Express yourself!

Drop us a line! Head on over to The Rockwood Mailbag at any time to leave us a message! It's easy!

Consider it an experiment in web interactivity. Or, consider it a way to artificially inflate our hit count. Either way, just write in!

 
August 8, 2008,

The Graphics on the 'lympic watch page are amazing. I love it. How do you come up with this stuff. It is great.

--Anthony

 
Well, Anthony, we were just sitting on the couch watching TV one day in July when Big Trouble In Little China came on, and from that moment it was obvious what we needed to do. Everything else just evolved from there. We're glad you like it, though. We put a lot of work into it and we think it turned out great.

 
August 9, 2008,

Spike's "Rockwood Olympic Watch"... uh... Watch score for the Opening Ceremonies: 9 out of 10 (would have been a 10/10 - but sometimes it is "your" instead of "you're" ;)

Great job! Looking forward to the next two weeks.

So how about the Cox Olympic channels? (808 and up) I know the 'Watch doesn't cover those but I'm getting to watch some other interesting sports that don't make it to network TV much (i.e. dressage, women's handball and soccer)

--Spike

 
We only missed one your/you're, Spike, so hopefully we won't get slammed too much by the Chinese judge.

We have watched some other non-primetime Olympic events, we just haven't written about them. We barely have time to write about the ones we ARE doing. We are, however, very disappointed that none of NBC's channels will be broadcasting taekwondo this year. You'll only be able to get that one online. Apparently, 1,400 combined hours of coverage aren't enough to fit it all in.

 
August 10, 2008,

Team Rockwood,

I had a couple questions regarding your Olympic Watch.

1) What was your first Olympics?
2) Do you have help after so many years?
3) If not, does Mrs. Rockwood need you to get out more?
4) Does Skip continue to pay you even when you are watching TV?

Anyway, it's entertaining to read, even though I would say that technically speaking the website is 100% Fluff. I say this because I read it at work and well...the average office worker spends more time surfing the internet than working.

Later,

--Leif

P.S. I found some time in the last week to review some of the archives. There's still too many to read. I've been gone WAY too long.

 
1. That depends on your definition of "first," Leif. The first one we remember was Montreal in 1976. The first one we went to was Atlanta in 1996. And the first winter games we went to was Salt Lake in 2002. Look for us in Vancouver in two years!

2. High-ranking Team Rockwood member Sandy has made some choice comments this year. We're sure she'll make some more.

3. Get out? But then we'd miss the Olympics!

4. Of course. Skip is busy watching the 2,200 hours of online Olympic coverage, so he doesn't know what we're doing.

 
August 12, 2008,

I will be interested to see your fluff to sports ratios, whenever you get them posted beyond the first day.

My gut feel from watching so far is that they got the mix of sports to fluff just about perfect this year, for once. It seems like there has been very little fluff, and what fluff they have had has been interesting to me.

Either there really *is* less fluff this year, or else it is just more interesting to me because we really know so little about Chinese culture. Or both.

Normally I can't stand the amount of fluff they have. I still remember the year in the '80s when Bryant Gumbel was hosting the Olympics, and there was almost no sports at all. That was terrible.

This is our first year watching the Olympics with our TiVo. So if the fluff gets too excessive we can always fast-forward. So far, it hasn't really been necessary. Nice to be able to fast-forward sports I don't really care to see though. (Diving - booooring.)

--Bobby

The nice thing about having done this for several Olympics is that we can compare. For instance, on this year's first Friday, there was 33 minutes of fluff. In 2004, it was only 29 minutes. In 2000, it was 32 minutes. Some days are better than others, and we haven't done the math yet, but our impression is that this year is better. However, there's still an entire week to go, and that's plenty of time for NBC to screw it up. Let's hope they don't.

 
August 14, 2008,

What do you think of that Michael Phelps? We think he's so darn cute. Can we put a link to your website on my facebook page so other can enjoy?

--K.Peterson

 
Cute? We don't think we'd use that phrase to describe Phelps, K, but to each his (or her) own. We've never really been good judges of male beauty, anyway. However, we're sure some people will find him a lot more attractive now that he has eight new shiny gold medals hanging around his neck. He deserves it.

 
August 17, 2008,

I think I'd give credit any time an athlete sings even a bit of the national anthem. See, I personally have been known to tear up slightly at the playing of the anthem when I'm just at a baseball game. If I actually won an Olympic medal, I would probably not be able to get through the whole song without completely losing any semblance of composure. So what you'd probably see is me mouthing as many of the words as I could manage, but probably not all, and not actually singing 'cause I'd be too choked up.

Now, if they don't even try, that's different.

--Sunflower

 
All we ask for is "try," Sunflower. We're certainly no virtuosos ourselves, so we're not going to grade anyone on actual singing talent, but we do know the words, and we proudly crack our voices through the national anthem before every sporting event we go to. All we're asking for is a little show of emotion when someone has just realized their lifelong dream. We don't think that's too much to ask.

 
August 18, 2008,

So... have you been banned in China yet? If so, how can you tell?

--James

 
Not yet, James, but we figure it's just a matter of time. We must be too small for Beijing to consider us a threat. But you can keep checking here throughout the games to find out when we've finally got the commies worried. Surely it won't be that long, now.