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Re-Set: 2023

 The Latest Word:
New Year’s Day is the most important day of the year.
Unlike religious holidays, it is universally celebrated and universally enjoyed.
New Year’s Day requires no special decorations (confetti is nice, but not necessary); has no special set of colors (unlike the red and green of Christmas), is non-denominational and completely international. It wraps the globe like a warm wave of positive energy, moving from culture to culture as the grey line of propagation makes its daily revolution around the planet.
For Americans, the New Year—in this case 2023– starts on one side of the world and in a vastly different time zone (Asia), and then works its’ way around to us, arriving—conveniently for network television—at prime time in America.
Midnight is the demarcation line and seldom has midnight had more importance. Within the space of one minute, one year will go and another one will arrive. One door shuts and another one opens; it’s concrete and finite and everyone on earth knows it.
Unlike much in modern life, it is unequivocal; there is no room for debate or no grey area: 2022 Out. 2023, In. Carry on.
The New Year comes in; the old one goes out and you get a re-set.
Whether or not you are the type that likes to stay up until midnight partying and socializing or prefer to bring in the New Year more privately, the time-space effect is going to be the same: you will say goodbye to 2022 (really, not a terrific year) and hello to 2023 in just a matter of hours and you will join billions on the planet in doing so.
The New Year’s celebration (New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day)is best understood as a two day event, not a single day one, although a bit of partying can easily make them run together and seem like one never-ending holiday. I’ve had those moments myself, although not as much lately as in the past.
New Year’s Eve is the big celebratory party day, starting, depending upon your schedule, at about 4PM and continuing past (or well past) midnight. It is time for partying, eating, dancing, loud music, and new found enthusiasm for kissing people you do not know particularly well as well as kissing people you know extremely well.
“You must remember this, a kiss is a just a kiss, the fundamental things apply as time goes by”, was how Dooley Wilson summed it up in “Casablanca” and you’ll do well to take his advice. 

New Year’s Eve is the last day of the old year. Congratulations: You made it. You have the right to get silly and celebrate. (Safety note: just don’t drive if you drink; crash in place and tell everyone you didn’t want to miss anything when you wake up the next day).
New Year’s Day itself –the daylight portion—is of course, the first day of the New Year and is for recovery, family, football and begging for forgiveness if your enthusiasm for kissing people you do not know particularly well got out of hand, as it often does on such a night. If that turns out to be the case—well, best of luck to you. You may find out the hard way that the old saying that it’s “better to ask for forgiveness than to seek permission” does not apply to random groping and hot twerking in a tuxedo. Just hope that no one from the press or a particularly well-circulated internet site was snapping photos in hopes of making one reputation (theirs) while crushing another one (yours).
In addition to post-celebration recovery and football, and a full day of grazing at the New Year’s Day buffet table, New Year’s Day is also famous for New Year’s Resolutions. As a matter of fact, that (and begging for forgiveness) might be the very best option for New Year’s Day.
Although one can make a resolution at any time of the year, New Year’s Day is always the very best time to do so. Making them in June or July seems a bit pointless and lonesome.
You’re expected to re-start and re-set on New Year’s Day. This is the day of forgiveness for habits past(see above). Have at it. You’ll be in good company. Literally millions of resolutions will be made by sundown of New Year’s Day (and no doubt another million broken by dawn of the next day) but it’s a tradition and a form of personal positivism that should be encouraged. New Year’s resolutions speak to your best intentions, so indulge and encourage yourself. If you want to re-set some part of your life, career, health program, or diet,  New Year’s is the very best day to do it. The timing is in your favor.
Take society up on the open book for reconciliation and change it’s given you and understand the dynamics.
New Year’s Eve is the end; New Year’s Day is the beginning.
So do with yourself what you so often have done to your computer. Hit the re-set button. Enjoy shutting down the old days, the old ways, the memories past (both good and bad), flash  your personal RAM and relish the re-start, the new energy, the revised perspective, the bigger dreams. Simultaneously enjoy the freedom of letting go and the exhilaration of unbounded possibilities. Dream a little.
One day is for reflection; the other for projection. One set of stories and days and events are now complete; another set of adventures and trials and days and nights are to come.
More than any other holiday, New Year’s celebrates the possible, the unknown, the future, the passage of time and the new journey.
Once a year, mankind is all on the same page. And while the moment of synchronicity will disappear in just hours, we are all united by the hope (and promise) of a new year, a new start, a new beginning.

