I think I may have a problem - I find that I'm agreeing with Jimmy Roberts more often than not the last few days.

Take his Olympic Moment on the legacy of the Athens Games. His point - that the Games will mostly be remembered for going off smoothly when there was ample concern that they would not - has a solid ring of truth to it. When all was said and done, the Games went off better than expected.

I don't think they'll be seen as one of the classic Games, though. Solid for sure, but lacking that breakout character like Carl Lewis (or on the other end, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards). Michael Phelps will continue to be pushed upon us for that role, but the immense hype that preceded the Games has, I think, worked against him. His medal total is still incredible, but after pushing the Spitz angle for so long, it makes his result seem something less than it was. That's unfortunate, but not unexpected give the way the US media works.

Speaking of which, NBC should get good marks for its area rug coverage. It's still not wall to wall, but it's a step in the right direction. The ADHD-influenced prime time coverage can go, certainly. Let's hope for Torino they give more consistent coverage of events rather than going from a heat in one event to a half of something else to a rotation of third event before going back to the first - but not before giving us some human interest.

And as much as TripleCast stands out as a joke, perhaps the time is coming where live event coverage with actual sports-oriented production could be provided on a PPV basis. Overkill, perhaps, but if you really like an event it'd be heaven.

In the tradition of James Dinan though, here are my five items for Making it Better: Olympic broadcasting.

1. Show the beach volleyball dancing girls. They were mentioned on-air and in other media, but we never got a chance to judge things on our own. I'm sure the Baron de Coubertin would be horrified, of course.

2. Make advertisers come up with at least 5 different spots. I'm pretty sick of Kristi Yamaguchi and Jonny Mosley pretending to diss their summer counterparts. I also now know that Bank of America processes 11 billion checks a year, and that to them it's about doing one check right and repeating that process 11 billion times.

3. See point number two regarding new fall season promotion. I will never watch an episode of Father of the Pride after seeing the same small rotation of promos for it (then again, I wasn't likely to tune in to begin with).

4. More long-form event coverage, especially in prime time, as I noted before. Let the drama of the events unfold rather than forcing it upon us.

5. A couple fewer US medal ceremonies, please. At one point I heard the Star Spangled Banner three times in something like 7 minutes. I'm not expecting that the coverage will become any less Americentric, but try to even it out at least.

There's a bit of a parallel between the US men's basketball team and the US 4 by 100 meter relay teams. Given the fairly late date for the US track and field qualifiers, you get the sense that the relays teams didn't have much time to run together. So while they didn't have to go through a couple dozen sprinters to get the team, they did try to do what hoops did - win gold without as much team preparation as they may have wanted.

There was a relay camp in Munich leading up to the Games, but clearly the exchanges could have used more work. Clearly, we don't have the same margin we used to in these relays.

While I've not been watching as much, I have also been noting the resurgence of the Red Sox, who are 16-4 in their last 20. They've cut their AL East defecit to 5.5 games, with six games against the Yankees (three here, three there) to come.

The Sox also have three games each against Texas, Oakland, and Anaheim left, which will start to clarify the wild card thing a bit (as will those three teams playing each other down the stretch).

It's good that I have something else to obsess about once the Olympics are over.

Oh yeah, the first major college football game is tomorrow, too. USC versus Virginia Tech. Good times.

Bad night to be Marion Jones, huh? Either falling short of a long jump medal or being involved in a dropped exchange in the 4 by 100 meter relay is bad enough. Both on the same nigh - ugh. You'd expect a reciept from BALCO to come to light just about now to finish her off.

But it's probably a bad night to be a US men's basketball team member, given that you now have to face Lithuania - who beat you earlier - to even get a medal. Regardless of how the bronze medal game turns out, you can be sure that the team members are going to be getting the business in arenas all across the NBA this season. Then again, given the number of players who passed on participating, there's precious few who can actually jaw with impunity.

