• Day one of the NFL Draft
• NBA trade deadline
• The NBA Draft
That's it. Those are the three days. You can have your Christmas, New Years and birthdays. I'll take the chaos and coverage of the above.
Last Thursday happened to be one of those days, and it didn't disappoint. The NBA trade deadline came and went at 3:00 pm that afternoon, and the event wound up being a fascinating example of how social media and the internet have changed sports.
You had:
• Blogs being updated by the minute
• NBA boards getting so many views that servers were crashing
• Twitter absolutely blowing the fuck up
Apologies to my company, but this was my day
- a Firefox window with about four tabs open: Twitter, RealGM, ESPN, SI. Read one site, click to the next and hit refresh, read updates, move to the next tab. When there was a new Tweet (averaged about four new a minute) click back to read the updates. When there was a new rumor or information it was back to RealGM to read or post. Thousands or people took place today.
Quick example: That morning I created a new thread on RealGM regarding a rumor between the Bucks and Sixers. Inside of three minutes it had 55 views and a dozen responses. In nine minutes there was 260 views. As of 7:00 pm that night there were a staggering 403 responses and 5703 views.
This was a typical NBA deadline day. But what upped the ante this year was Twitter.
I went to lunch with friends that afternoon. I kept up with Twitter on my phone. At one point my entire home page were tweets made in the last two minutes. All were trade rumors and updates.
Every writer, especially those from ESPN, wants to get credit for breaking even the most benign news. So instead of insiders and writers getting a report and publishing the information in an article or a blog, you had them updating Twitter seconds after hearing the information.
For information junkies like myself and those on RealGM, this stuff is our crack. Get an update, share the info on the board, read reactions and comment. Wash, rinse, repeat all day. Around 11:05 that morning RealgM servers crashed. This happens every year on the draft and deadline days. But the fact that it's expected doesn't make it any less excruciating. Around the time that it went down today coincided with the rumor that the Bucks were sending our a draft pick in a trade. It was awful news and it had to be discussed, only our outlet was down. The next twenty minutes were absolutely horrendous. I felt like a junkie desperate for a fix I couldn't get. When the servers went back online, within a minute there were hundreds of new posts. Just like myself, you had people hitting refresh every thirty seconds hoping the servers were working again.
One of my first entries in this blog dealt with information addiction. Today was Exhibit A.
2 - Speaking of information addiction and social media, someone alert NBC that it's no longer 1990.
The Olympics have been bashed so much in the last two weeks I won't bother kicking this long-dead dog. Much.
The Olympics are about stories, not sports. Nobody cares about curling or ice dancing or snowboarding or skiing. In three weeks they could show Bode Miller in some competition in California and no one would turn in.
But in the Olympics, people will tune in for the story. If you know who he is, you know that four years ago he was shut-out from any medals and left Italy an embarrassment. The story this year was one of redemption. People wanted to see how he would bounce back. Key word there is "see".
Unfortunately, NBC didn't televise a single run of his live. Every one was tape-delayed into prime-time. Same with Lindsay Vonn, the sweetheart of this year's Olympics. Or Lindsey Jacobellis, the snowboarder also looking for redemption. I left work a half hour early last week because I figured that while they probably wouldn't show her run on NBC, surely they would have it live on CNBC or MSNBC. Nope. I got Curling and hockey.
NBC paid a lot of money for these games. They've lost cash by the boatload, even with huge ratings. If they feel like they have to put the marquee day events in prime-time, fine. Whatever. But at least give the public an avenue to watch live if they wish. Why can't they broadcast over the internet? They'll show cross country skiing on their website but not the Women's Super-G?
I'm on the internet all day. I read blogs, I'm on Twitter, on Facebook. So are millions. It's virtually impossible to shut yourself out of the coverage. When I know how Vonn and Miller and Jacobellis did hours before their events are televised, it removes any reason for me to tune in that night.
2b - This was a well thought out blog on the subject, I thought.
3 - Sunday night represented just another massive fuck-up by NBC. The USA vs Canada hockey match is one of, if not the major event of the games. It wound up being as exhilarating a sporting event as you'll find anywhere. The last five minutes my pulse was going a mile a minute and it wasn't like I was one of the few. Twitter and the boards were going bat-shit crazy too. It brought cynical "I've seen it all" sports writers to the point of using shitty punctuation – I'm guessing they were excited.
