Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

This morning got off to a too-exciting start because I forgot to set an alarm, and the hours I've been working caught up to me. I awoke with a start after 10 AM — five hours later than usual and eleven hours after I'd gone to sleep the night before — on the morning I was to check out of the hotel in San Jose by 11 AM. Furthermore, the papers I'd signed when I checked in sounded rather draconian about check-out time, as in "one minute late costs you an entire day" draconian. I rushed around and managed to get showered, dressed, packed, and out of the room by 11. It turns out that they probably were less strict than the letter of the agreement. My guess is that they've had some difficult customers (not me) and have therefore set things up to deal with them. In any event, there was no serious problem, nor was I charges an extra $65 for checking out at 11:02.

I headed to the office, where I was able to get coffee and get caught up on e-mail and make sure Skype and my webcam were working with plenty of time to be ready for my 2 PM (4 PM Central time) panel at Capricon on "Trains: The Flying Cars of the Future" panel. I set myself up in a small two-person "phone conference" room we have here and the call came together as expected. I could mostly hear everyone else, and the video I could see was okay, although it froze in the last ten minutes of the panel. (The audio never hiccuped.)

A point I got to make based on the panel topic was that "flying cars," a la The Jetsons, with a flying car for everyone, is in my opinion never going to happen. Frankly, I'm highly skeptical of self-driving cars even if they don't fly. But widespread use of high-speed trains for passenger transportation in corridors where they make sense not only is practical, but it's actually happening in many developed countries, as opposed to the third-world nation that the USA is trying to turn itself into. I don't mean freight: US rail is very good at moving freight. I also don't mean using high-speed rail to the exclusion of all air transport. But in the 800 km/500 mi range, rail is IMO more sensible than air, and more efficient and safer than by automobile. It's just a matter of making the appropriate investment, which is very difficult and requires political will. We don't have a lot of that in the USA right now, not with a vast number of noisy people who insist that "we don't want no guv'mint!" and somehow think that "roads cost nothing" because it's a freeway, and similarly willfully-ignorant nonsense. Even in California, we're surrounded by anti-guv'mint, anti-rail idiots who somehow think that highways cost nothing and have infinite capacity, airlines don't cost the guv'mint anything and make lots of money, while actually spending money on train infrastructure is "ebil guv'mint subsidy."

But enough ranting. We talked trains for an hour-plus and I had a good time. Thanks to Steve Silver for inviting me to be a panelist this afternoon, and I hope I was a net positive contribution to the convention.

We have a television set in the breakroom at my office, so after the panel I watched some of the long-track speed skating and the 10 km biathlon while having lunch. I then went and dealt with my laundry (I only take a week's worth with me on these trips and need to get laundry done sometime in the middle of the two-week stints), and eventually headed over to Fremont, where I'm spending tonight only at the Holiday Inn Express. The the front-desk staff recognized me (the hat is distinctive) and gave me a one-class upgrade to my room. I'm only here tonight and move back to San Jose tomorrow in my quest for enough points to make my hotel stay (or much of it) in London run on IHG points. There apparently is a large group of very noisy people staying in the hotel tonight, running up and down the halls, yelling at each other, and similarly making noise. After having been a panelist at a convention this afternoon, it sounds a bit like I'm staying on the party floor tonight.

While I'm happy to be on the train and looking forward to checking out the Hilton Arden West, site of Westercon 66 (a hotel I last visited during the early 1990's Eclecticons), I do admit that there's a part of me that would rather spend the entire weekend holed up in my apartment in an orgy of sports-watching of the Olympic Games.

I watched the Opening Ceremony (about ten hours after it happened) last night, and I did enjoy it. I am probably one of the few Americans who recognized without the help of NBC's commentary (which I didn't hear as I was on the phone at the time) that Kenneth Branagh was portraying Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I'm trying to imagine Americans revering engineers that way. It seems unlikely to me that the Brooklyn Bridge would have the words "J.A. Roebling, Engineer" engraved in letters you could see from far away in the style of the Royal Albert Bridge.

I love the parade of nations, and was amused that the parade was going so fast that the NBC commentators could not keep up with all of their notes on the various countries. I also hadn't heard about the Indpendent Olympic Athletes, which seems like an interesting development to me. I'm bemused to read that IOC rules claim that you have to be a "sovereign state" to have International Olympic Committee status, given that there are several sub-sovereign units competing, like Puerto Rico, Guam, and Hong Kong. However, I guess it's hard to expect the IOC to be consistent about anything.

I was surprised to hear that NBC cut out parts of the ceremony. I would have figured that if they were bowing to right-wing political pressure, they would have removed the NHS segment, not the 7/7 tribute. Was it just to fit in more commercials? If so, and since the whole thing was on delay anyway, why not run the whole thing a half-hour longer?

It's going to take a "Mini-Miracle on Ice" for either team to make it to the medal round with four losses, but at least the USA curling teams will not suffer the ignominious result of being totally shutout in the tournament, either.

The USA-Switzerland curling match was very tight. After the Swiss got out to a 4-0 lead, the USA came storming back, and the tenth (final regular) end came down to a measurement, which the Swiss won to tie the match and force an extra end. So when the live video came back from the commercial, they started showing a hockey match instead, and when I tried to reload the curling, I got an "Application Error" message. I have a bad feeling that NBC set things up so that when the time scheduled for the match ended, regardless of when it finished, they cut it off. Sigh.