I think I've seen all the sports but taekwondo now, so I'll have to seek that out. I've got a much greater appreciation for both modern pentathletes and equestrian competitors (human and equine) after watching some of both over the last couple of days. Freestyle dressage, however, may be the most unusual event I've seen during this entire Games. Picture, if you will, a horse prancing to a budget synthesized version of "Karma Chamelion" and you'll start to get my meaning.

And I say this after seeing both synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics over the last couple of days.

Louis Johnson, one of the color commentators for track, now has Tom Hammond Repetitive Announcing Syndrome. At one point tonight he said the exact same thing about a sprinter that Hammond had said about 8 seconds beforehand. Our attention spans aren't getting that short, are they?

Can we let this gymnastics thing die? The competition has been over for days, yet NBC is compelled to continue beating the dead horse. I know Paul Hamm's been taking a beating over the last couple of days, but was the 15 minute puff piece at the end of tonight's prime-time broadcast necessary? It's not like the American public needs the propaganda to change its image of him.

Which makes me wonder what sort of fluffy bit we'll get about the men's 200 meter sweep, to make up for the crowd's temporary hijacking of the event. Maybe we'll just get some sort of smug words about Kenteris, a la Al Trautwig's catty remarks after the Korean gymnast involved in the all-around kerfuffle messed up his individual high bar routine (along the lines of "Paul Hamm never did that.")

Tom Hammond speculated that part of the problem last night was that at least on Greek newspaper implied that the US was behind the whole Kenteris thing. That conventiently ignores the past issues with him making drug tests and his rather spotty appearances on the world track stage since Sydney, but given the current world climate regarding America, you have to figure some greater percentage than normal of regular people are willing to believe nonsense.

Speaking of nonsense, I'm more irritated by the Bush Olympic ad now that his campaign said it's not going to pull it. If I made an ad, and the people who I'm touting voice strong opinion against it, why would you keep running it? You've gotten your publicity, now act like you actually care about the folks whose country you've invaded.

Say hello to Athena and Phevos. They are the mascots for the Athens Olympics, and they're... interesting. I suppose a design based on ancient dolls is OK. Better than that animated owl from Clash of the Titans.

But not much better. While some locals have come around to liking them, they've been derided as looking like condoms or the result of a nuclear accident. An anti-Olympic group took the names, and then bombed a couple of government offices for good measure.

Like most things that turn out this way, it was created by committee, as strong an argument against groupthing as you'd need. You can back that up with Izzy, of course, the computer-generated Atlanta mascot who was so reviled that you saw very little of the thing when the Games actually took place.

Other Games, like Lillehammer and Nagano, had almost no obvious mascot presence (though not surprising when your mascots are a pair of 14th century Norwegian children and a quartet of snow-loving owls).

Not surprisingly, the last Olympic mascot to really catch the public's attention - Cobi, the dog-like mascot of Barcelona - was drawn in a matter of seconds by a Spanish artist who was reportedly under the influence of something when he doodled the eventual mascot (which bodes well for 2010 in Vancouver).

My favorite mascots? Probably Waldi, the daschund used for Munich (solely because it was a daschund) and Hodori, the male of the pair of tigers who were mascots for Seoul (come to think of it, I don't know if the female tiger was that widely used - I've only seen mentions in print).

Anyway, look for Athena and Phevos merchandise at your local Big Lots or Building 19 or liquidation store of you choice soon!

Here's a fun game when Olympic coverage starts to drag - try to find an American athlete who is sporting a visible Nike logo who is not also wearing a yellow Live Strong bracelet. They're out there, but rare.

Unfortunate trend recently noticed: "Born in the USA" being played when an American wins a gold. Heard this tonight in both beach volleyball and track. I fear the first time an Asian competitor is bested and has to hear the line about going to kill the yellow man.

It's been NAFTA night on NBC, as they've given some more in-depth coverage to Canadian diver Alexandre Despatie and Mexican sprinter Ana Guevara. Neither won gold, the ingrates. Dick Ebersol is firing off angry telegrams to their embassies as we speak.

All the "drama" around the men's gymnastics event finals pretty much confirms that gymnastics generally is my least favorite of the summer Olympic sports. I'm glad it's over, except for some "gala" that's being foisted upon us in prime time.