New Year’s Day 2023 remains what all New Year’s Days have been through time: one more chance to really, really get it right.
It’s the New Year. Celebrate tonight. Recalibrate tomorrow.
Re-Set.
This post was originally published on New Year’s, 2014 and has been re-published every year since then. It has been modified to reflect re-posting for 2023. Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. The photo has not been altered in any way. All rights belong to Getty Images and/or their designate. Text(c) 2014 Donald Pierce, all rights reserved; post produced by the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Have a Happy New Year, don’t overindulge, and drive safely. See you..next year. 

Featured

The 2022 Winter Olympics Coverage

 

Welcome to coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics.

This site features a wide range of journalism, video, articles, and background on the 2022 games, starting with the basics of schedule, results, and the disciplines of this Olympic gathering. Each section–in particular the sections on different disciplines, is updated on a continuing basis.

Schedule

The Winter Olympic Results

Resources and Background

Alpine Skiing

Curling

Cross Country Skiing

Snowboarding

Short Track Speed Skating

Figure Skating

Ski Jumping

Biathlon

Bob Sleigh

Ice Hockey

Nordic Combined

Luge

Skeleton

Speed Skating

Freestyle Skiiing

 

 

The Fine Print: Images courtesy of and copyright by Getty Images. Images have not been altered in anyway. Text copyright 2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC, all rights reserved. Site produced by Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. All rights reserved. All other rights belong to their respective rights holders. Thanks for visiting and come back soon. 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Bob Sleigh

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Bobsleigh

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sport: Curling

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Curling

Rules of the Game: Curling (video Local 5 News Iowa)

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Video courtesy of YouTube. All rights reserved to respective rights holders.  Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Ice Hockey

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Ice Hockey

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Winter Olympic Sports: Luge

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Luge

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Winter Olympic Sports: Nordic Combined

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Nordic Combined

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Skeleton

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Skeleton

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Short Track Speed Skating

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Short Track Speed Skating

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Snowboarding

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Snowboarding

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Winter Olympic Sports: Speed Skating

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Speed Skating

 Last 5 Olympic Speed Skating Champions

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. Video courtesy of YouTube and International Olympic Committee.We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Alpine Skiing

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Alpine Skiing

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympics: Results, Articles

NIGHTSHIFT SPORTS

Latest Results of all the competition in the 2022 Winter Olympics along with important news, background or other stories.

New stories and background are listed first. Results after.

For the purposes of providing maximum information and transparency, several different results resource sites are listed.

The Chinese Are Making the Snow for the Olympics. Here’s how it’s done.(Washington Post)

Staging the Winter Olympics Without Snow(CNet)

Video: Making the Snow for the Winter Olympics(Youtube/National Geographic)

USA Today Olympic Results Page

ESPN Olympic Results Feed

Twitter Winter Olympics Stream

Team USA Olympic Results

Eurosports Results and Medal Count

 

 

 

The Fine Print: Images courtesy of and copyright by Getty Images. Images have not been altered in anyway. Text copyright 2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC, all rights reserved. Site produced by Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. All rights reserved. All other rights belong to their respective rights holders. Thanks for visiting and come back soon. 

 

 

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The Winter Olympics: Resources and Background

 

The Winter Olympics of 2022 is one of the world’s premier sporting events.

To make it easier to keep up with the results, backstory, schedules, and news from the Games, we’ve put together a list of resources that includes videos, print sources, photographs, articles, and other compilations of data. This data will be updated on a daily basis as we add new material/sources and links.

