Douglas.

Is there anything more beautiful than feeling the cool air of fall start to kick back up? Then again, is there anything more depressing than coming to realize in the very same moment that summer has nearly passed? Sure, we’ve spent these waning days of late July and early August complaining about the heat, but who ever wants to contemplate seasonal change? What did we really do with our summer, after all?

Well, for starters, we were introduced to a few new people making a name for themselves in London. The Games of the XXX Olympiad, as they are officially known, brought us, among others, Gabby Douglas, that high-flying 16-year-old who managed to defy gravity and, perhaps more impressively, take our minds off the swimmers for a moment. She won’t be going anywhere soon—as long as we’re eating our Corn Flakes. But it does appear that Bob Costas needed a time-out. Why else would NBC leave him locked all alone in a room, while
everyone else on the NBC team was out on the town?

There was plenty happening stateside as well. It seems that when certain people say “I’ll be back,” they mean it—like the Terminator himself, who has reinvented his career once more. The former governor is now Professor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of the University of Southern California. There he’ll sit on the board of advisors at the Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. He’ll also be the Governor Downey Professor of State and Global Policy at his shiny new think tank. Things are looking on the up for the body-builder-turned-actor-turned-politico-turned-tabloid-fodder. He might have been able to resurrect his career, but let’s face it, Total Recall is past saving after Colin Farrell’s clunker of a remake left us in desperate search for our own memory-alteration apparatus.

Speaking of Hollywoodland, there was a whole lotta hubbub when Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart—long rumored to be a couple—were officially deemed an item through news of their very publicized breakup, after Ms. Stewart was caught lip-locking with her married Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders. Though the “trampire”—as she was dubbed by Will Ferrell—seems to be on her way out of the public’s fair graces, we still have Natalie Portman, whose “official” wedding to Benjamin Millepied, with whom she is raising a son, Aleph, was perfect. The ceremony was Jewish and vegan, which takes care of all those pesky kosher issues.

On the smaller screen, Mariah Carey will be joining American Idol to replace Steven Tyler—and there is a slight possibility that Nick Jonas may join the panel as well. Sharon Osbourne is leaving America’s Got Talent, while her son, Jack Osbourne, was dropped from the Dick Wolf reality show contest about being in the military, Stars Earn Stripes. And finally, we were reminded that a Housewife by any other name is still a Housewife, after the big season shake-up left us with a bunch of new women and a bunch of the same drama. Ramona Singer versus Heather Thompson? Déjà vu, anyone?

But what did we learn this summer? That we haven’t learned anything at all.

Olympic flame (screengrab)

Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle crafted an epic opening ceremony for the 2012 Summer Olympics. It was filled with uniquely British pageantry, drama, great music and classically quirky humor. At least American audiences afflicted with NBC's tape-delayed coverage of the Friday night spectacular think Mr. Boyle accomplished this. We can't be sure, because the consensus online seems to be that NBC's tape-delayed coverage of the Opening Ceremony was terrible. Screen Rant was pointed:

Appropriately complaining about not being able to watch the Olympic Ceremony live with the rest of the world, many complaints quickly turned to the abundance of commentary that was provided by Today Show hosts Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer – and later NBC Sports commentator Bob Costas, taking over for Vieira. Stepping over many of the beautifully crafted moments of the Opening Ceremony, it was almost impossible for anyone to have appreciated Boyle’s carefully planned program the same way they could have if it was aired live, uninterrupted, and without such substantial commentary.

Criticism of Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Bob Costas on social media outlets like Twitter was blunt. British journalist and broadcaster Charlie Brooker noted one peculiar wince-worthy quirk in the coverage:

Tell you what though, Britain. You'd love the NBC commentary.Ceaseless, grim list of just how troubled each individual nation is.

— Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) July 28, 2012

Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski was straightforward:

This NBC color commentary is exceptionally bad.

— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) July 28, 2012

Mr. Kaczynski later linked a video clip (now removed from Youtube) that demonstrated how amusingly bad the commentary was. Referring to a scene with  current James Bond Daniel Craig that culminated in Queen Elizabeth appearing to parachute into the venue from a helicopter, Meredith Vieira seemed unaware of the etymology of the term "money shot," saying, "... [The] money shot tonight, the one that I think went viral, was the one with the Queen."

