Photo: China's expanding reach (1)
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Blake Hounshell (21)
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FP Passport - blogging on global news, politics, economics, and ideas (75)
4 hours, 20 minutes
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When people talk about China's threat to the West, I don't think this is what they mean: THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images Misty May-Treanor (L-back to camera) of the US hugs China's Tian Jia (L-facing) as Kerri Walsh (2nd R) of the US hugs China's Tian Jia Wang Jie (R-facing) at the end of their women's final beach volleyball match at Beijing's Chaoyang Park Beach Volleyball Ground on August 21 during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The ...
Michael Phelps Returns To His Tank At Sea World | The Onion - America's Finest News Source (8)
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The Onion (239)
5 hours, 9 minutes
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ORLANDO—Fourteen-time Olympic gold medalist and SeaWorld main attraction Michael Phelps returned to his seven-million-gallon water tank Wednesday to resume his normal schedule of performing in six shows a day for marine park crowds every...
Has He Kexin’s age been changed to older or younger? (1)
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nimrod (2)
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Fool's Mountain: Blogging for China (16)
16 hours, 34 minutes
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Even though Buxi isn’t back, why don’t we return to a fine tradition of this blog? This post from Niubo (牛博), a Chinese forum often filled with discontent with how things are, has something interesting to add about the age of Olympic gymnast He Kexin. Translation below: On the question of the Chinese gymnast He Kexin’s age, one fact is certain, that is, there is an inconsistency between the local athletic bureau and the central ...
All White Men Look Alike In Chinese Stereotype Reversal [Jingolympics] (1)
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Hamilton Nolan (41)
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Gawker (241)
22 hours, 2 minutes
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When will the far East stop its racist stereotyping of the white man? Athletes from across the world define the Chinese by the slanty-ness of their eyes. But China is just as bad. They harbor the ludicrous notion that whites look alike! Listen carefully, China: BBC pundit Steve Parry is a tall, white, goofy former swimmer. But Michael Phelps is a tall, white, goofy current swimmer. Being mistaken for someone else is just one more ...
Elderly Chinese Women Sentenced to "Re-Education" (1)
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Hannah Tennant-Moore (2)
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Strollerderby (9)
23 hours, 42 minutes
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Chinese authorities have sentenced two elderly women to a year of “re-education” through labor because they repeatedly sought permits to protest in one of the official Olympic protest sites—areas that Chinese authorities designated as the only places where protests were allowed during the Olympic games, but which have yet to see a single protest.The women, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying, are 77 and 79. They went to the police five times seeking permits to protest ...
On the ages of the female Chinese gymnasts (2)
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James Fallows (21)
1 day, 6 hours
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I haven't watched any gymnastics, live or on TV; don't follow the sport; and have no opinion on how old members of various teams look and how much that matters.But this new post, from the Stryde Hax blog, does an impressive technical job of finding information that has not yet been removed from caches of official Chinese sites. At face value it makes a strong circumstantial case that one of the gymnasts, the double gold-medalist ...
A real U.S. American (1)
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beerschoolblog (2)
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Beer School Blog (2)
1 day, 7 hours
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While filming the Beerlympics we happened to see an olympian…or was it Michael Phelps mom? Not sure. Either way it was quite patriotic! Enjoy! P.S. Turn up the volume a bit…Brian’s whispering. If you’re using Internet Explorer then you might wanna click here to see the video. WordPress doesn’t seem like YouTube videos when you use IE.
Bob Costas is Sorry for Getting Michael Phelps to Believe Bruce Cares About His Olympic Gold (1)
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Jossip (14)
1 day, 10 hours
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Bad information often gets a reporter into trouble. WMDs and Judy Miller, anyone? But for Bob Costas, a bad tip didn't get him into trouble — it got colleague Brian Williams into an embarrassing lie. You see, Costas had heard that Bruce Springsteen had, during a live concert, congratulated World's Best Athlete Michael Phelps (who Amanda Beard totally didn't make out with) for snagging his seventh gold medal and then dedicated "Born in the USA" ...
Hating Michael Phelps [Celebrity Science] (1)
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Ryan Tate (33)
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Gawker (241)
1 day, 13 hours
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That was fast! Michael Phelps was a rocking gold-medal winner, then a record-breaking champion athletic God, then the $100 million endorsement kingpin, then a celebrity sex symbol. The whole process took maybe a week. Now? He has the "general aura of doucheyness," writes Alex Blagg at Best Week Ever, citing Phelps' propensity for side-cocked baseball hats and low-slung jeans, plus that Sports Illustrated cover. Bloggers aren't the only ones slamming Phelps in public. Here's the ...
