Tuesday, August 26, 2008

I Believe in Innocence Until Proven Guilty, But....

Wow, I have never seen anyone looking more guilty than these three, with the possible exception of this guy.

Full story here.

Denver Update and the Olympic Effect

You can read my Denver Update on PlanetEye here. It is part of a pattern that I have observed at highly anticipated major events such as the Olympics and the Superbowl.

Step One: City is awarded a major event, nightmare scenarios are predicted for lodging and transportation.

Step Two: Every business in town prepares for record breaking crowds, and quadruples their prices in an attempt to gouge visitors.

Step Three: The residents and regular visitors anticipate this and change their habits, avoiding the city at all costs.

Step Four: The event begins, crowds are light, and business suffers. Life goes on as normal with far fewer disruptions than a typical workday.

Step Five: Residents re-adjust to reality, and repopulate the city, just as the event ends.

This happened in Atlanta in 1996, Bejing last week, and Denver this week. It is predictable, but never predicted.

Monday, August 25, 2008

This Just In...

A Blue Hen was just spotted in Downtown Denver!

Some of my observations on the crowd.

I felt compelled to write some Denver Etiquette tips after my experiences last night.

Monday Denver Update

I went out on the town last night with a friend of mine. Thankfully there was noticeably less visible police presence in "occupied Denver" this time. Perhaps they were busy with actual protesters. There were plenty of cops, but they weren't traveling in such big groups, and they didn't seem as heavily armed and equipped.

We went to the Wyncoop bar, a local place owned by Denver's Mayor, and had a pitcher of "Obaminator" beer. From there we went around town, finally ending up at a bar with the Young Democrats of America. It was pretty cool, and I met another delegate or two.

Tonight I am either going to a Planned Parenthood party, or possibly to a Bill Maher event, if I can snag some tickets.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Denver!

After living in Denver for the last 10 years, I have never been so thrilled to be here as I am this week!

I am also thrilled to be covering this experience all week long at my Denver Local Expert page at Planeteye.


Last night we went out to Downtown to eat dinner and and see what we see. The city is teaming with delegates, and cops. You could almost call it "occupied Denver", as there were many police officers walking about in large groups with riot gear and heavy weapons.

One of the highlights of our evening was meeting Liz Villarreal, an Obama delegate from Alaska. She has a great blog here. Essentially, she and her husband live in Homer, a mere 7 hour drive or $350 flight from Anchorage. She is one of only 8 pledged delegates from the last frontier. Eating dinner next to us by herself with a t-shirt and a backpack, we would never have guessed that she was an actual delegate. Apparently, she had to hold a fundraiser just to raise the money to attend. We were very impressed.

After dinner, we went to Denver's City Park to see the newly restored Prismatic Electric Fountain that was build for the 1908 Democratic Convention in Denver. Some background here.

If you go, the lights turn on at 8:30 PM.

Taking good pictures at night was tough, but this guy seemed to take better ones.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Gotta love this headline

"McCain not sure how many houses he and wife own"

I'm voting for McCain, we can't have that elitist Obama in the White House.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Chinese Government Sentences Two Women 77, and 79 to Labor Camp for Applying for a Olympic "Protest Permit"

Just as I predicted, a moral cesspool, brought to you by the IOC and sponsored by Coca-Cola, Kodak, GE, McDonalds, VISA, etc.

Blogger Discovers Proof Chinese Gymnasts are Underage

Here is a fantastic blog post about the underage Chinese gymnasts that illustrates many truths:

1. According to official Chinese government documents, the gymnast He Kexin was below the minimum age allowed by the rules.

2. Mainstream media is either too lazy or unskilled to perform investigative journalism anymore.

3. The IOC is amazingly hypocritical. They unquestionably trust the World Anti Doping Agency's scientifically useless drug tests, but can't seem to take any action against a clear violation of their own age limits.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Enthusiasm Gap


There is a lot of excitement here in Denver as people are scrambling to see Obama speak at the 80,000 seat stadium.

This article tells of quite a bit less enthusiasm for the Republican convention, although this picture is worth at thousand words.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Monday, August 11, 2008

All Four Events, Ten Hours Later!

NBC has been committed to covering all four events in this years Shmolympic Games: Gymnastics, Track and Field, the Dream Team, and Phelps. Results of anything else can be found in small "stock quote" type on the back page of your local paper's sports section.

Unfortunately, NBC been tape delaying sporting events, a particularly boneheaded move, especially when they have twisted the IOC's arm to begin events in the morning so that they appear "live" in the US.

Of course this should be no surprise to people who realized that NBC edited and partially faked the opening ceremony coverage to delay the entry of the US team until the end of the broadcast in order to boost ratings.