NBC's decision to not offer a live stream of the ceremony was, in hindsight, made for the worst possible reason. The broadcaster's explanation, as reported by the Los Angeles Times:

"We are live streaming every sporting event, all 32 sports and 302 medals," an NBC spokesman wrote in an email to Show Tracker. "It was never our intent to live stream the Opening Ceremony or Closing Ceremony. They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large prime-time audiences that gather together to watch them.

The "context" provided wasn't confined only to using terms more common to porno flicks to describe a scene involving the Queen. Meredith Vieira confessed at one point (with no apparent embarrassment) that she'd never heard of the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. HuffPo's Ethan Klapper recorded the moment for posterity. (Update: by Saturday afternoon Vimeo had removed the video clip of Ms. Vieira's commentary, which was originally embedded below.)

Other enjoyable moments of "context" as witnessed by the Observer:

- Bob Costas, noting that Luxembourg is actually the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, innocently asked, "why don't they march in the 'g-spot'?" Mr. Costas was referring to the nation's proper alphabetical position as its Olympians entered the stadium.

- Mr. Costas's "context" for Australia: the country was "originally founded as a penal colony..."

In a serious vein, Deadspin reports NBC also censored a tribute to the victims of the 7/7 terrorist attacks and aired a Ryan Seacrest interview with Michael Phelps in its place.

Emma G. Keller, writing for the Guardian, said the Peacock turned three and a half hours of action "into four and a half hours of tedium." Noting that #nbcfail had begun trending on Twitter, Ms. Keller wrote that the hashtag was "an award rightly earned."

The whole letter is up at Dealbreaker; a piece of Mr. Einhorn's summary of the European situation is here:

And:

Or maybe we're projecting our own anticipation of Bob Costas lyrical examination of the cutbacks in Valencia. (Sad stuff, Bob. Men's handball, up next.)

It was the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 9, three and a half days before the kickoff of the Winter Olympics, and on NBC’s Today the “Countdown to Vancouver” was in full swing. From the slopes of Cypress Mountain, Ms. Morales, in a red parka, gestured at a ski run behind her. Vancouver, she explained, was experiencing what was, by Canadian standards, a freakish heat wave. With time ticking down, officials were now dropping in snow via helicopters. (Plenty o’ banter about how we shoulda held the Olympics in New York, where at least a foot of the stuff is expected this week!)

“Natalie, how’s it look?” asked Matt Lauer, who was sitting in downtown Vancouver, awaiting an interview with the city’s mayor. Ms. Morales seemed confident that the city’s mental toughness would ultimately triumph over the adversity posed by the balmy weather. “This has been a superhuman effort,” she said.

In the weeks to come, NBC channels will air more than 800 televised hours of bobsledding, alpine skiing, speed skating, curling, luge and hockey. Amid the constellation of crowd favorites and comeback kids, one aging veteran of the games, bloodied yet still hungry for glory, will make a high-profile quest for redemption. That’s NBC. In the wake of its gruesome late-night face-plant, the network will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming weeks doggedly proving that the histrionics of Team Coco are nothing compared to the heroics of Team U.S.A.

Olympic television has always thrived on nostalgia for past favorites, big (the Miracle on Ice) and small (Eddie the Eagle!). But this year, while watching NBC’s exhaustive coverage (the original “cyclonic perpetual emotion machine,” to quote Jon Stewart), American audiences are likely to experience a new form of longing. Nostalgia for the increasingly rare sight of an American media superpower bending the world to fit our stage. How will crowdsourcing replace all this?

In the four years since the last Winter Games in Turin, Italy, American life has drifted deeper into a new age of gnostic media consumption, in which every individual is capable of creative enlightenment and, as such, personally responsible for participating (whether through talk radio, Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter) in shaping the myths that sustain us. For the next two weeks, NBC will cast aside the ambiguities of participatory mythmaking and return us temporarily to the earlier era of narrative orthodoxy, in which a team of some 2,000 professionally ordained storytellers will join together in concert under the strict rule of NBC’s Olympics pope, Dick Ebersol.  

There are few things left in modern media life like the televised pageantry of the Olympics to convey that once pervasive feeling of what Daniel Boorstin called “the American illusion of omnipotence.” Walter Cronkite may be gone, but the Olympics can still reliably give us Bob Costas as the Voice of God. The full revelation of NBC’s coverage (double the number of televised hours from four years ago) will be passed down as always from on high, in the form of 1,001 human parables about the value of sacrifice, the cost of distraction and the fragility of earthly success. All that’s missing is the dramatic end to each story, which, of course, you will get to watch unfold live in HD.