 

 New York Times Olympic Coverage

The Guardian Winter Olympics Coverage

Official Beijing Winter Olympics News Feed

BBC Olympic Coverage

The South China Morning Post Olympic Feed

Photo Resource: Getty Images

Inside the Beijing Olympics (Video, Washington Post)

Beijing Olympics Downhill Course(Video Yanqing)

The New Yorker Olympics Coverage

Hermann Maier Wengen Downhill (Video Hermann Goldgraber)

2022 Winter Olympics Schedule

Where to Watch the 2022 Winter Olympics:

 

The Fine Print: Image courtesy of and copyright by Getty Images. This image has not been altered in anyway. Text copyright 2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC, all rights reserved. Site produced by Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. All rights reserved. All other rights belong to their respective parties.

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The 2022 Winter Olympics Schedule

 

The Winter Olympics of 2022 feature 109 events in 15 different sports.

That’s quite a lot to keep track of, especially with the time-shift issues that arise from events/broadcasts taking place in China with eventual broadcasting/streaming in the United States.

Stay informed with this direct link to the Official Winter  Olympics Results Page.

 2022 WINTER OLYMPICS SCHEDULE

WHERE TO WATCH THE 2022  WINTER OLYMPICS:

The Fine Print: Image courtesy of and copyright by Getty Images. This image has not been altered in anyway. Text copyright 2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC, all rights reserved. Site produced by Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. All rights reserved. All other rights belong to their respective parties. 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Cross Country Skiing

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Cross Country Skiing

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  A special shout out to the guys at Trak Ski Company, who worked long and hard to popularize Cross Country Skiing the U.S….Bill Danner, Erik Eidsmo, Alan Lizee, Mike Bing, Chris Crosby and the usual suspects. Well done guys. You can come out of hiding now. For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Figure Skating

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Figure Skating

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Winter Olympic Sports: Freestyle Skiing

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Freestyle Skiing

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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COLD SHOULDERS: WHY THE WINTER OLYMPICS ARE COOLER (LITERALLY) THAN THE SUMMER OLYMPICS

Repeat Offender: This article is a reprint, first posted at the end of the 2018 Winter Olympics which were staged in Korea. The times may have changed, but the sentiment hasn’t.

