Is watching the Olympic sporting events even an option anymore? The last several Olympics were used as a vehicle for NBC to provide continuous inspirational background stories on the athlete's lives. Revolting. Maybe this time we're really just getting 10 channels of over-the-top uplifting inspiration? I miss the good old days when beating the evil Soviet bloc athletes was all the inspiration we needed.

Like most people I know, I don't plan on watching one minute of the Olympics. The games have sadly become boorish, unimportant media fanfares, which is truly sad for the athletes. To put it frankly, why would I want to watch a competition between countries? I'm already IN a daily competition with them for petroleum, food, economy, and even my job (outsourcing, anyone?). And since this later struggle is one of life-and-death, you'll have to pardon everyone in the modern world who doesn't feel like engaging in silly athletic competitions sports with our adversaries...

on the LA times column.

Yesterday, I wrote you a very fine comment about how beautiful it is that NBC has provided viewers who have high-speed Internet access with a way of watching live and recorded webisodes of sports that they don't plan to televise. (I wrote and sent a similar comment to King Kaufman's headline piece "Show the Games Live".) I love Judo, and I was literally drunk with the ecstacy of having just viewed the Womens 48kg and Mens 60kg medal rounds, and also clicking "rewind" to see several of the previous matches.

But before I sent you something containing watchable links, I went back to ensure that you would be able to navigate to the important matches. When I did this, the first thing I noticed was that although it was possible to "rewind" most of the matches, for the gold medal matches there was only a link entitled "final" that, if you clicked it, showed the entire finals (runtime, approx. 2 hours).

This sort of reduced the thrust of my comment, which was to show you, HH, how to watch two wonderfully informative webisodes, the men's and women's gold medal matches, which were both exquisite examples of breathtakingly spectacular throws.

So, I held off sending you my note. I thought, they'll fix this later in the day. Well, they have indeed "fixed" it.

By later in the day, all of the "rewind" links were gone, replaced with an icon indicating that I could watch photo slide shows of each match.

Today, the links for the event are all changed. Where yesterday, there was a "live" link for a plausibly live video feed of the current men's and women's matches and a "rewind" for each individual match, today there are no "rewind" links in evidence. There is now a link labeled "official" where I can go to see a box score of how a match was scored, and now only photo slide shows are available. I awoke in time to see the men's gold medal match, and the women's medal ceremony, but there is no way to watch anything I slept theough.

But I may look at photos. Did I mention that? There's some kind of saying that's been kicking around for years that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture" or something. Well, looking at photos of Judo falls into that category. I love a good photo; a picture is worth 1000 words, you know. But photo slide shows of Olympic Judo?

Thank you, NBC.

I soon gave up when I couldn't make the "rewind" links work the way they did yesterday. But Laura eventually found a link to the video of today's Judo competition, in its entirety. Runtime is 4 hours and 38 minutes, so I still think the rewind snippets would be more fun to watch. But they were probably a bitch to have to edit and I figure somebody checked the stats and determined I was the only one watching them, and then the editor probably whined that he or she would prefer to be hanging out in the market eating scorpion satays, instead of slicing and dicing Judo single match vids for one bored moron in Texas.

Speaking of bored, I've just about watched the entire Women's 52kg and Men's 66kg competitions. Sometimes, sport Judo can be like watching paint dry, and there's less scoring than you'd see in your average World cup. (It one quarterfinal match, there was no score at all during regulation, and the American guy lost to the Cuban on a minor penalty in sudden death.) But the tournament uses the repechage format (and it is just fun to say 'repechage' every once in awhile), and the Japanese guy and the Chinese woman who are going to eventually win the golds today have made some beautiful throws.

Repechage, by the way, is a French word meaning that if the last person who kicked your ass and put you out keeps on winning, then you aren't out of the tournament like you thought. Instead, somebody else gets to kick your ass, and then you're out.

Almost all of the competitors, men and women, are better than average looking, so I think you would really enjoy that aspect. It makes me wish I were young again.

So, anyway, I guess I don't hate NBC as much as I want.