Not helping is that it's given fresh reasons for South Koreans and Russians to dislike the US, not that they needed any.

Two notes from the lighter side:

1. An American in the rifle competition just needed to hit his target to win gold. He mistakenly aimed at the target of another competitor. No medal for him. This isn't the lighter side, though.

The real lighter side is that the American who took silver in the competition did take off his olive wreath during the national anthem - the Chinese national anthem. I don't think anyone expected him to be that respectful.

2. In an early heat of the women's 200 meter dash, a Jamaican sprinter started in lane seven but finished in lane eight. It being Greece, she was not penalized for changing lanes without signaling. Everyone does it.

(Seriously, she didn't get a penalty because the lane was open and switching to it didn't confer any benefit to her - in fact, it probably added a little length to her run.)

I wasn't all that surprised by Paula Radcliffe's failure to finish the women's marathon today. While her results have been stupendous, she's only run in London and Chicago, both flat courses in cool climes. With 100 degree heat and hills that make Boston look flat by comparison, it'd almost have been more surprising if she had won. Look for her in 2008, though, as course designers come in to play rather than history.

Very surprising was the American medal, as marathoning here hasn't been world class since, well, Joan Benoit took the first women's Olympic marathon 20 years ago.

Speaking of which, kudos to NBC for their piece on the women's marathon prior to the race, and for covering the event live. The taped piece was well done and had some good historical context. The coverage was OK, but they really should have trucked in a crew from Boston - we know how to cover marathons on TV.

In vaguely related news, being in Maine this weekend subjected us to more Presidential campaign ads than we get in Massachusetts, and we saw an Olympic-themed one that Bush is running, about the growing number of worldwide democracies and how Afghanistan and Iraq are here thanks to him. It was vaguely irritating, in the gratutitous use of sports for political means sort of way.

Besides, given that an Afghan soldier interviewed for yesterday's Olympic Moment said he would kill his sister if she paraded herself around like one of the Afghan female athletes, there's clearly more work to be done in some corners.

And, surprising, I give props to Jimmy Roberts and crew for today's Olympic Moment on Pyrros Dimas, the Albanian-born Greek weightlifter who went for and missed a fourth straight gold medal in his weight class. These are the sorts of things these spots should cover, not more repetitive crap about overhyped American athletes.

Jimmy Roberts finally ventured into somewhat unfamiliar territory tonight, bringing us up to speed on the women Olympians from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan while making some larger points on the status of women, in the Olympics (where they didn't get to compete in 1896, in case you'd forgotten from the last time it was mentioned) and generally.

As inoccuous as the piece was, two points came to mind watching it.

1. I don't think any of the NBC family of networks deigned to show any of the competitions where any of these women competed. If it wasn't for this moment, the opening ceremony would have been the only time we saw them (if even then).

2. There are several female US Olympians - May and Walsh, Jenny Thompson, and Amanda Beard are notable - who whenever they are mentioned by a studio host come up over their shoulder in what appears to be a glamor shot. Inge de Bruijn of The Netherlands, by comparison, looks like they just dragged her in from the pool. So we've got nationalism and sexism, kind of the Reese's Cup of socially questionable behavior - "you've got sexism in my nationalism!" and so forth.

In unrelated news, either Tom Hammond has short term memory problems or he thinks we do. He's a little too fond of repetition. When noting the finalists in women's pole vault, he reminded us twice within 3 minutes that no Americans were going. He also likes to remind us about 100 meter dash silver medalist Lauryn Williams' parents (divorced, she's an 8th grade teacher in Detroit, he's devoted to his daughter, and needs dialysis every other day related to a long-term case of leukemia).

From a color commentary volume perspective, there's a tight medal battle going between Carol Lewis (track), Rowdy Gaines (swimming), and Cynthia Potter (diving). I mean, they all do a good job, but don't need to be turned up to 11 to do so.

Merlene Ottey: the pride of Slovenia?

