learning stuff from the Olympics

I guess I never really knew that handball was a team sport played on a basketball court (or something akin to one) with soccer type nets on either end of the playing space.

NBC is sticking to its promise to use its networks to present Olympic events that have often been ignored by broadcasters...and I'm learning stuff. It's all good.

NBC's announcers are still far too jingoistic for my tastes but that goes with the territory, I guess...they are broadcasting to a US audience...and I'm trying to ignore that as much as I can. (I'm a patriotic guy and I like seeing the home folks on the medal stand but it gets a bit embarrassing when the announcers frame everything through the prism of Americans winning...or losing...rather than celebrating the victors no matter what country they come from without "if only" caveats when it doesn't go the American way.)

As with most Olympic sports, most of us will pay scant attention to most of the contests being showcased these two weeks until the world gathers again in China in '08 but for now it's interesting to see them played with the highest levels of skill and commitment.

Beyond handball, I've watched badmitton (man, for a cute pastime that people play in their rumpus rooms, it certainly looks killer when it's played by grown men), beach volleyball (which still looks less like a sport than something you do after having a couple of beers down by the shore), synchronized diving (an interesting exhibition that), and ping pong...I mean, table tennis. I've seen folks shooting air rifles and shotguns and tiny women with lots of vowels in their names lifting three times their body weights.

I've watched lots of swimming and just enough football (I know that soccer is the most popular sport in the world but, I have to be honest, I still don't get the appeal of it.) I've watched some of the different kinds of rowing and dozens of sweaty guys riding bicycles through the storied streets of Athens under an unforgiving sun (guess nobody thought to ask Apollo to cut the guys a bit of slack :-) And the gymnastics...the pure physicality of the men and the more dainty grace of the pixie-like "women"...are, of course, all but unavoidable.

The Olympics are on...and I'm learning stuff. It's all good.