J-school prof Ivor Shapiro's complaint that Canadian sports reporters uncritically promoted a we-was-robbed version of  the Canada-US Women's Olympic soccer final provoked Contrarian readers to provide contrary examples, and a testy chinwag amount tweeting Halifax journos (viz.:  @pdmcleod, @bbhorne). Ruth Davenport, who knows a little about news, thinks he jumped the gun: Shapiro’s beef stuck in my craw for the same reason any unfounded assertion of laziness or incompetence sticks in my craw: it’s unfounded. He was griping about a lack of reporting that was patently in evidence – he just didn’t bother to look.  Even if those particular pieces hadn’t been published...

09 August, 2012

Here's a curious Olympic postscript: a printout of Halifax water consumption on the afternoon of the Olympic gold medal hockey game: The spikes correspond with the three intermissions, and with the immediate aftermath of Crosby's sudden-death goal and the medal ceremony. Epcor, the company that runs Edmonton's water system, produced a similar graph for that city on the same afternoon, with the previous day's spikeless consumption superimposed in green: Hat tip: R.S....

09 March, 2010

Contrarian amused himself yesterday by seeing how long a non-sports fan living in Canada without television and with the radio turned off could avoid learning the outcome of the Canada-US hockey game. Answer: Until a 6:59 p.m. AST email bulletin from the New York Times. Herewith some of the very few Olympic nuggets that actually tweaked my interest: What a difference a second makes: Amanda Cox of the New York Times uses a musical interactive graphic to illustrate the extent to which elite athletes cluster near the winning time in various events. When you "play" each event, a staccato musical tone represents each contestant...

01 March, 2010

I hesitate to start this, for fear of luring Olympic-worshiping bores out of their rec-rooms, but US bloggers had a field day with the perfectly hideous opening ceremony in Vancouver. My favorite was Heather Havrilesky in Salon.com, Moneyquotes: Some dramatic photography paired with soaring music and a lot of melodramatic prose. "Here, where a swerving coastline submits to waves of glacial peaks, where the mapping of the Western world came to an end, the discovery yet begins anew!" Praise Jesus! Who writes this stuff? Nelly Furtado and Bryan Adams perform the lamest song since that thing they play at the end of...

17 February, 2010