We were just watching the preliminary heats of the women's 100 meter run, and were surprised to see Ottey, the grande dame of Jamaican track, representing a slightly different country.

The NBC commentators didn't give much of an explanation (way to go, knuckleheads). Turns out that she'd been getting some treatment and coaching in Slovenia in the late 1990s, and when the Jamaican team started to try to ease her out for younger runners (Ottey is 44), she opted to move on. She became a Slovenian citizen a couple of years ago. She says she plans to run for Slovenia in the 2006 European championships, which suggests a certain lack of depth in the Slovenian track program at the shorter distances.

In the heat we saw, Ottey was flanked by Jamaicans. They finished 1-2, with Ottey finishing third. They all advanced to the semis.

I'm sure they're partying in Ljubljana.

Going back to yesterday's archery, the men's final involved a 41-year old Japanese contestant who took bronze in Los Angeles. I have to think that 20 years between medals is some sort of record. He took silver.

The coverage gave me a much greater appreciation for archery. The target is 70 meters (roughly 230 feet) away from the participants, and the center ring has the diameter of an orange. Each guy got 12 arrows in an alternate shot format, which makes for good, dramatic coverage. Makes me wish I'd stuck with archery the one time I tried it out at Scout camp.

Oh, we can knock off fencing from the list of sports not seen, as I caught chunks of the men's team sabre final. A tough competition for the US, falling a point short of both making the gold medal match and winning bronze.

As a televised sport, fencing is a little difficult given that it's not always easy to see the touches. I still enjoyed it.

Kudos to Yahoo! for adding a check box so you can filter Olympic results out of their home page. Kudos as well to Allyson for pointing this out to me.

I can now check archery off my list of unseen sports. It's on right now!

Quick hits for now.

* Having seen a fair bit of water polo now, I think it's time that we stopped letting California hog the sport to itself. I've yet to see a game that's not been entertaining, which is saying something for Olympic team sports.

* Is it me, or would the US men's hoops team be better off playing Lebron James and Amare Stoudamire more and Stephon Marbury and Richard Jefferson less?

* Along those lines, I don't know if this is strictly legal, but Larry Brown should fine any player who takes a shot from more than 12 feet away from the basket. Fines are doubled if you take a three pointer. It's hard to tell which has been more atrocious, the long distance shooting or the quarter-hearted "defense" that's marked most US games.

* Speaking of deciding between atrocities, I'm trying to decide which has been the worst moment by an in-studio personality: Pat O'Brien's stupid, borderline insensitive interview with sabre bronze medalist Sada Jacobsen, or Mary Carillo trying to milk humor from a horse passport required for horses to prove they meet quarantine laws ("So you're here for pleasure? Then why the long face, fella?").

Jimmy Roberts gets the lifetime achievement award here for his gauzy "Olympic Moments" which more often than not give further pointless coverage to people and topics previously beaten to death.

* I'll agree with the general consensus that the cable-based coverage has been solid. I would like to see more replays, though.

Not much for an Olympic report today - I was out most of the day, visiting former coworkers at Babson and going to the Red Sox game (more on that in a second). So instead, here's a list of the sports I've not seen yet:

Archery, though there's some gold medal action tomorrow on one of the channels from what I just heard.

Baseball, which I'll need to see before it gets dropped. I caught like one out of Cuba-Japan (I think it was Japan), but I'm not counting it.

Canoeing, on which I really have nothing to say.

Fencing, as I don't count the highlights of the women's individual sabre from yesterday. That's on somewhere tomorrow, too.

Modern Pentathlon, assuming there's going to be any coverage of it anyway.

Synchronized Swimming, which can stay on the list for all I care. But I know I'll wind up seeing some of it.

Taekwondo, wrestling, triathlon, none of which have started yet.

Track and field, as I didn't stay up until 2 am to see the shot put from Olympus and wasn't home to see a rebroadcast.

