Category: Personal (Page 42 of 48)

In the most dramatic public relations turnaround one could image from a teenager, I thought Miss Teen South Carolina showed a lot of poise in her national comeback at the MTV Video Music Awards.  The clip of her making fun of herself is found here at Buzznet.

I don’t see how anyone can say anythng mean about her ever again.  After all, she got invited to the VMA’s, and we did not, so good for her making something positive out of a complete disaster. 

I must admit I was riding an emotional high last week when I posted the video from the 8 year old, in which a classic video game was turned into stop motion animation using legos. I was temporarily fooled into thinking the U.S. Education system was on track.

Then……….this video surfaces from the Miss Teen USA pageant. The pride of South Carolina, right here. It hurts too much too look away……

Ok, you still don’t think you’re getting laid off when you’re 45? Well here’s what 8 year olds can do with their computer and a set of legos. What can you do?

Ok, I promise this is not going to turn into a soccer blog.

But, let’s look at football, baseball and basketball.  We have all seen games in which an official makes an EGREGIOUS mistake.  The players know it, the fans know it, the announcers know it.  The next day the papers write about it.  The bloggers can’t stop wriitng about it.  Talk shows go on about it for days.

Yet the league will say nothing.  And when the owner complains about it, he gets fined. 

From a brand perspective, this is disastrous.  By defending the official who made the error, the league is saying one of three things to the fans:

1) We told him to make a bad call.

2) We don’t care when they make bad calls.

3) Heck, we’re lucky the official didn’t make more bad calls. 

Now I present you the English Premier League. A mere 30 hours ago, Liverpool played at home vs Chelsea.  This is the equivalent of Colts vs Patriots, except imagine every Patriots fan has slept with the wife of every Colts fan, and the Patriots are owned by Osama Bin Laden.

Now, the ref makes a horrible horrible call to basically award Chelsea a game-tying goal, and as American soccer fans know, one goal in soccer is like 21 points in football. So imagine an NFL ref making 3 consecutive calls that award 21 points to the Patriots – and because of it, the game ends in a tie.

Fans here would be in outrage. And the NFL would sit in absolute silence, defending the integrity of the officiating crew. (If you don’t believe me, maybe you want to go back to Seahawks vs Steelers in the 2006 Super Bowl….)

But not here in the EPL.  And to bring a sudden conclusion to this ramble, I will simply say that the league has BANISHED the ref for a week and the ref *gasp* admitted he made a mistake – and then apologized!  This my friends is what makes the EPL great.  The ref screwed up.  He admitted it.  He got punished.  He said he was sorry.  Move on to Week 4.  I’m imagining Mark Cuban printing out copies of this article and bringing it to every subsequent meeting in which he gets fined.

You want to know how to build a brand – you be honest about it. End of story. 

More on this at ESPN SoccerNet.

So, I finally sat down and watched the 1st half of a MLS game.  It was probably because of David Beckham, and a New York vs LA game in front of 66,000 people is good in any sport.  And if you were the MLS, you had to be pleased with 3 goals in about 12 minutes, with 2 of them assisted by Beckham.

The game was fun, it was ok soccer, and I recognized some names.  The fans were enthusiastic and the stadium was packed.  But there was still something missing for me.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Then the next morning I went down to the George and Dragon for breakfast and to watch Manchester City v Manchester United. That’s when I realized what was missing from the MLS game.  For all the excitement and story lines, at the end of the day, it’s just harder to watch any league in which the best players in the world aren’t taking part.  That’s not a knock on the MLS – it’s a credit to the EPL.  And as much as I am rooting for soccer in the U.S, I’m still unsure how to promote what is essentially a minor league.

But then I think about all these reality TV shows, where second rate singers, chefs, designers, MBA students and outdoorsmen compete for big money and a short-cut to the big time.  These are people who by definition are not successes yet – minor leaguers in their professions if you will.  And Americans eat it up.  The chase for the dream is what drives the viewership.  Americans are actually watching other people cook, yet we can’t get them to watch soccer.

So what I’m getting at, is in the case of a minor league sport, maybe we need to promote the dream aspect.   It would be great if they could figure out some way that one MLS guy gets a European contract every year, based on some sort of elimination.  Just a thought.

If you ask me, the game that launched video games into the stratosphere was Tecmo Bowl. Other sports games were pretty good, but this was the precursor to Madden. This was the one that turned playing video games into an obsession for some people.

So, if you ever played, you will find this clip hilarious. Remember how Bo Jackson was the absolute MAN in this game?

I don’t throw any personal stuff on here, but I think it’s newsworthy in my circle that Liz Boyer completed her PhD in Sports Psychology from teh University of North Texas.  It’s been quite a long road filled with sacrficies – the kind of uphill battle most entrepreneurs and start-ups face every day as well.  These stresses were shared and assisted by her husban Rich who has been great through the whole process.

Anyway, let me be the first person in the blogosphere to congratulate DOCTOR Elizabeth Boyer.   Nice work. 

(also posted at http://myelectionchoices.wordpress.com/) 

Hi all – we just got done with two segments on "The Air Americans" on Air America Radio.

We had the chance to speak with host David Bender, and saw traffic to the site spike during the period we were on.  Unfortunately, the particular show we were on was not broadcast in Seattle – and we didn’t realize that until gametime.  Also, to further confuse matters, we were moved from 7:00pm to 6:30pm to 6:00pm.  So, if you received one of our emails and were hoping to hear the live broadcast on the radio at 7:00pm, apologies.  But, we do have it recorded and will be posting it as podcasts as soon as we get the legal clearance.

So, we’d like to thank David Bender and the whole team over there for the opportunity.  Hopefully we’ll get a few more shots on the radio.