It’s all over but the drug testing.
The 2018 Winter Olympics, brought to you live and in living color from that Alpine powerhouse, South Korea, from their made-just-for-TV Winter Olympic site in Pyeong Chang, are history now and in a decade or so when we look back on them, here’s what we will remember:
American slalom skier Mikaela Schiffrin won two medals, a gold in Giant Slalom and a Silver in the Combined (slalom and downhill). She did not win a gold in her speciality—the Slalom.
Russia stayed true to form and had an athlete caught using prohibited substances, i.e. doping. It was a Curling participant. Who knew curling had such high physical demands. Most curling athletes look like they came to the competition pushing walkers.
The North Koreans and the South Koreans came together at the Winter Olympics to form a single Women’s Hockey Team. That’s an amazing step for two countries that have been at each other’s throats for years.
Shaun White won another gold medal in Snowboarding. White broke down after the victory, but he proved that, again, when the chips are down, he is the best in the world with a flat piece of carbon fiber strapped to his feet and upside down fifty feet up. A rare skill, indeed.
The Norwegians won the most medals and dominated cross country. It was expected. The Norwegians are the New York Yankees of Cross Country Skiing …..or is it the other way around.
The Dutch dominated speed skating. They usually dominate. It’s that Hans Brinker thing.
The biathlon remains one of the most fun and demanding of all Olympic sports, unless you are actually in the competition, in which case it’s a brutal exercise in cardio conditioning and nerve control. Pack a defibrillator if you’re new to the sport.
But—records and achievements aside—here’s what you need to really remember: the Winter Olympics are so much better than the Summer Olympics in every thing from skill level required to win a Gold to the type of equipment used to the facilities built to host the games. They are what Olympic competition should be: awe-freaking-inspiring of the how-do-they-do-that variety.
The Summer Olympics—we love them—are basically your junior high school field day blown up to…..Olympian…..proportions. Put up a media center for the internationals at Jugghead High and you’ve got the setup. Not too complicated. Rather easy to understand. Go fast, high, or long (if you’re a gymnast, do it while flipping).
The Summer Olympic games are built around basic physical abilities—running, jumping, throwing, and sometimes all three in one event. Adding higher skill level sports like golf and tennis and cycling and sailing doesn’t change the fact that great Summer Olympic athletes are born, not made. The newly added sports—golf, tennis, etc..—are in the games to “broaden the appeal”. Why does the appeal need to be broadened? One questions: when was the last time you paid to go to a track & field event. 
Case esta closed, si?
The Summer Olympics are really the world-wide DNA sort for body type and muscle composition.
If you have weight lifter genes in your family, you can work into being an Olympic weightlifter. If that doesn’t pan out, you can move those refrigerators or work as a negative entry advisor at nightclubs (i.e. bouncer).
If you have running genes, you can run—short, middle, long, pick your distance.
If you are a jumper, you can go long (long jump), high (high jump or pole vault), or very short and fast (hurdles).
The Summer Olympics are all about native physical abilities—enhanced with lots of repetitive training.
There is no secret to being a good competitive swimmer: get the right genes and spend a lot of time in the pool. As for skills? Learn how to start like a pro and do a good flip turn. You already know how to breathe, but you will get much better at it if you swim. Otherwise….not that taxing for the skill set. Just put in the time –if you have the genetic prerequisites. It helps to be tall. 
It’s not unusual for a high-school level swimmer to do two workouts a day and swim up to five miles over the two workouts, most in timed intervals. Competitive swimming at any level is about two things: a very high pain threshold and the mental ability to focus for hours doing the same thing you did for hours the day before. I have a friend who once taught the pre-med courses at a major university, and when I asked who the best scholar athletes were in his class, he said, without hesitation, “the swimmers”.
Why? “
“They have a terrific ability to concentrate..”
What about the baseball players? “Nope”.
Basketball? “Not a chance…”
Football? “No way.”
And, even if you have the ability to sustain the mind and body-numbing workouts required in competitive swimming, you’d best have the swimmer gene, i.e. a great pair of lungs and a long body and wingspread (more distance per stroke), or no matter how hard you train, you will be left at the blocks. Ask Ryan Lochte. Trained like an animal. Fast, Strong. But…short for a swimmer. Michael Phelps busted his chops again and again and again. Bad gene pool for Ryan. It happens.
Running as an Olympic sport? You’ve either got it or you don’t. A great track coach—like my old pal Doc Shelala—could coach you up a few tenths of a second on your hundred or two hundred. But…..ultimately….you’ve either got a surplus of fast twitch muscle fiber or you’re running for sixth or seventh place. No amount of interval sprint work will make you fast enough to do anything but catch a better view of Usain Bolt as he goes past you for the gold. Sorry.
Olympic running events, from the marathon to the four hundred (one of the most testing of all the running events, since the really great ones run the 400 like it was a 100) are just high level contests of native abilities.
The training methods are well known to everyone at the world class level of running (pick your event) and when someone posts an usually great time, the first thing on everyone’s mind is “what’s he/she on?”. The East Germans made a science of chemically based performance enhancement—and won a lot of gold medals and every other kind of prize—in international track and field for years because they were the world’s best—the best ever seen—at doping.
East German track and field athletes, especially some of the women, were so loaded up on PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) that they almost glowed when they walked onto the field. Indeed, you know something is wrong, when a team’s female athletes spend more time shaving their face than their legs. But they won. And the whole German unification thing happened and the athlete doping labs went away (into Russia, apparently) and now the Germans have moved back to the pack. Slow happens.
