Rickster

It’s pretty much the same reason you don’t see offensive linemen type people playing quarterback. It’s a completely different skill set. Driving is really hard. It would be like taking someone off the street and asking them to drive in a Formula 1 race.

The other thing about monobob (which I didn’t know until today), is that all the sleds are standardized, so winning comes down to the skill of the driver. The advantage of better funded teams to research things like optimum sled and runner design is eliminated.

The IOC is concerned about competitiveness and broad participation in the sports they consider adding. My guess is that they thought few countries could field decent four women teams, while more countries could come up with a monobob driver. Otherwise, the obvious choice would have been to mirror the men’s events.

They were in place before he was added to the lineup, but I’d be pretty sure the use of nicknames at all was an attempt to put a spin on Labett’s Beast persona from the daytime version of the show. I never thought it worked for the other chasers. FWIW, I think the trivia on the ABC version is generally more obscure than the GSN version, also Labett might not be keeping up with recent US pop culture.

I spent a lot of the movie trying to figure out how in the world Ruby was able to fit in school and working on the fishing boat, and if her family just assumed she would spend the rest of her life taking care of them. I agree, Berklee was just movie fantasy. I’m surprised this got a best picture nomination.

I guess my opinion is a little different. I felt bad for the players, caddies, officials and volunteers forced to clean up all that crap tossed by those entitled folks in the stands. If you want to toss your beer cup, go down and pick it up. If you’re not allowed to go pick it up, don’t toss it in the first place.

I think the issue with sending the anchors is that movement is strictly controlled, and limited to the hotel and broadcast center, according to Mike Tirico, due to covid. Usually sending more reporters/anchors is to get more local flavor stories. Probably didn’t make sense to send people like the Today staff to have them hanging around the hotel all day. This was an issue in Tokyo, too, where the Today anchors did go, and the big excitement was them eventually being allowed to take a bus ride around the city. I think NBC decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I’d agree these Olympics (and Tokyo, too) has been lackluster compared to previous ones due to all the restrictions. Hopefully they will get back to normal in Paris.

In a story today in the NY Times, the director said they were looking for actors who looked as alike as possible, but had different types of energy. Actually they picked Mbatha-Raw first, then looked for someone like her. I could tell the difference though. Saw half of the first episode last night. Thought it was intriguing, will be watching the rest.

My girlfriend thought the US men’s team looked like they came from a homeless shelter.

Probably overkill, since you can only answer so many questions in the given time period, no matter how many smart people you have. However, for an idea of of what this would look like, James (when he was unknown) and a couple of teammates went up against the Beast in the daytime version that is sometimes repeated on GSN.

You could make the same point about American baseball, where home uniforms were always all white (and often still are).

I’d to know who thought it was a good idea to do the show outdoors, in New York, in February. I know it’s part of their Olympic promotion, but they hard to run inside when it started snowing/raining and sit around in their parkas. I kept wondering how they kept from getting overheated.

Saw the first episode last night. Have seen the Cruise movies and read one book (not this one). Have never seen Richtson before. Generally, we liked it. My one quibble is that by casting someone with Richtson’s build, it makes it a bit cartoonish. A guy like that is spending a couple of hours in the gym each day, not riding Greyhound buses from town to town.

There are really two different issues: 1)Should the judges have reacted the way they did. 2)Should the producers be booking controversial figures just to drive publicity/ratings, since it’s obviously not based on talent. Many people would like a show like this to be escapist entertainment.

Well, I guess I was stupid not to add time to my DVR, since it cut off with them bringing in the Olympic flag. They really needed to turn up the mike on the woman providing background commentary in Beijing. I could barely hear her.

I’ve already seen two media stories on the event spoilered above, and I find it hard to believe it won’t get wider coverage. I wonder how the show will end up handling it.

I guess this is a UK show? Is it streaming someplace?

I find it hard to believe they can keep up the sports talk post Superbowl. Discuss Olympic figure skating? March Madness? Joe has never shown much interest in sports besides football, baseball and soccer. There may be no spring training this year. That leaves us with interminable discussions of Liverpool’s title prospects.

Coming soon…. Great British Bake Off - The Musical

The Today show is 4 hours, but they have enough people to swap out different combinations of hosts and different sets for each of the last two hours. It’s not like two people doing 4 hours from a bunker in Florida.

True, but the purpose is to win, and given the parameters of the competition, bots have evolved to the most effective design. Not really a surprise. If you want more variety, you need to change the rules.

Foot girl seemed to take extra special glee in saying "ballsack" as often as possible.

Pretty sure (but not certain) that Mika thanked someone yesterday for loaning her network’s studio to NBC for the broadcast. So I doubt there is any tech support for her to do anything other than read copy. On the Mika flub front, I noticed on the story about the NJ toddler buying all the furniture, for some reason she referred to the family as living in Brooklyn (while the captions at the bottom of the screen accurately said NJ). They do not live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn is not in NJ.

Mike Tirico will be the overall host of the Olympic coverage and will be in Beijing for most of it, while all or almost all commentary will come from the NBC Sports HQ in Connecticut. The fact that Today has been silent on whether they’re going seems to indicate they’re not, or it will be a last minute decision depending on Covid (?). Maybe the experience in Tokyo, where they were stuck in the hotel and studio mostly, has made it not worth the effort.

Interesting to note that Mark’s bio page on the embassy website mentions his daughter by name, but not his wife or marriage status (some bios just say “married”, without any names). I was as confused as everyone else why Mika was there.