IOC clears China of gymnastics age cheating

*cough*bullshit*cough*

Football season next year is going to be AWESOME!!!

You've heard me bellyache before about the situation football fans face in the San Francisco bay area. The NFL's rules say that whenever the home team is playing, no other in-market TV station may air any out-of-market games. For us, that is tres suck, because we have two teams. The Sunday morning game is usually the 9ers and the afternoon game is the Raiders, or vice-versa. The only time we get to see potentially 3 games is when either team plays on Thursday, Sunday or Monday night or has the week off.

The good news, at least for us here at chez Sayer, is that next February, they turn off the analog TV stations and we go 100% digital. What does that have to do with anything? Well, KCBA-DT is on (RF) channel 13, and we should be able to get that with our VHF-hi beam pointed to Fremont Peak! We get it today, except that it gets co-channel interference from KOVR-TV in Sacramento. Fortunately for us, since KCBA is in the Salinas/Monterey market and is a Fox affiliate, they're going to air the Cowboys game opposite KPIX's coverage of the Raiders. Now, since the Raiders are playing the Chargers this week, I'll probably watch that game, but if it turns into a laugher, I have somewhere else to go... except for the fact that KCBA probably won't come in today over KOVR. But this at least proves the point that if you can pull in KCBA (or if you could pull in the Fox or CBS affiliates from Walnut Grove), you'll once again get your choice of 3 games.

Of course, if I could pull in KION-DT (the CBS affiliate in Salinas/Monterey), then I'd have a choice potentially of 4 games, but unfortunately KION is UHF, and even if I had a UHF antenna pointed the right way, I probably couldn't pull in a signal good enough for a digital tuner to decode. Oh well.

Football sucks around here

I would really, really enjoy watching football on TV if it weren't for the fact that we live in the San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose TV market.

The problem comes about because of the NFL blackout rules. The rules say that if the 49ers or Raiders play a road game or a sold-out home game, no other local station may air a competing game. That means that we never see a game that doesn't involve the Raiders or 49ers except for the Sunday and Monday night games and weeks where either team has a bye week.

And if you haven't been paying attention, this is not the same 49er team that was helmed by Joe Bill Walsh [ed: how'd I get that wrong?!] back in the day. And I'm not sure the Raiders have ever been worth watching. The most memorable Raiders moment I can recall was seeing a fan with a paper bag over his head with the words PSL HOLDER written on it.

It's almost worth signing up for the DirecTV NFL package, but that's $180 a year. I don't like football quite that much.

Maybe if we're lucky folks will realize just how bad the 49ers and Raiders suck and they'll stop selling out their home games. Then we'd at least have a 50:50 chance of a choice.

We can but hope.

Go Cats, 2007 AFL premiers!

Just finishing up watching the AFL Grand Final for 2007 between the Geelong Cats and the Port Adelaide Power. Geelong thoroughly pwn3d. The final score was an incredible 24.19 163 to 6.8 44. I've never even heard of a margin even half that wide, much less in a Grand Final. Wow.

Alas, that means that there's no more footy until next year. Sigh.

Aussie Rules Football on KCSM!

I remember watching AFL (back then it was actually VFL) games on ESPN back when I was in college. I missed them when they went off the air. Well, they are available on the Setanta satellite TV channel, but fortunately for me, they're also showing a match of the week on KCSM! We're picking up their digital over-the-air signal, and I believe it's on the -2 stream, but I'm not sure. Through the magic of TiVo, I don't actually know when it gets aired. I have a season pass, so I don't actually worry about such things.