To the Sox game. The carmine hose put up a workmanlike 6-4 win on the Blue Jays, a game that moved swiftly until Keith Foulke decided to make things interesting in the ninth. We were standing in anticipation of the final out as Foulke was giving up runs on bloopers, and I mentioned to Sarah that perhaps we should sit down, as he got his first two outs easily when we were seated. As if they could hear me, large sections of people behind the plate did just that. So we sat down, too. Foulke got a pop out, game over.

Tonight marked the first big league start for Earl Snyder, just called up for Pawtucket. He was 0 for 3 going into the 8th, and upon taking the batter's box he got a huge standing ovation, the crowd doing everything in its part to will him to his first big league hit. I've never seen something like this before, and it was great to be a part of it. Thankfully, he was up to the challenge, stroking a nice single to left.

Sadly, third base coach Dale Sveum tried a little too hard to get him his first RBI, as he sent Bill Mueller. Given that the ball was out only about midway, he was a good 10 to 15 feet from the plate when the ball got there. He was stupendously out. Somewhere, Wendell Kim smiled.

A couple of firsts to note from Athens today.

The United Arab Emirates got their first gold ever, as Ahmed Al Maktoum won the double trap shooting event. That'll show those punks from the Great Outdoors Games.

The silver went to a shooter from India, which makes me wonder what sort of odds I could have gotten for that 1-2 in any sport.

Women's individual sabre fencing, a new event, brought the US its first fencing medal in something like 100 years. It surprisingly did not go to the American who is the world ranked number one; she finished third. Instead, a 19 year old woman who made the Olympics when a Nigerian fencer dropped out took the top prize, winning over a fencer from China. What little they showed of it on NBC primetime was fun to see, even if it did take me a second to realize that when a fencer's helmet lights up it means they scored the point. I was taking a lazer tag approach and figured they were the one getting touched.

Fencing is one of Bravo's sports, so keep your eyes peeled there.

I also found the first sport that I don't care to watch - sailing. There are like 20 tiny boats out there, and it's less play by play than longish recap. I slogged through half an hour of sailing early this morning in the hopes of seeing some judo or something, but couldn't stay awake. If I never see another Finn class boat again it won't bother me.

One of the problems with seeing the Olympics mostly on tape is avoiding results spoilers. NBC has been smart enough to put a "Spoiler Alert" tag on the screen when there's an interview that may give something away (though I wonder why they bother with such interviews, as it kind of cuts their own throats if people learn a result and decide to watch something else).

I'm finding it hard to avoid spoilers with Yahoo! as my home page, as they've taken to putting all the big results into main headlines. I could pretty much tell you how swimming and gymnastics went as of about 4 pm.

Yahoo! doesn't owe NBC anything to prevent this, but I do wonder if they may alienate users. I expect spoilers on the ESPN web site given its sports focus, and on news sites as they're news providers. I can avoid those if I really want to be surprised. I don't have the same choice if I want to use Yahoo!, even if it wasn't my home page.

I don't think it's going to cause a serious problem, but I'd be curious to see if Yahoo! gets fewer hits during than normal as people learn to stay away if they don't want to see results ahead of time.

I have very little to add in actual sports news, other than I got to see several pairs choke in the last round of the men's synchronized diving, including the US men who were in second. They wound up out of the medals, handing the Greeks a fairly unexpected gold. Much more entertaining than Olympic tennis.

If you could get a cheap flight, and don't mind perhaps sleeping in a public park, there are clearly plenty of good seats still available at the Olympics.

With all the hulabaloo about the venues getting done, actual ticket sales didn't get a lot of attention until now, and the numbers are a little frightening - some said that only 25% of all tickets were sold going into the opening ceremonies.

The issue came up last night during the men's gymnastics, as the lower deck was sparsely populated. Al Trautwig made several comments related to this, mostly aimed at noting that the upper deck was full. Bob Costas also noted that locals had stepped up over the last 2-3 weeks and bought more tickets.

Reasons for the slow sales are myriad, from August being a big vacation month for Athenians to terror concerns keeping some from making the trip. I'd have to think too that demand is much more for medal-round events and not so much for prelims. That would explain the half-dozen or so completely empty bleacher sections at the rowing venue yesterday. It just doesn't make it look any better.