Today’s assembly of NBC broadcasters can trace their lineage directly back to the original apostle of Olympic television, the late Roone Arledge. It was Mr. Arledge in 1964, producing his first Olympics for ABC, who figured out an algorithm for transforming dozens of sports Americans cared nothing about into an exalted form of scripted drama. Mr. Arledge’s epiphany was to narrow the vast field of competitors down to a few select characters, pile on the biography, crank up the stakes, drop in some bugles and let the snow fly. “More personalizing of competitors,” Mr. Arledge later wrote. “More sense of place … I hummed from my exalted summit.”

For the past half-century, Mr. Arledge and his disciples, including Mr. Ebersol (who in 1968 worked as Mr. Arledge’s research assistant during the Mexico City Games) have kept the Olympics humming . Along the way, they have endlessly refined the nuances of the presentation; this year’s technical advances include an increased deployment of radar guns and something called StroMotion cameras. But the basic formula has remained largely unchanged.

How much longer can it last? Vancouver will mark NBC’s sixth Olympics in a row. This year, thanks to the $820 million rights fee, the network could reportedly lose more than $200 million. In 2012, the network is scheduled to broadcast the Summer Games from London, for which it will shell out more than a billion dollars. Before the advent of broadcast television, Americans by and large ignored the Olympics. Now for the first time in decades, there’s a nagging question of what might happen to the Olympics after broadcast as we know it disappears.

Ron Simon, the curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media, told The Observer recently that pulling off the old Arledge formula has become increasingly hard, in part due to the proliferation of reality television—a genre that, like the Olympics, takes a cast of unknowns, builds up elaborate backstories and then sets the young go-getters against each other in obscure competitions. “We’ve seen every kind of triumph,” said Mr. Simon. “Everything seems clichéd. How do you make the story fresh? It was through the Arledge vision that the Games gathered this prominence in our psyche. This is the culmination of it. In many ways, it’s a grand hurrah for network television itself.”
Back in Vancouver, Matt Lauer launched into the network’s umpteenth profile of the winsome American skier Lindsey Vonn: the “golden girl” of these Olympic Games, who despite an unimaginable setback in 2006 was now once again “poised to be America’s breakout star.” It was one twilight round for the old mythmaking machine, still humming from the exalted summit.

fgillette@observer.com

A couple of ace numbers crunchers, David Ezra, author of Asterisk: Home Runs, Steroids and the Rush to Judgment, and J.C. Bradbury, author of The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, have thrown some chin music at the ongoing charges that  Clemens got any kind of statistical boost from performance-enhancing drugs.

In the mainstream media, Clemens's guilt has long been a foregone conclusion, the case against him as airtight as the one against Barry Bonds.  But there are a few dissenters, or at least some who want more conclusive proof.

Last summer, Bob Costas outlined an argument for skepticism on Real Time with Bill Maher.  

"To much of the media, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens make a perfect pair of bookends: one black, one white. One the greatest hitter in the modern game, the other the greatest pitcher."

But, as Costas cautioned, "Their careers are not the same.  Bonds's numbers took off into the stratosphere after his association with BALCO. All Clemens did was maintain a career that was already on track for the Hall of Fame."

Shortly after the Maher show, I asked Costas to elaborate his point.

"I'm not saying that Clemens is guilty or not guilty of using some form of PEDs," he told me. "What I'm saying is that there's nothing in his career numbers that would indicate any kind of artificial enhancement. I think a lot of people who assume that his later career performance was artificially enhanced haven't done their homework." 

Bradbury and Ezra, who have done their homework, agree. "The late career spike in Clemens' performance," says Bradbury, "just doesn't fit McNamee's accusations. First, the alleged use of human growth hormones took place, according to McNamee, at times when Clemens was pitching very well. Why would he have bothered?  Second, Clemens' late success, though remarkable, is far from unprecedented.  Nolan Ryan, Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson and numerous others can be cited as examples of pitchers who excelled well past their physical prime. There's nothing exceptional about Clemens' last few seasons." 

According to Ezra, "Clemens was a better pitcher than Nolan Ryan, but his career swings are similar. Ryan had some relative down years at ages 29, 31, 33, and even 38, but he was durable and pitched very well from age 41-44. Clemens had down years at 33, 36, and 39.  But, like Ryan, he was very good at ages 41-43. I haven't heard anyone throw charges of chemical enhancement at Nolan Ryan." 