Where was it being broadcast? MSNBC, in standard definition for 80% of the viewing public. What was on NBC? Fucking ice dancing. The performances weren't even for a medal, either.
Nice work, NBC. The best US hockey moment since Miracle on Ice and you put it on Rachel Madow's network.
4 - Not a lot of websites surprise me anymore.
This, however, was one of 'em.
I clicked on Wisconsin, then 2000, then UW vs LSU. Two seconds later I'm looking at a commercial free stream of the Badgers vs Tigers 2000 NCAA tournament game. Mike Kelly, Andy Kowskie, Mark Vershaw.
Jaw on the ground I let out a mind-blown, "Ho-ly-shit...". think I had a tear in my eye. I'm not even kidding.
Hundreds of full NCAA games over the last ten years. Recaps, results, highlights. It's a college basketball fan's dream.
5 - Roger Goodell: Get bent.
NFL: Fuck you, you pricks.
Above I mentioned my favorite three days of the year. My #1 is easily the first day of the NFL draft. I don't know what it's like to be a woman anticipating her wedding, but I have to think how I feel about that late Saturday every April is roughly the same. Each year is roughly the same. Wake up, make a trip to the gas station for a frozen pizza and a sixer, grab the local paper and settle in for roughly seven hours of NFL coverage. Follow along online, on ESPN, on Sirius and the NFL Network. I absorb it all.
In the past day one of the draft started 11:00 am central and went three rounds. This was perfect.
Last season, Roger Goodell decided to tinker with it a bit.
*pause...breathe...*
They moved it back three hours and pushed round three back to the second day. This wasn't a good move. Nobody liked it. Roger Goodell, in his first NFL draft, was fucking with something holy to a shit-ton of NFL fans.
But we got over it.
However, what we won't get over is this fucking travesty that Goodell set up this year. This April, the draft will no longer be on a Saturday. Instead, the draft's first round is to be held in primetime on a Thursday. Rounds two and three will be on Friday night. The remaining four rounds will be held on Saturday. There won't be any Sunday coverage.
It pisses me off just thinking about it.
Think I'm overreacting, check out just one website when the news was released. 341 comments, the overwhelming negative.
"way to destroy something that was perfect the way it was."
"The weekend draft has been a tradition in my household. We spent the weekend cooking (making spaghetti sauce,etc) and watching. With it in the evening we will probably record it and flip through. Not interested in the new time."
"i liked waking up on saturday jacked and weatching the countdown waiting for the draft to begin it was alota fun that weekend, and now the best rounds are on thursday and friday nites, wow, the NFL is all about the ratings and money Goodell doesnt care about the fans"
"This is stupid. All year long I can't wait for the NFL draft. It has Been a weekend tradition."
"I have not heard a fan say a good thing about this. It's just a money grab by the NFL. The suits decided they don't care what the fans want."
Ugh.
6 - I originally wanted to get this post up in the middle of the last week. One reason why is Epic Beard Man.
If you're not a frequent crawler of blogs and Twitter, you can be forgiven for missing this last Tuesday or Wednesday. But you owe it to yourself to check out the following:
Epic Beard Man Beats up Kid
Epic Beard Man - Part II
Absolutely remarkable. I mean, the old guy is built like a brick shit-house. He's wearing a shirt that says " I am a Motherfucker". And some kid is talking smack to him?
I loved the Mortal Kombat remix seen at the bottom of the second link. I crack up every time I hear, "Bring Amber Lamps".
6b - Speaking of Deadspin, they're now doing a Balls Deep Mailbag every Tuesday AND Thursday.
*single tear*
Last week I timed it. I started a mailbag around 4:00. By the time I was done reading it and the comments it was 5:00. There were a few moments spent checking another site and a few more minutes getting up to get a soda, but in the end that's one hour of my day spent reading letters to the editor like...
Q: Why don't they make Bailey's Irish Cream without alcohol, so I can enjoy it in the morning without having to go to work drunk? It's simply better than anything else you can put in coffee.
A: Why is the alcohol a problem? The real question you should be asking is why they don't make regular cream WITH alcohol.
I'm of the mind that, unless you like White Russians and Black Russians, no one over the age of 25 ever needs to drink Bailey's or Kahlua. That's the shit you drink when you're 14 and you're too much of a pussy to have acquired a taste for scotch.
or....