Not sure how dire an issue this is, as with all the infrastructure improvements I don't think Greece was ever looking to make money off the Games. It may linger as part of their history, though, which would be unfortunate. No one wants to be the Unattended Games.

In other news:

* The US lost to Puerto Rico in men's basketball, which is more of an "upset" than an upset. Most folks seemed to think the US was primed for a loss. Just not to Puerto Rico.

If you missed the game, the US more or less checked out until the fourth quarter, and managed to get the lead down to 9 before it got bumped back out to the teens, where it was more often than not (at least when the lead wasn't 20-plus).

Clearly, there's a need for a national team for basketball. I don't know how many times we're going to slap together a bunch of guys before this becomes obvious.

* Iraq's men's soccer team won its second game, blanking Costa Rica 2-0. They played another good game, a little less physical than the Portugal match. They're through to the quarterfinals, which is well beyond anything expected for them.

* Sports watched today: sailing, judo, boxing, table tennis, badminton, softball, soccer, beach volleyball, basketball, weightlifting, cycling, equestrian, and indoor volleyball. As you can imagine, very little of this was seen (or presented) all the way through. Not sure if that'd good or bad.

A few quick postscripts for today:

* Men's gymnastics may be this Olympics' pairs figure skating. Apparently, the main judge for the high bar told the US team a couple of days ago that part of the routines of two gymnasts would be judged at a different point level than in the past - such as at the last world championships. Not sure if any other competitors were hurt by this (NBC's not said anything), but it seems odd.

* Picking up on Cooch's question as to this Olympics' breakout event, Bob Costas put forth badminton.

* I was sick of Michael Phelps before the Games even started. You can imagine where I am with him now.

* Sport that seems less dubious now: synchronized diving. Didn't see much of it from Sydney (not like I sought it out), but after seeing it the last couple of days I've got a much higher opinion. The coverage has been pretty good here, one of the few times the commentators and the technology come together to clearly illustrate what happened. Tune into this when volleyball isn't on.

While there's a good 20 hours of coverage left today (OK, maybe not, but it feels like it with 5 networks in play), here's my somewhat stupid Olympic story of the day:

Volleyball is cool.

Watching a couple of indoor matches today (Germany's surprise win over Cuba and the US loss to China), I remembered how much I like the sport. I've never taken to the beach variety for some reason, and it's hard to see the indoor one outside of Olympics or NCAA tournaments (which always seem to air on weekday afternoons on ESPN).

My one real solid memory of the first Goodwill Games (outside of motoball, soccer played on some sort of moped/dirtbike/motorcycle) was the volleyball tournaments, as I got to watch the bulk of them when not pumping gas (a job I had for about a year, was more fun than you'd think, mostly because the owners trusted me enough to let me work alone).

Along the lines of Olympic objectification, I do wonder why the US women's volleyball team doesn't get more of the Jennie Finch treatment, what with the being in shape and the long legs and all. None of them have quite the Barbie quality that Finch does, I suppose. It also helps that (a) Finch is dating some major leaguer whose name I can't remember, and (b) softball is likely to win gold, while volleyball likely won't medal at all.

That being said, watch more volleyball.

Today's Olympic story is the opening ceremonies. A Reuters article I'm reading now notes the "worldwide television audience" that saw the ceremonies, which is funny given that NBC's not airing it until tonight. It's like I'm reading news from the future.

I am interested to see who the final torch bearer is, but I'm not going to peek. I was going along with the idea of Kostas Kenteris, who won the 200 meter race in Sydney, but his current imbroglio (missed a drug test) may bump him. The next logical choice was Katerina Thanou, who took silver in the 100 meters in Sydney, but she's got the same problem as Kenteris.

Both runners have some history with being tough to track down for drug tests, and they were involved in a motorcycle accident hours after they were supposed to be tested (they'd asked for an extension for the test, claiming that they needed to get personal effects). It's a strange run of events, to be sure.