The numbers support both Ezra and Bradbury. McNamee claims that Clemens' use of HGH began in 1998, a season in which he won the American League Cy Young award with a 20-6 record, a 2.65 ERA, and led the league with 271 strikeouts.  The problem is that Clemens was even better the year before, when McNamee doesn't claim to have supplied him with HGH.  In 1997, Clemens was 21-7 with a 2.05 ERA; he actually had more strikeouts, 292 to 271, and pitched 30 more innings, 264 to 234.7, in 1997 than in 1998.

Costas points out that discussions of Clemens' Hall of Fame worthiness should at least begin by acknowledging that he was a legitimate candidate before McNamee became his personal trainer. "I'm really amazed," he says, "that anyone would question that Clemens was Hall of Fame worthy before 1998. He won more than 20 games four times and 18 games in three other seasons. Nearly all his best years were from 1984 through 1997." 

By any objective yardstick, Costas is right. In his first 14 seasons, Clemens led the American League in wins three times; in his last 10 seasons, after his association with McNamee, he led just once, 1998.   From 1986-1999, he led the league in ERA five times; from 1998-2005 twice. Before McNamee, Clemens was first in strikeouts four times and second four times; after McNamee, he led the AL in whiffs just once, 1998, and finished second only once, in 2002.  (Nolan Ryan led the National League in strikeouts four times in his final five seasons.) 

Measured by a favorite tool of sabermatricians, Adjusted ERA (which allows for park factors and league averages), Clemens had six of his best eight seasons before 1998; measured by another, WHIP (walks and hits per nine innings), he had all his best seasons before 1998.

Both Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds were 35 when their alleged PED use began.  Clemens continued to be a great pitcher for most of the rest of his career, but his post-35 performance isn't in the same universe as Bonds'.  The best all-around hitting stat yet developed is Adjusted OPS, which combines on-base percentage and slugging average then adjusts them for ball parks and league averages.  By Adjusted OPS, all four of Bonds's best seasons came from 2001 through 2004, from ages 36 through 39.  If a chemical substance affected Bonds's performance over that span—and Ezra makes a detailed argument in Asterisk that many factors other than PEDs could have impacted Bonds's performance—there's no statistical evidence that Clemens got a similar boost.

Bradbury takes the argument one step further. 

"The best evidence for a power pitchers' potency is strikeouts.  Clemens's strikeout rate relative to the league declined as he aged. If he was getting some artificial help, wouldn't we have expected him to have improved in this area?  The one thing that jumps out at you when you look at the numbers for Clemens' last several seasons is not striking out batters but preventing walks. That's the part of his game least likely to have been affected by PEDs. I think this lends support to the idea that Clemens was able to maintain effectiveness as he got older because he simply got smarter and tougher."

Benjamin Disraeli famously said that there are three kinds of lies - "lies, damned lies, and statistics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

If the feds or Brian McNamee's lawyers finally bring Roger Clemens down, it won't be because of his statistics. 

"Except that in this case," Mr. Costas concluded, "he didn’t."

Then Mr. Costas sent a very personal plea to Mr. Springsteen, which we're passing along in the hope that he's a Media Mob reader:

The Zeckendorf-developed, Stern-designed condo appears to have done just that: Sportscaster Bob Costas and wife Jill Sutton have sold their 61st-floor Time Warner condo (and a storage unit) for $8.5 million to an unknown buyer, city records show. They paid $4.95 million for the 1,819-square-foot, two-bedroom model apartment furnished for the developer in 2005, and reportedly later converted it into a three-bedroom.

Presumably, they will be settling into the 3,444-square-foot, three-bedroom, condo at 15 Central Park West that they bought for $10.8 million last November. They may not have to adjust to a new neighborhood, but they will have to contend with a much more circumscribed, eighth-floor view.

It didn't go well, as this video (linked from Deadspin, of course) shows.

Warning: Language not "palatable" for work

He and wife Jill Sutton are the latest celebrity buyers to officially close on one of the 202 condos. Former Citigroup head Sanford Weil purchased a $42 million penthouse at Fifteen back in July, and celebrities such as Denzel Washington, Norman Lear, and NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon are closing on condos there, too.