Time to drop the pretenses and cheer for the judges?

Ex-Canadian competing for Australia should have won gold: official

An Australian sport official accused judges of awarding inflated scores to Canadian Alex Bilodeau Sunday, allowing him to edge out Dale Begg-Smith for gold in men’s moguls.

….

Coach Steve Desovich refused to criticize the judges, but said he thought Begg-Smith deserved gold.

via calgaryherald.com

This is the problem I have with “own the podium” rhetoric and, ultimately, with the way the Olympics is structured as a competition. At that level, there are *lots* of people who *deserve* gold. When the difference between two performances is an insignificant .17 points, they should be equally celebrated.

Otherwise, it’s not a matter of who performed better. It’s only a matter of who scored better. Sorry if this is cynical, but the Olympics are more about the scoring than the performances.

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Which Star Trek TNG episodes are the important ones?

I’m introducing my kids to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I want them to understand the series and see the major storylines, but I don’t really want them to need to watch all seven seasons to do so.

I spent a summer in England once when the X-Files was hot, and some friends there were watching it on video. The interesting thing was that they didn’t release ever episode. They only released the episodes that advanced the major storylines — Mulder’s sister, the cigarette smoking man, Cancer man, and all that. Mostly they were the double episodes, but sometimes they were singles too.

I’d like to know a list of particular TNG episodes that advance the major stories — Yar and the Romulans, the Borg, Q… and I can’t even remember what else there would be.

Any suggestions for a list that some fans have already assembled? If you have any ideas of particular episodes, add them to this list. If you have pointers for where to find a list, please let me know in the comments!

1963 train on today’s Rideau Canal by Tim Wayne

via flickr.com