Add on to this that two players on the Greek baseball team (American citizens who qualified to play for Greece) were dropped from the squad for drug test violations. Not the best start for the hosts.

Assuming Kenteris and Thanou are out as final torch bearer, I wonder if Spiridon Louis has a great-great-great grandchild who could do the honors.

Given the lack of other stuff to write about (life being more or less in stasis currently), I'm going to take the next couple weeks or so to give you my Olympic story of the day. We'll actually start with yesterday, given that Olympic soccer has already started.

Yesterday saw the US women start their tournament with a 3-0 win over host Greece. More of a story for me was the 8-0 pounding that Germany put on China. China is right up there with both Germany and the US, making this blowout pretty surprising.

Japan's win over Sweden was pretty surprising, too, but it looks like that may be the order of the day in Olympic soccer this time around.

Today, the obvious story is the Iraq's 4-2 win over Portugal in the first day of men's soccer. Iraq outplayed Portugal, though the latter team was also snakebit by a shot each off a goalpost and the crossbar. Iraq's been playing well in regional Asian tournaments, and obviously did well enough to qualify here, so as much a surprise as the result is, it's not like the Iraqis got here on sympathy.

The upset opening game loss is becoming a habit for the Portuguese (dropped the 2002 World Cup opener to the US, the Euro '04 opener to Greece, and now this).

Furthering the wackiness: Mali and Ghana tied Mexico and Italy, respectively, in their opening games. Then again, African success in Olympic men's soccer is becoming something of a tradition. Nigeria took gold in Atlanta, while Cameroon (who Mali beat to get to Athens) won it in Sydney.

Back from a weekend in the Detroit area, where I got to play some trash (after a strong undefeated start I took the collar three times to finish fourth) and see the Red Sox play the Tigers, marking the first Sox win I've seen outside of Fenway (it being only the second time I've seen them play outside of Fenway, though).

If yesterday's game had happened last year - where the pitching staff gives up a half-dozen dingers and yet the team still wins - we'd have seen it as another sign from Providence (not the one in Rhode Island) that the Sox were destined. This year, though, it's another reminder of the team's inconsistency.

Not much else to report, other than that the Airport station on the T's Blue Line is light years better than the old one, and that the T is run by idiots. When you can't access automated commuter rail schedule information because it's after office hours, you are run by idiots.

For anyone looking for some fantasy action on the Olympics, ESPN.com is running their challenge game. You pick five countries and get points based on the medals they win (3 points for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze) times a multiplier based on the country's athletic prowess (for example, the US would have to win 25 gold medals to make up a single bronze by, say, Nauru).

If you're interested, I've set up a group:

Name: Baklava and Badminton
Password: opa

I am looking forward to NBC's wall to wall coverage, inasmuch as there will be ways to see things live and that don't necessarily involve Americans. I am looking less forward to their usual cornucopia of tape-delayed prime time coverage.

And we're back. As you may have noticed, the entire Gerbil family was incommunicado for a few days. Turns out that the servers that host us got caught up in some sort of power outage in south Florida and didn't get back on-line until today.

Not that I've had a great deal going on. The weekend was marked by a couple trips to the mall for odds and ends and taking in The Village, which was pretty good (though I kind of anticipated the ending, which I usually don't do with movies like this). On the preview front, saw one for The Aviator, with Leo DeCaprio playing a young Howard Hughes (sadly, Leo will not be playing the collecting-urine-in-jars Hughes). Also one for The Incredibles, a Pixar offering about a family of superheroes. Been to the movies enough that the rest of the previews were ones I'd seen before... I think. In the back of my head there was one other new one, but I've forgotten what it may have been.

Sunday night I had a continuation of a "you can't go home again" moment. When I was growing up, we (my mom and some subset of the kids) would go shopping in north Beverly quite a bit. Needless to say, it's quite different now. The supermarket moved over to where the regional discount chain store used to be, a Staples is moving in where the supermarket used to be, and the Papa Gino's, which I can't even count how many times I ate at or got pizza from, is closed. God help us if it becomes a Starbucks.