The field events in the Summer Olympics? The same principals apply. Very big guys tossing heavy stuff in, hopefully, the right direction. Discus? Spin and throw it. It helps if you’re 250 plus. Javelin? Same drill but run straight and heave, with lots of fast twitch muscles for the run up to the throw. The Hammer? Give it a twirl and aim it away from the crowd. For training? Lift lots of weights, have a great diet, and toss stuff for hours a day.
And, yes, it’s not easy to do and I have only one friend who ever reached world class levels at discus, and he had minimal athletic skills—be certain that I am separating skills from abilities—in anything other than throwing the discus. But he could bench press a car.
At this point, it’s time to set the record straight, because if this article is read by the wrong type of people, i.e. those who are die-hard Summer Olympic fans, they might get the impression that I’m dissing the Summer Olympics and the athletes in them and get mad.
Don’t.
I’m just addressing the unpleasant little secret of the Summer Olympics by drawing a line to emphasize the difference between native athletic ability tuned up and athletic ability + athletic skills expertly applied to highly demanding physical events.
Other than the shooting sports, sailing, maybe fencing (maybe not, you don’t have to be good for more than a second or two in any of the fencing sports), and the newer Summer Olympic sports like golf and tennis, well, there are not a lot of high skill set sports in the Summer Olympics. It’s just basic athletics, nothing too complicated or fancy, except for gymnastics which is like gym class gone mad. 
The Summer Olympics  are mostly composed of running sports and, truth be told, I can run.
There are swimming sports and yes, I can swim.
There are shooting sports and I can do that too. Can I do it at the level of the folks in the Summer Olympics? Obviously not or you would have seen me on the podium instead of behind the laptop. But I can do all those things and so, most probably can you.
There is very little wow factor behind watching some skinny guy in a beanie run the steeple chase.
There’s even a “Speed walking event”, which looks suspiciously like what I see the young neighborhood moms doing each morning, without that weird little wiggle the Olympic walkers do. But really—walking as an Olympic sport? Might as well add in yard work as an Olympic sport if the athletic level requirement is that low.
But the point is…the Summer Olympics are full of events that I can do and you can too. And, they use only a modest amount of specialized equipment, none of it too technical. Running shoes, goggles, nose clips, tshirts, swim suits…well, those are available at Dick’s. Finding a discus, hammer, or javelin will take a little work, but you can have them shipped in… from China probably.
And, finally, let’s get to the staging of the Summer Olympics, just in case we need a tie-breaker for which Olympics is best (which we don’t). The reality is that we could stage a Summer Olympics at a well-equipped high school. In Mayberry.
You just don’t need a lot of special facilities, except to blow out your countries international entertainment budget.
You need a gym for gymnastics, weightlifting, indoor stuff; a track with a field for track & field events; and a swimming pool for the swimming competition. Tennis courts—to your right. Marathon—we’ll block some streets off. This is not big time facility-dependent stuff and 100 yards is 100 yards, whether its in L.A. or Paris. With the new summer Olympics no-spectators, fans or family rules, you just don’t need super-duper billion dollar facilities. 
Really, it’s all pretty basic. The Summer Olympics are mostly about sports you can do in places you drive by every day.
Now let’s look at the Winter Olympics.
This is stuff you can’t do (mostly), using equipment you can’t afford and don’t know how to put on and its always staged in some place you have to drive to, not by.
The Winter Olympics are the high bar in high skill athletic competition. Having good genes helps (that fast twitch muscle thing again, unless you’re a 50KM cross country skier) but having a world class skill set will not only get you to the medal round, but also, quite possibly, save your life.
The Winter Olympics are full of very dangerous events, the type of stuff you see on an insurance application under the “you don’t do any of these crazy things do you?” section.
Look at it this way: there is no danger in running the 200M dash. A pulled hammie? Yes. You’ll get over it.
A mistake in the Alpine Downhill? You can not only get seriously hurt, you can get even more seriously dead. It happens.
Going down an ice covered hill at 90MPH on a pair of carbon fiber sticks is something that will keep your attention or take away your mobility (or mortality) if you don’t have both the native athletic ability and the highly specialized skill from training to cope with the unknown that’s waiting just one millisecond in front of you. The downhill is deadly. That’s part of the fun—and attraction to us as spectators: we just can’t do that…at least not intentionally.
The 100 M dash track isn’t icy, doesn’t have bumps, and isn’t slanted. There are no grooves cut in the track to pull you off course. Wind is not life threatening.
Not so in the Downhill, or the Giant Slalom, or Slalom.
These sports require quick reflexes, huge reserves of power (to pull control back when the hill or a rut has taken it away), lightning fast recalibration of the right line through a given course, and major cohones to keep pointing downhill when all of your self-preservation instincts are saying to ease up, just so you can see another day. It helps if you have thighs the size of an armchair to bail you out from your inevitable mistakes.
A world class slalom or downhill skier is a very finely tuned athlete who has developed an amazing skill set. Running the downhill or the slalom requires a lot more technical ability than running the 400m. One (the 400) is simple: do a lap of the track as fast as you can. The other requires mastery of high-tech equipment (the skis); the ability to sort out snow and weather conditions on the run; precise turns under international pressure; stamina and balance and tight focus for a what seems like-to the competitor-an eternity.
Downhill skiing vs. the 100M dash? Running straight versus turn for your life? Right. It is, in terms of athletic complexity, no contest.
