floundersgreatadventure

If you’re a sports fan this is the best time of year because you have baseball, football, soccer, Basketball and hockey starting up, you just can’t get better than this. Of all the sports the one Jeff and I like the least is baseball. It’s a played at such a slow pace and TV makes it even slower that it’s difficult to pay attention when watching even if you’re at the game. Let’s look how TV affects the pace of sports in baseball we’ve gotten used to the slow pace of the game because the batters and the pitchers do these little things to get noticed by TV so maybe they’ll get endorsement deals. In football they hold up the pace of a game for TV commercials here is a simple example. If you go to a big time college game or pro game you’ll see this guy on the sidelines with these big red cloves on he tells the teams when they can start playing again and when they have to wait so the commercial can finish. Go to a high school game where there is no TV and if the game stars at 1pm you can be pretty sure you’ll be by three while at a pro or College game you might not get home until 5. A reason you don’t see a lot big time European or Latin American soccer on TV is they don’t stop the game for anything the clock is always running and in Colombia where we live the commercial are at half time or they run along the bottom of the screen (can’t see that happening in the US). A couple of time recently the big Networks have tried to change the game so that they would be able to see commercials, but when you look at the most valuable franchises in the world and there European soccer teams you can see why I don’t see this happening soon. In basketball they actually schedule TV time outs for commercials this of course can alter the momentum in the game and again make sit longer than necessary. Hockey, which we don’t get to watch a lot off down here, has a nice pace to it and it couldn’t get much longer since there is a long time between periods. Ad no real time outs. So it looks like if you really want to watch the game at the pace it’s supposed to be played at soccer or high school sports is the way to go. This is the non fan flounder saying CIAO from Colombia.

Today we’re going to take a look at the news and see if we can figure it out. If you want to know why your buddies seem to have such opposite opinions from you take a look at where they get there info from. If you look at Yahoo’s home page and click on news you will see some AP and UPI as well as stories from the various media outlets. You will also see stories about people catching giant alligators’ who’s going to be the judge on American Idol or dancing with the stars as well as other stuff that really has no meaning. OK so you go to CNN or Fox and maybe even CBS and here you’ll get news but it seems everybody has their slant to it. So what are you to do if you want real info to make an intelligent decision? Well you’re going to have to work for it which is something most people don’t have the time or the desire to do, then you just might be able to form an opinion that is correct. Of course everybody else will still want to argue with you. That’s it this Flounder saying CIAO from Medellin.

It’s Monday and in the US it’s a Holiday called Labor Day, just so you remember every day is a Holiday for me and Jeff. Olga came over yesterday and made Sancocho for everybody and it was very good. El Jefe was here, Camilo and his love, Elda and I and Jeff others were supposed to come but they were no shows. We watched soccer saw Medellin tie and Nacional win not a good day for Jeff. We should here from john sometime today saying something like we won is normal. I need to take a nap all those people in the house yesterday ruined my afternoon sleep time this is Flounder saying CIAO from Medellin