Q: I am a first time father and my son is 11 months old. His favorite show is Jacks Big Music show on Nick Jr. It is fucking brutal. God I hate children's television. Anyways, on one particular episode Lisa Loeb does a little music video. I found myself thinking that she looked pretty damned cute. I think it's something about the glasses. Am I a horrible person for wanting to fire off some knuckle children to a children's show? Will I now be on some sort of government list for even asking the question?
A; No, it's okay. You are an adult, and that means you are allowed to enjoy children's shows on an adult level, even if that includes picturing Lisa Loeb as a very sexy librarian who is about to throw back her hair and ride you like a carousel. YOU SAY…
Enjoy.
7 - I can't vouch for the following two sites unless you own a Mac and have AdBlock plus. They might be shady on a PC. I don't know.
But NinjaVideo.net and GotMovies.net are freaking fantastic. I've already mentioned NinjaVideo. Great for all the new movies and TV shows. They've got a good amount of old TV too.
That said, GotMovies blows them out of the water in terms of content. I've been using the site for a week and I've yet to not find a TV episode or movie I searched for.
In the last three days Ben and I have watched old school MacGyver episodes and these three obscure flicks from our youth that we just randomly wanted to check out.
OK, our choice in movies as kids were basically shit. We get that now.
But the point is that those are three flicks our local Blockbuster doesn't carry and we were able to get them in 20 minutes online. For free. In DVD quality.
I love technology.
8 - The only reason I found the above site is my obsession with all things Olivia Wilde reminded me of how awesome The OC was. I lost my DVDs years ago so I ran a search for episodes online and found GotMovies.
The OC was awesome. One of my friends left season one at my place when I was a senior in college. One weekend I started watching and didn't stop for three days. Eventually my other pals were hooked too. We never missed an episode.
One reason for this is obvious. The eye candy was ridiculous. Mischa Barton, Rachel Bilson, Olivia Wilde, Autumn Reeser...yea.
But that gets old. The reason the OC was so awesome was the writing. It was legitimately laugh out loud funny. It was trashy and sordid. It was the very definition of a guilty pleasure and usually you got it all in every scene.
Watch it. Start from episode one. You'll be hooked. Fictional TV isn't supposed to enlighten or make you a better person. In the end it's just entertainment and I guarantee you The OC will deliver that.
9 - Might be moving on from here relatively soon.
My original plan was to stick it out in EC through the spring, see how things were looking and make a decision around May. But Friday may have been a tipping point.
We have had a good number of awful clients, for a lot of different reasons. This client (I can't say who), however, is made up of purely awful individuals. We've bent over backwards for them time and time again. We acquiesce to their every demand. In the end, nothing is good enough. We build something one way and they hate it, despite it being exactly what they wanted. We design something and they sign off. A month later when it's ready to go they change their minds. We have meetings where things are specifically hammered out and a week later it's like they remember nothing.
Everyone has been hit by 'em. Our content specialist, designer, even our company owner. On Friday it was my turn.
I won't get into specifics, but I was destroyed. I actually left early that day. I took my beat-down over something that was their fault, and just went home. For almost that entire night I couldn't think of anything else. Just how these people, these fucking assholes, could be so terrible to others and irrational when it comes to working with an agency.
I was worried it would ruin my weekend. But then Friday night happened and I had a new reason to be pissed off on Saturday.
9b - This weekend mostly sucked.
10 - Three hours on the road, feeling demolished both ways did leave me in a beaten down state of mind to the point where all I wanted to do was listen to some heavy, angry, soul crushing tunes. Thankfully I had no shortage of that.
I give you the best of what I heard this weekend.
Thrice - Under Par
Papa Roach - She Loves Me Not
DMX - How's it Goin Down
SocialBurn - Ride
Three Days Grace - Someone Who Cares
Glassjaw - When One Eight Becomes Two Zeroes
From Autumn to Ashes - Short Stories With Tragic Endings
Taproot - Poem
Puddle of Mudd - Away from me
The Ataris - The last song I will ever write about a girl
No Use for a Name - On the outside
Primer 55 - My Girl
Cold - Stupid Girl
Strung out - Razorblade
Sick Puppies - My World
Bullet for my Valentine - The End
Smile Empty Soul - Bottom of a Bottle
Apocalyptica - I Don't Care
The Offspring - Dirty Magic
Chevelle - Comfortable Liar
Linky link.
10b - The Sick Puppies do give me an excuse to introduce you to the prettiest bass player around, the lovely miss Emma Anzai.
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