First, they had the footy on until about five minutes before the ceremony started. No build-up, no pre-promotion, no nothing. Sure, you have to keep your footy audience happy (I guess - not a real big footy fan) but given that the Olympics is a relatively rare event I would have thought some more coverage would be in order.
Which brings me to my second point. With a pre-show Channel 7 could have shown ads during that instead of wasting about 2-3 minutes before the ceremony started promoting the 'broadcast sponsors' and stopping the broadcast of the ceremony every few minutes for ad breaks. It really ruined the atmosphere and meant that a few things (like the fireworks and a few bits of the show) were missed.
I did notice, however, that there were no ad breaks during the athlete's walk into the stadium. Or at least none that I noticed - I wandered off in the middle. Unusual, given that this went on for a few hours.
Also, the commentary disappeared for a few minutes at the start of the show to be replaced by the sound of technicians trying to get the commentary back online. Not that this was such a bad thing, because...
The commentary was nearly useless. It was filled with sexist remarks about various female athletes; had pointless comments about parts of the ceremony (like how paper could be used for writing or drawing on - really? I had no idea...); and they failed to explain for the first ten minutes of the athlete's walk in why they were entering the stadium in such an unusual (for a westerner) order. It turns out the order of the countries was dictated by how many movements of the pen it took to represent the country's name in Chinese script. This was about the only thing useful thing said in the entire broadcast.
Overall, this has reinforced my ongoing belief that the Channel 7 commentary team needs a complete overhaul. They are tired, monotonous and boring. And on top of that, it appears that Channel 7 has spent all their money buying the rights to the broadcast and none on quality production values.
Coming back through Subi from doing my shopping I saw a woman pushing a pram with three kids in tow. She crossed the road at a set of traffic lights while the pedestrian signal was on red. So far, only moderately stupid but still a bad example for the kids.
Anyway, only two of the kids went with her and the pram - the third (who had obviously not got his dose of stupid for the day) stayed on the footpath and was waiting for the light to change. Good kid.
Of course, the traffic moves towards this woman when she is halfway across the road. The two kids on the road run for the far side. Not too smart but the best they could do in bad circumstances.
The woman (who now has a surprised look on her face) sees the cars and then has a second attack of the stupids. She leaves the pram (with the kid in it) in the middle of the road and runs back to get the third kid who is still standing on the footpath; grabs him, rushes back across the road with the kid in tow; and proceeds to push the pram across the rest of the way. All while the traffic is approaching (admittedly, slowly becaue they can see this woman is having a real stupid attack).
What is with people? Sure, we all have an attack of the stupids occassionally and do dumb things. But who leaves a pram with a kid in it in the middle of the road with approaching traffic? Clearly, evoluation at work.
This isn't the only stupid thing I saw today and it certainly isn't the only stupid thing I've ever seen people do with their kids. But today, if I didn't know better I'd say there was some stupid injected into the water supply over the last few days.