Update: I checked the replay, and they cut it off as well. Someone was asleep at the switch. I sent a feedback complaint.

Unlike many of you, I like the Olympics. I'm pleased to discover that curling is one of the two sports that NBC will be live-streaming, for instance.

Today over lunch, Lisa suggested a winter sport that I think would be the equivalent of Triathalon, because it would involve skills from three different-but-related disciplines.

( It might be fun to watch.... )

Will it happen? Never, I think. But I also think it would be fun.

So Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Olympics and Chicago will have to settle for (possibly) the 2012 Worldcon.

I'm intrigued that some of the reports I read suggested Rio was the favorite of many IOC members who thought it important that the Olympics move around and go to countries it had not been before. To that extent, it's the same attitude I've seen in many Worldcon races.

There are only three sports in which I've been a participant in some way that makes me think I can comment all that meaningfully: Baseball (North Yuba Little League champion, 1979), Soccer (AYSO Region 150 champion, 1980; also a referee that same season and following summer), and gridiron American Football (Sutter Union High School Huskies statistician, 1982-85). So I don't know anything about ice hockey except as someone who watches it and now and then attends a Sharks game. But the final for the gold medal in men's ice hockey between Finland and Sweden has got to go down as a classic match, I think.

( But as usual, if sports aren't your bag, there's nothing to see here, move along )

The games are mostly over as I write this, although of course I won't get to see the very end until this evening's Closing Ceremony coverage. I'm sorry to hear so few people here in the USA watched it, and the bashing the Olympics took on Fox Sports Radio yesterday was irritating, especially as it reinforces the idea that anyone who doesn't get a gold medal is a loser and winning at all costs is the only important thing.

Well, Canada's men's ice hockey team might have slunk home with their tails between their legs (along with the US team), but their curling team did them proud. I was working from home today so I got to see the gold medal final live.

( But if you don't care about rocks on ice, you can skip the next part )

Now I can go back to getting sleep at night instead of staying up late and getting up early to watch curling matches.

I got to thinking about the "tournament" games (like ice hockey and curling) and how a silver medal is apt to be perceived as "losing" because your last game is a loss, in contrast to the bronze, where your last game is a win. So, how could you set up the tournament so that you have to win a game to get the silver medal?

Here's one method. Currently (to use curling as an example), after pool play the top four teams go to the medal round, seeded 1-2-3-4. 1 plays 4, 2 plays 3; the winners play for the gold, the losers for the bronze, and the loser of the final gets the silver.

To make a system where you have to win your last game to take a medal of any color, you'd have to start with the gold medal game, pitting 1 versus 2. (Only 1 or 2 could possibly win gold.) The winner gets gold; the loser plays 3 for the silver. The winner of that game gets silver; the loser plays 4 for the bronze.

There are obvious problem with this, starting with the anticlimactic nature, whereby there are two matches after what should be the final, gold medal game. There isn't any method I can think of that avoids this flaw.

I've been accused of only watching the women's figure skating because of the skimpy outfits, so I suppose folks might expect I would be disappointed in recent rule changes that allow the women to forgo the short skirts and wear pants, but Russian skater Irina Slutskaya's outfit was just as attractive as any of the other women's and she placed a strong second.

I was impressed by all of the performances, even those that didn't go as well as the skaters would have liked. The amount of strength and flexibility it takes to perform is astonishing, and the pressure must be nearly impossible.

The American women did quite well, even late substitute Emily Hughes. The big performance was from Sasha Cohen, who finally managed to live up to the much-discussed "potential" and hit all of her moves. The tiny lead she has means that she'll still have to be perfect in the long program.

I'm no expert on figure skating; indeed, I'm predisposed to not like it. But tonight's performances were good, and the new scoring system appears to work. I can't claim to understand the fine points of it, but I'm pretty sure that if things weren't right, the NBC commentators, who include Dick Button, would be saying if things were not right. Button, in particular, is reputed to know just about anything there is to know about the sport.

-------

Usually the soap opera is at the figure skating, but at these games, it appears that the speed skaters are stepping up to the drama plate. Over at speed skating, the Americans went 2-3 in the 1500m, and the simmering feud between Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick continued. For those of you not following the dispute, Hedrick is annoyed that Davis took himself out of the team pursuit competition, ruining the USA's chances in that event. Davis responds in kind, complaining that Hedrick didn't shake his hand when Davis won the 1000m event, although Hedrick did shake his hand after the 1500m. Showing how little he values the silver medal, Davis stormed out of the post-1500m press conference saying, "Shakes my hand when I lose. Typical Chad."

Grow up, guys, both of you! So you don't like each other, but this sniping at each other is really classless.

-------

Curling starts again Wednesday morning 5 AM my time. I'll see some of it, because I'll be up relatively early and working from home, taking a departmental conference call at home before heading off to the dentist. Unfortunately, it looks like the men's semi-final will be on tape delay. I'll be taping what I think is the right time and will try to avoid the news so I can watch it when I get home Wednesday night.