to death. There was no trial, inquest or any real effort to figure out what happened officially. All in all, the elephant wasn’t treated any worse by the system than say any given black person would have been. Anyway, a mob showed up and wanted Mary dead. They tried shooting her with shotguns, but that didn’t work. The sheriff used his .45, nope. The crowd suggested electrocuting her, or pulling her apart with two locomotives. The decision was made to have a hangin’. Free admission was given to those who paid to see the circus. The good people of Erwin hung Mary from a boom at the local railyard. First time, the chain broke and Mary fell causing a panic. The second rigging did the trick. Mary was buried at 219 S. Main St in Erwin. An image of Mary on the gallows is on this YouTube video that is a promo for the play “Hanging Mary,” based on the Mary’s story.

Olympics day 14

Michael Phelps has left the building Beijing. He is flying to London to check out the scene for his next Olympic appearance. Then he will chill and figure out if he wants an Aston-Martin or a Maserati to replace his pedestrian BMW. I’m sure than unlike our presidential candidates, he really isn’t an elitist. An no dating fellow swimmers.

Reading any of the athletes’ blogs? Here’s some postings for today.

Have to mention in the medals race that South Korea has slightly more medals than Japan. Japan has double South Korea’s population, so go figure. Once upon a time Korea (North and South) was occupied by Japan for some 40 years. Japan made Korean athletes compete under the rising sun and only recently transferred credit of national origin for some of those medalists.

Futility in sport matters to some patriots.

Russia is doing better than the USA USA in overall medal count. The big red one has slightly more than half of the US’s medals, with a population somewhat under half of the US. Russia is shrinking, a sort of a population neutron bomb. America is getting bigger and bigger thanks to illegal immigrants and other sorts of huddled masses. Native (US citizens not talking about actual Native Americans exclusively) women aren’t responsible for the first-world’s healthiest population growth.

I was just reading, John Edwards may have had yet another affair, this time with a ‘mysterious’ Duke graduate. Sorry, that has nothing to do with the Olympics.

America is still trailing in the gold count. An Italian Olympic official had predicted last month that the US gold medal count would rise and beat out the Chinese by 11 medals. Time is running out. The same web page also has an article about an Aussie scientists who predicts the increased use of Viagra at these games. Gold medal count rise indeed.

PriceWaterhouse Coopers predicted a one medal win for China. It’s about the GDP of the country that determines its medal count, not my theories of athletic prowess and other national character traits. It’s the economy, stupid. The GDP trend is your friend for medals.

Meanwhile the former head of the IOC predicts that China will indeed be #1 in gold at the end of the day. With the current lead, kind of an easy prediction to make. Makes his hosts happy though.

I’m into data visualization, so if you haven’t seen this Flash representation of Olympic medals counts from the NYT, check it out. The medals counts of all Olympics are there for you on a slider. Countries are shown in geographic location as circles sized by the relative number of medals they won. You can watch the ebb and tide of national fortunes from the end of the 19th century to the 21st, just by moving the slider back and forth with your mouse.

Take the 1908 Games. Man, 100 years ago the Brits totally dominated the planet. The UK controlled 1/4 of the Earth’s surface back then, and they was da bomb in those Games, which they graciously hosted. The Brits had 3x the medals of the #2 country, their former colonies the United States. Sweden was third, and then the French, Canada and Germany. If athletic dominance could have been transmogrified into battlefield dominance, then the Brits would have been able to kick the Kaiser’s ass in no time.  I am sure though in 1908 that no one was thinking that way since King George V was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cousin. Admittedly, the Brits dominated in 1908 because hey hosted the games. Transport and corporate sponsors were a wee more hard to come by back then. The US dominated their games in 1904 where the Olympics were merely a side show to the St. Louis World’s Fair (times have changed unimaginably, St. Louis hosting the Olympics!!???), the Greeks in 1896, Even the Swedes in 1912.

Check out this blog from the WaPost on NBC’s coverage of the games on TV. He has my kind of attitude.

The Olympics day 13

The US softball team, lost, in the gold medal game. This is like the Redeem Team losing its gold medal game. Reportedly the reason the IOC dropped softball from 2012 is the total and complete domination of the sport by the US, who outscored their opponents 51-1 in Athens. Now that the US has lost a game, will the IOC reconsider? Surely Ms. Jowell in London could slap together a softball field for the women to play on.

The horses have now been caught doping. They have been caught rubbing a substance like an equine Absorbine Jr. onto their aching leg muscles. Actually I would assume their handlers did it without telling them. Looks like Norway will have to give up their bronze in show jumping  to the Swiss.

Medal count – The US of course leads in overall count, China a splendid second. In golds, and that is the only one that matters to many people, China is still, and probably unsurmountably #1. The UK Great Britain or the GBR in Olympicspeak (seriously, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands don’t send athletes to the Games?) is establishing dominance steadily over its continental rivals in the EU (well that is if the GBR actually considered itself a part of the EU) with an overall medal count 1/3 greater than that of the French but only a population 20% greater. And as for golds alone, fageddaboudit. The French have never seemed very athletic anyway, worrying more about good food and not working too hard. Running for 20 minutes in excruciating pain so your fellow citizens won’t call you a quitter again isn’t la belle vie.

BTW if I put in the term “the good life” into Google Translate and ask it to give me the phrase in Japanese, I get のグッドライフ, which phonetically comes out as “no guudo riifu.” No doesn’t mean no in Japanese, although the Japanese can say no. “The good life” can only be translated as Japlish, meaning that there is no Japanese equivalent for “the good life.” I believe that to be correct.

Back to the subject. The Germans too have fallen on Olympic hard times. They have 1/3 fewer medals than the GBR, with a larger population. Far cry from the, I won’t bring up the details, of the 1936 Games and of the East German prowess of the 1970s and 1980s.

Speaking of East Germany, my local PBS station last night did some interesting counter programming. They showed an episode of “Secrets of the Dead” which featured the East German Olympic doping program during the 1976 through 1988 games. Not a proud chapter in Olympic history. The East German government literally killed people through their drugs program to gain socialist glory. The gender bending stuff in the late 1980s, really tragic.

Flash clipboard hijack attack hijinks

Just posted on Slashdot. I mention it because I just noticed the same phenomenom myself the past two days while doing some ActionScript 3 programming in Flash. I tried copying text onto the clipboard, and while the app was running in a Firefox tab, it had control of the clipboard as long as I kept writing text to the clipboard. However, once the tab was closed (and this is true also for the evil.com example ref’d by the Slashdot piece). Any program can do this in Windows anyway. Adobe maybe should have a setting to allow end users to disable clipboard access by Flash.

I’ve been looking at integrating Flash viz libraries into Flex UIComponents, and thus into Flex. Adobe should have made this smoother.. BTW. UIComponent > flexSprite > Sprite. Have to dig through blogs and forums to figure it out satisfactorily.

Does Silverlight 2 allow for the same kind of attack? If you have access to the clipboard, and w/o looking it up, I am sure there is.