Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I was up so late overnight that I went to sleep with the Men's 50 km race-walk running. I woke up as the Women's 20 km race-walk was nearing the conclusion and after Mexico's men had won the gold medal in soccer.

There was so much of interest to watch today. For pretty much the only day since the Games began, I actually had time to watch as much as I could. I ended up having to resort to the online feeds to catch the track and field, since the broadcast channels of NBC didn't seem to be covering it live, presumably so they can build a story around it for tonight's delayed coverage.

One great advantage of the online coverage was that it didn't patronizingly translate all of the distances and heights into old-fashioned units, being perfectly okay with saying that the high-jump had been raised to 2.05 meters instead of having to give it in old money. I swear, sometimes I think the US commentators would prefer to tell us that we were about to watch the 109-yard dash, or that the divers were about to compete in the 32-and-a-half-foot platform finals, and so forth. It's a pity that Americans are, on the whole, that stupid, or at least that the people feeding us the information assume that we are that stupid, to the point of assuming that if they dared give the distances in those Funny Furrin units, the Good True Merikuns would switch off the television, lest they be contaminated by those meter thingies.