Olympic match-up II: Foreign press vs. BOCOG spokesman Wang Wei (3)
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Will (14)
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Imagethief (10)
1 day, 15 hours
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This New York Times article is a few days old, but I didn't have time to get to it when it first came out. Apparently some of the press conferences got a little scratchy as journalists got frustrated with BOCOG's oblique responses to any question not focusing on China's immense medal haul, and the IOCs equally vapid responses. In this case, the catalyst was Beijing's three pointless "protest zones" (pointless because no protests have been ...
Building a Social Athlete (1)
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David Churbuck (8)
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Churbuck.com (8)
1 day, 16 hours
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I’m going to the athlete village in a few hours to hang out (1600 to 1800, Wednesday) and be the resident geek for any athletes who want some advice on how to launch a blog and use Web 2.0 tools to tell their stories, share their experiences and build their careers – athletic or professional or both. Figuring it would be good to actually think about the topic before arriving in our International iLounge, I ...
Commie-style Olympic ceremony - You heard it here first (1)
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Andy Jackson (2)
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The Marmot's Hole (2)
1 day, 20 hours
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Remember this? The Beijing Mass Games Olympic Opening Ceremony cost up to $300. It was a nice, bombastic show of nationalism. Lefty film critic Roger Ebert could thinking of only one event in recent history that compares: The closest sight I have seen to Friday night’s spectacle, and I mean this objectively, not with disrespect, is the sight of all those Germans marching wave upon wave before Adolf Hitler in the documentary “Triumph of the ...
Sexism Can Come In All Sorts Of Pretty Packages [The Other Golden Girls] (3)
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megan (10)
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Jezebel (90)
1 day, 23 hours
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When you do most of your Olympic-watching in bars with silenced televisions, you tend to obsessively notice details. One thing I have been obsessed with is the insanely perfect posture of the silent women of the medal ceremonies. And of course, there's a reason for that — the 337 "hostesses" were picked for their looks and trained for that posture. And when I say "picked for their looks," I don't mean they were chosen because ...
Olympic Torrents More Popular Than Ever (2)
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Ernesto (401)
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TorrentFreak (619)
1 day, 23 hours
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This week, close to two million people have downloaded the Olympics opening ceremony, which makes it the most pirated TV-show of the week - again. The International Olympic Committee is not too happy about it, and they are urging the Swedish government to take on The Pirate Bay. Last week we reported that the Opening Ceremony had been downloaded by more than a million people, and this figure has doubled over the past 7 days. ...
Why The Weightlifting Fetish? [Media] (1)
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Hamilton Nolan (41)
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Gawker (241)
2 days
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Weightlifting is a relatively obscure sport. But all the intellectual media types love Olympic weightlifting! Slate! The Times! And more of the Times! Today we applaud German Matthias Steiner, who became the World's Strongest Man with a clean and jerk of 569 pounds and a snatch of 447 pounds. By comparison, I once permanently injured my shoulder snatching a 50 pound dumbbell. Which is to say, the media is scared of being beaten up.
But Who Do The Terrorists Think Are Winning The Olympics? [Jingolympics] (3)
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Moe (21)
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Gawker (241)
2 days, 1 hour
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So who is, like, winning all the medals this Olympics? Besides Michael Phelps I mean. It's a tricky question! If you're watching at home in U.S. America, you're probably inclined to think "America!" because not only does your capacity for snack food consumption mean NBC is raking in the most ad revenue in broadcasting the games, US media outlets conveniently ranks the countries in terms of "medals won," whereby the U.S. wins (by a hair!) ...
An Olympic Moment for Mobile Media? (1)
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Paul Lamb (2)
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MediaShift Idea Lab (37)
2 days, 3 hours
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There has been a lot of hype in mobile media circles about how the Summer Olympics are signaling a watershed moments in broadcasting and media access on the fly. According to Nielson, 23 per cent US and 17 per cent of UK mobile internet users will be tracking the games through their phone browser, and 45 % of US mobile video users will watch the Olympics on their handsets. Are those significant statistics and if ...
Chinese Communists Detain New York Graffiti Artist! (?) [Artists In Peril] (1)
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Moe (21)
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Gawker (241)
2 days, 3 hours
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A hipster artist has just become the first American detained by Chinese authorities for something he did at the Beijing Olympics. (Is this seriously the first? We would be very happy to be wrong about everything about this.) Tennessee native James Powderly (no relation to Dash Snow) ("heh") was last seen leaving New York—where his graffiti-influenced experimental art collective had a Moma show earlier this year—in this Flickr photo. (More recognizable photo of him after ...
