Whether I bother watching a little or a lot of the Olympics has still not been decided, but what I know for sure is that this is about the handiest thing I could have found. Here Is Your Handy Olympic Master Schedule
A list of when everything is going to take place, with the added benefit of stream links when available in case your only choice is NBC’s coverage and you want to see more than profiles of Michael Phelps over and over again.
There’s a tiny bit of math involved, but it’s easy enough even for me. In other words, you should all be fine. the times are listed in GMT, so all you have to do is subtract or add depending on what timezone you’re in. I’m Eastern, so I knock five hours off of everything this tells me.
I’d like to now take a moment to rant about something semi-Olympic-related. It’s a wider trend, but I just saw it again in an Olympic context yesterday, so here goes.
Dear Media:
Blind and legally blind are not the same thing. In fact, they can be the furthest thing from similar at times.
I can see nothing. I have fallen asleep with lamps on right over my head, woken up and still not noticed. I am blind.
Carin can see next to nothing. She has enough vision to at times be handy and at others dangerous. She’ll go from following lines to keep herself on target while walking to mistaking a giant woman wearing a green dress for a recycling bin. she is blind.
I don’t know how blind “legally blind archer Im Dong-hyun” is, but if he can see colours and lines from far enough away to shoot arrows at them without help aiming or glasses at the Olympic level, I’ll bet he’s sporting some decent usable vision.
I know that “Blind Guy Does Something We Were Pretty Sure He Wasn’t Qualified For” makes for good copy, but it’s misleading and annoying if you know shit about shit.
I went to a school for the blind. while there, I met a lot of blind people, wonder of wonders. they all had varying degrees of vision. Some of them were like me. Some of them needed gigantic print that you could probably see from outer space just to maybe be able to read. And some of them, who were classified legally blind, could read regular signs. In the dark. From across the street. Without their glasses on. I have a friend who, when I last spoke to him, was unable to get Ontario Disability Support because the government thought he could see too well. In spite of this, he was still able to attend the same school that I did and was considered to be blind in a legal sense. He probably should have sued, come to think of it.
Now knowing this, imagine how relentlessly irritating it is for somebody like me to see the headline “Blind Man Accomplishes Amazing Thing”, only to click it and see that the guy is legally blind and that compared to most of the people I know, he’s made in the friggin shade. This goes double when the thing he’s doing isn’t actually amazing. “Man Climbs Enormous Mountain” is amazing whether the guy is legally blind or not, but I still hate it when you say he’s blind, because it puts an entirely different spin on things. But “Blind Man Walks From House To Store, Lives Normal Life” isn’t amazing when I do it, and it’s especially ridiculous when he’s my aforementioned friend.
In summation, fuck off with that shit, please and thank you.
Sincerely,
Actual Blind People of the World