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.	Daily Results from Friday, September 29 Highlights and Lowlights You wanna know my secret? Human interest stories! They tug at the heart and cloud the mind. --Kent Brockman, "The Simpsons" That wasn't news. That was sappy, manipulative drivel. --Lisa Simpson NBC shows its legs as it goes into the home stretch, attempting to pull out a last minute upset. But is it too late? I went through NBC's ratings from last week and found an interesting trend. I took the three highest rated days and the three lowest rated days (in the spirit of the Olympics, I threw out the day in the middle), and averaged all their "fluff" times. Surprise! Despite Dick Ebersol's claim that people like the "Up Close and Personal" stories, the three top-rated days had an average of ten fewer minutes devoted to fluff than the three low-rated days. And as I said yesterday, the highest-rated day had the lowest fluff content of all. And today, NBC even admitted as much in their actions, if not in their words, with their second sub-30-minute-fluff day in a row. I'll get my biggest beef out of the way right at the top. Where was taekwondo? An American wins a gold medal in a new sport that's practically made for TV and we don't see one second of it on NBC's prime-time coverage. Although I don't condone it, I can understand NBC not showing events like badminton and table tennis, since the U.S. is never competitive in them. But with the thrill that the announcers seem to get in covering the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, you'd think they'd make an effort to get taekwondo in somewhere. Okay, rant over. Another fluff piece on Marion Jones? Was this really necessary? What more do we need to find out about her to cheer her on? It is precisely things like this that spawned The Rockwood 2000 Olympic Watch in the first place. Okay, it was only three minutes, right? Where's the harm in that? Well, as the saying goes, a million here and a million there and pretty soon you're talking about a lot of money. If you add up all of the fluff time from this Olympics you end up with a total of almost nine hours! Or, to put it another way, using the amount of time currently spent each night on events, NBC could fill up another three days of programming. Three days! That's what you've been robbed of so you could instead see an overexposed, shaky-cam shot of a gymnast standing on some rock overlooking the ocean. Dick Ebersol must think we're all chumps. While I shopped for Daewoos during 270 seconds of "GM presents Olympic Moments," Jimmy Roberts ran his mouth off about how the Olympics have had a lot of upsets. Wow. Now this is in-depth journalism. Let's analyze this segment. What has Jimmy just done? By my calculations, he has just spent four-and-a-half minutes telling us about events that took place days ago instead of showing me current events. If I cared about the Olympics to begin with, I would have already seen these stories. If I don't care about the Olympics, then I wouldn't care about these stories anyway. So in essence, this story, even more so than all of the other drivel Jimmy has wasted our time with, was completely worthless. "Completely worthless." Those are just two more words I will now permanently associate with General Motors. They must be so proud. The "Sun America Sports Desk," not wanting to be left behind in the Marion Jones coverage-o-thon, today got Bob Costas to spend six minutes interviewing her. She's pleasant. She's gracious. She politely deflects all questions about her husband's rumored drug charges. But in the end, it's still fluff and not an event. "Citius, Altius, Fortius, by AT&T" brought back Harry Smith again, this time to tell us all about Jackie-Joyner Kersee, who, like many other historical Olympians, is not in these games. I want to point out here that Dick Ebersol and NBC, who have spent over a week telling us how viewers like seeing personal stories about the athletes being featured, devoted exactly zero minutes to telling us anything about the Dream Team during their game with Lithuania. Of course, this is because they'd be strung up from the nearest tree if they dared to interrupt a basketball game. It's too bad they don't have the same respect for all of the other events. This has nothing to do with the games, but I keep seeing NBC's promo for "Third Watch" (which, I believe, is the "most important 'Third Watch' ever"), and it's about a kidnapper who has a victim buried alive in an unknown location, but the police can't find out where because the kidnapper is now in a coma. You know, I saw that when it was "The Cell," and I think NBC's going to have a hard time selling me on seeing it again without Jennifer Lopez. Today, I got to watch a lot of taped Olympic coverage from last night's (or rather, early this morning's) Canadian Broadcasting Company. In case you're wondering, they have fluff, too, but not as much. But what's really amazing is how they just let the event itself tell the story. I watched 30 minutes of team synchronized swimming, easily the Olympics' silliest "sport," just because the CBC showed it to me in its entirety. By the way, I'm pretty sure the only reason the entire event was covered was because Canada won the bronze. Jingoism isn't an American-only trait, it's just that, like everything else, we're better at it. Yes, that was ironic on purpose. Don't write me letters. Not about that at least, but feel free to write about anything else Olympics-related. Also, since the entire purpose behind this site is self-promotion, why not check out Rockwood while you're here? After all, I'll only be able to drop a hint like that for another two days. See you tomorrow! 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