{"id":201,"date":"2008-08-11T08:32:11","date_gmt":"2008-08-11T14:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/?p=201"},"modified":"2008-08-10T21:52:16","modified_gmt":"2008-08-11T03:52:16","slug":"weekend-sports-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/weekend-sports-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Sports Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Still find myself watching the Olympics, a whole lot more than I&#8217;d intended. But I also watched some racing too. Here are some thoughts on what I watched over the weekend:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>NASCAR Trucks<\/strong>: They were at &#8220;Nashville&#8221; Superspeedway Saturday night. Funny how &#8220;Nashville&#8221; Superspeedway isn&#8217;t even in the same county as Nashville. Anyway, Johnny Benson seems to finally found his niche in NASCAR as he goes for a championship in the truck series. His win Saturday night was his third in a row, and he gave an otherwise dull race an exciting finish.<\/li>\n<li><strong>NASCAR Cup Series:<\/strong> I watched some of the Cup race at Watkins Glen. Personally, I think Watkins Glen is too dangerous now, since they had a &#8220;big one&#8221;, so I recommend they take it off the circuit. Actually, that&#8217;s a sarcastic remark there. Seems that every time they go to a plate race, everyone talks about how dangerous it is because of the &#8220;big one&#8221;. They had a &#8220;big one&#8221; at the Glen, and they&#8217;ve had &#8220;big ones&#8221; at Bristol and other tracks, so if a &#8220;big one&#8221; is the only criteria needed to remove a track from the series, then there are several tracks that need to be removed.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Olympics swimming<\/strong>: Maybe the Chinese are using a counterfeit iPod to play the national anthems, or at least the American National Anthem. Either that, or they seriously showed a lack of respect to the US when they played the Anthem for Michael Phelps&#8217; Gold Medal ceremony. It started wrong, and then they ended it short.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Olympics gymnastics<\/strong>: I watched the Chinese Women&#8217;s Dwarf Gymnastic team. At least, they appear to be dwarfs, if their ages are correct. Otherwise, they&#8217;re putting up 12 year olds in their women&#8217;s gymnastic program, and since that&#8217;s not permitted.<\/li>\n<li><strong>NBC Commentators<\/strong>: Would someone tell NBC&#8217;s gymnastics and diving commentators what country they&#8217;re from? Seems that the USA competitors in those two sports couldn&#8217;t do anything right (according to the commentators) and the Chinese competitors could do no wrong. I don&#8217;t necessarily expect them to be cheerleaders, but come on. But if they&#8217;re going to cheer the Chinese, then they should cheer the Americans as well.<\/li>\n<li><strong>NBC Commentators, Part 2<\/strong>: The gymnastic commentators were the worst; they could have taken a minute or two to explain the new scoring, instead of just assuming we all knew about it already. There are apparently new scoring procedures in a few sports, and they should make sure to explain them.<\/li>\n<li><strong>NBC Commentators, Part 3:<\/strong> NBC just needs to go ahead and replace their swimming commentators. They completely blew it Sunday night. On one of the women&#8217;s finals, they pretty much discounted everyone except the Italian swimmer. She finished fourth. Then in the men&#8217;s 4&#215;100 relay, they pronounced the French as the winners before the race.  They finished second, behind the Americans.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Speaking of the French: <\/strong>Bite me.<\/li>\n<li><strong>New Countries<\/strong>: I&#8217;ve already commented about Taiwan&#8217;s being called &#8220;Chinese Taipei&#8221; and not being allowed to fly their own flag. But apparently a new country called &#8220;Korea&#8221;, even though North Korea and South Korea marched into the opening ceremonies separately.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Boxing Scoring<\/strong>: Even with the &#8220;open&#8221; scoring in boxing, they still &#8220;miss&#8221; punches that should score. Not sure what they need to do, but the potential for funny business seems to be as high as ever.<\/li>\n<li><strong>NBC Olympic Logo: <\/strong>Wonder how much Marlboro paid NBC Olympic logo? Yeah, I know, they don&#8217;t see &#8220;Marlboro&#8221; but the similarities are amazing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Still find myself watching the Olympics, a whole lot more than I&#8217;d intended. But I also watched some racing too. Here are some thoughts on what I watched over the weekend: NASCAR Trucks: They were at &#8220;Nashville&#8221; Superspeedway Saturday night. Funny how &#8220;Nashville&#8221; Superspeedway isn&#8217;t even in the same county as Nashville. Anyway, Johnny Benson &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/weekend-sports-thoughts\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Weekend Sports Thoughts&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}