Coming out of a BIG closet

I don't have a lot to say about Jason Collins, the NBA center with the Wizards, for publicly coming out of the closet, except that I admire his courage, and I hope this gets us to the point where people will only think about someone's abilities on the field/court, not about their sexuality.

Plumbing more depths

Now that we've talked about a frightfully shallow movie and a fantasy novel investigating the depths of the planet, let's talk about some different depths.

As I mentioned earlier, I changed FiOS plans recently, and one of the added channels is ESPN 3D. I was curious to see how that would look, but it generally doesn't have a lot of current material.

But I was thrilled to hear that the NBA Finals would be showing there, as that's certainly current material. As I think I alluded earlier, I'm not a bit NBA fan. These days, I don't watch complete games, and rarely even watch more than a couple of minutes of games. This season, I watched some of the season-opening Heat/Celtics game, and I think that was it for the regular season. I watched pieces of a few playoff games (oddly, the Heat dominated the chunks of the games I watched with them, even if they didn't really dominate that series, or even that game, outside of the piece I saw).

But, to see it in 3D? Now, that I was curious about. I still haven't watched a full game, but I saw pretty good pieces of the second and third games.

What do I think about the channel? It's kind of interesting, in a way, but because they don't have a whole lot of audience (it's more a proof-of-concept thing, I think, than something looking to generate immediate revenue) there isn't a whole lot of advertising. So the announcers need to be better, because they have more time to fill. But since they aren't the big-audience announcers, they aren't better. But since I mostly ignore them, I guess it isn't too bad.

But what I find interesting is that you can see a lot more of the arena during timeouts and such than normally. It's games that haven't been ruined by commercials (well, mostly). At least, it seems that way.

Another piece that's interesting is that there are only a few commercials. Somewhat ironically, one of them is for Sony 3D TVs where they're selling 3D. Hello, you're sending this commercial to people who already have a 3D TV, so you don't need to sell them on the concept.

Getting to the game itself, it's a bit weird. The perspective seems off, in a way, but I haven't really been able to quantify how. The players seem smaller, somehow, and the scale just seems ... off, I guess. But the depth of the whole thing is still pretty cool. I think it'll do very well if they can figure out the perspective issue (they should especially look at cameras close to the crowd; things really look wonky if someone in the crowd sticks their arm up into the frame).

I'm definitely curious to see how things look when there's a bit more material. And is there any chance of an NHL 3D channel? I'd like to see it.

weird night in playoffs

Ended up flipping back and forth between the hockey and basketball games the other night. Had expected to only do so for a while, but ended up watching until LeBron's last-second shot won it for the Cavs.

It was a weird night, though. When I turned the TV on, I think the Cavs were ahead 24-18. It took me a couple of minutes to find the hockey game (I forgot where Versus was on the HD tuner); when I did so, Chicago had just scored to extend their lead to 3-0. Seeing that that one was pretty well in hand, I flipped back to the basketball game quicker than expected.

Pretty soon, Cleveland was up 43-20 and Chicago was still leading 3-0. Seeing that both games were blow-outs, I almost stopped watching entirely. I'm glad I didn't, though, as Detroit stormed back to tie the game around the end of the second period (one of the goals was pretty amazing, too, as it appeared that the puck was deflected twice by the same player, once on the shaft and once on the blade of his stick).

Meanwhile, Orlando had been chipping away at the Cavs lead for a while, having chipped it all the way down to twelve by halftime, although Cleveland remained ahead by quite a bit.

Starting the third period, Chicago surprised me by inserting Huet in goal. This turned out to be a good choice, as he yielded no goals. But it got me to thinking; Huet spent the end of last season with the Caps, and did a great job for them. I knew he had signed elsewhere in the offseason, but hadn't realized that he'd done so to be the backup. So Chicago was willing to pay him more to be a backup than the Caps were to be their primary, apparently. I hope that the reason for that was because the Caps were expecting Varlamov (or Neuwirth) to be ready too soon to pay that much, although the amount Theodore is getting paid certainly calls that into question.

Anyway, getting back to the games, the third period of the hockey game was tense, with no scoring at all. And through the third and fourth quarters, the Magic kept chipping away, finally tying the game with a minute or two left. The game was back and forth the rest of the way, though still with Cleveland in the lead until the last minute. I believe the Magic got their second lead from Turkoglu with a second left, setting up LeBron's shot.

Meanwhile, in overtime, Detroit had continued to pressure, but Chicago was the one to score the winning goal after a shot on a rush had rebounded directly to a Blackhawk on the opposite side of the net. Sharp buried it in the mostly-empty net immediately, and Chicago was rejoicing.

Cleveland saw similar reason for celebration after LeBron buried the three-pointer to send their series to Orlando with a tie, although Orlando certainly had no reason to hang their heads after forcing the game to that situation.

All in all, and interesting night. :)