But it’s not just Alpine skiing that makes the Winter Oympics tougher. Look at the biathlon. Ski up and downhill on skis about as thick as chopsticks, stop and shoot at a teeny-weeny target and don’t miss because if you miss, you have to ski an extra lap. Repeat. Any sport that combines firearms with Scandinavians has a certain level of inherent danger. Especially if they’ve been out the night before.
The skiing portion of the biathlon is difficult enough to master (cross country skiing is a natural sport only if you were born into a Norwegian family), but the shooting component adds another level of complexity. Plus—you only have a given amount of time to squeeze off all 10 required shots. So…ski the 400, then slow your heart rate to the point you can effectively aim and fire…and don’t miss. Then do it again. The biathlon is excruciating mentally and physically. There is no equivalent in the Summer Olympics.
Ice Skating? Not natural. This is another Olympic sport that is awe—and injury—inspiring.
First, you must have the balance of a high wire walker, then total command of spatial awareness (spinning around, on the ice or in the air is no easy thing to pop right out of), enough muscles to launch the triple toe loop, combined with enough muscles to soften the landing so that your knee caps don’t pop out into the first row of spectators when you land. And—don’t dress warmly for the event, either. In the last Olympics, two of the female contestants had various parts of their flimsy skating costumes fall off or fail. Didn’t faze ‘em. They kept right on spinning.
Tough work.
In the Summer Olympics, the high jumpers land in a big bag of foam. In the Winter Olympics, a figure skater lands on a surface as hard as a concrete parking lot when they fall. No contest. Plus, the ice skaters do most of their routine backwards; high jumpers go backwards only when clearing the bar using the “Fosbury Flop” technique.
What about speed skating? Isn’t that just a winter version of sprinting? Not quite. First you have to learn how to skate, then how to carve turns, and then how to do it all at racing speeds. Plus, in short track you need to master the elbow takeout of a fellow competitor. Skating requires more balance,  athletic ability and tactical skill than running, which requires only foot speed. Ever seen a 100M sprinter fall over?  
You can run. And thus you are not amazed when you see someone run fast.
Can you skate? You can’t. I saw you at the mall rink and I had to cover my eyes. You get the point.
Ski Jumping? Oh my. Nothing even close in the Summer Olympics. Nothing. This is both a great media event and a test of man’s ability to deny the potential of obvious doom if he messes up (think ABC’s “Wide World of Sports “ famous opening sequence).
Snowboarding? No equivalent in the Summers…..we hear that skateboarding is going to be present in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics so maybe there will be a half-pipe event but until then? Nada. You try dropping into a Winter Olympic half-pipe and pulling off a few 720s without stuffing yourself, painfully and totally, into the sides of the pipe. Forget about it.
And, that brings us to ice hockey. Maybe—from an athletic point of view—one of the most demanding of all sports and certainly—from a skill set point of view—the most demanding game of them all. Skate like a figure skater; have the eye/hand coordination of a world class tennis player so you can move a froze puck of rubber from one end of the ice to the other without looking at it and then passing or shooting while on the move, all the time avoiding being lit up at mid ice with a hip check or crammed into the boards. There is no equivalent to ice hockey in the Summer Olympics. It is THE high athletic ability/high skill game.
Is there a Summer Olympics equivalent to the bobsled? Four guys pushstart a thousand pound sled that goes down a tight, iced-up track, with one guy driving and the other three praying. If you do a good job as a driver, you might end up on the podium; if you do a bad job, your sled might end up upside down and sliding out of control all the way to the bottom.
But bob sledding is safe compared to the luge. The luge is college-level cafeteria-tray snow-hill sliding on steroids. Lay down—feet first on the luge, head first on the skeleton– on the tray, push off, and hope that you have the reflexes and internal GPS to keep it all upright all the way down. Successful luge competitors are noticeable by their lack of surgical scars and over-developed right arms, strengthened through years of crossing themselves before a run.
These “sliding sports” have no equivalent in the Summer Olympics.
And, finally, let’s play the facility card. You can stage the Summer Olympics—most of the big events—at your neighborhood high school. But you have to have some major facilities for the Winter Olympics. First, you’ll need mountains. Then a couple of ski jumps (very expensive to build and maintain); an ice rink; slalom, GS, and downhill courses; a half-pipe; a shooting range with a cross country course close by for the biathlon; special runs for free skiing contests and another huge and special jump for snowboard aerials; a bodsled/luge/skeleton run. You get the point….these type of facilities are not just laying around at Jugghead High.
And, of course, snow, and plenty of it.
The Winter Olympics are serious sports and they require serious and expensive facilities with lots of maintenance issues. Recently, because the Winter Olympics have been staged in countries not known for their alpine skiing heritage (Russia? Korea?), snow making is required. Or, the snow is “brought in”. Hmmm. Sounds expensive to moi.
Track & field maintenance requirements? Keep the track clean and mow the field. Done. You can do it yourself.
The 2020 Summer Olympics are next on our flat screens and, as always, we will enjoy the sprints and the swimming relays and some of the gymnastics.
We will get to see the world’s best pure athletes—running, jumping, swimming, throwing things—at hopefully their finest, undrugged, best. We will root for the home team and scream when our guys don’t deliver.
It’s a good show.
But it’s just filler, until the very best Olympic competition comes around again: the Winter Olympics, the ultimate combination of athletic ability and sports skills, the Olympics with lots of high tech equipment, featuring people doing amazing things we would never even consider doing unless forced to at gunpoint, staged at athletic sites whose cost to build is so expensive, it can bankrupt a country.
Now, that’s what the Olympics are all about.

Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. DonaldPierce.com has a wide bandwidth that allows for the coverage of everything from politics to sports car racing and is designed as an experiment in digital communications. From time-to-time we cover live events as they happen. For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

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The Winter Olympic Sports: Ski Jumping

A short introduction to the Winter Olympics of 2022

Ski Jumping

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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Olympic Briefing: The Downhill

Nightshift Sports: The Downhill is considered the ultimate event in alpine skiing. The concept is simple: start at the top of the mountain and go down it–often straight downhill but with enough turns to hold your attention–as fast you can.

There is none of the rhythmic direction changes that mark the slalom or the gentler sweeping turns of the Giant Slalom (which, BTW, only look gentle from a distance).

Go down the hill on the course as fast you can, navigating the turns, the bumps, the jumps, and try to stay in form,  aerodynamically correct, and strong all the way to bottom and maybe you won’t wad yourself up in the safety fences, so twisted it takes  experts fifteen to twenty minutes to extract you. In other words, mistakes on the downhill can result in very serious injuries.

The course at the Beijing Winter Olympics is considered very difficult and dangerous for a couple of reasons. First, it is a total unknown. The ski racers  at the Olympics have never seen it before, it’s not on the World Cup circuit and has never been run in serious, world class competition. Second, the snow is all man-made. As you know from previous postings, man made snow is more granular than the natural stuff, and it also has a tendency to be icy, which is not good. Just as wi drying a car, hitting a bad patch of ice at the wrong time can throw a racer off the preferred trajectory and into barriers on the side of the course. The Beijing course is also steep, even steeper than the famed Hahnenkamm downhill in Austria. Take it seriously.  Do not leave the starting gate unless your insurance is paid up and you have done all the dry land training your coach mandated. Paid close attention on the very few practice runs you got on the hill. And your personal racer chaser has tuned your skis to perfection It’s good to have an acute sense of your own mortality while you chase immortality as an Olympic Medalist. 

Otherwise…it’s not going to end up good.

Once you leave the gate, you must be focused and committed and there is no time for doubt or turning back. 

Luckily for us, the small size of modern digital video cameras provides us with viewpoints in sports that were previously never available. Today’s clip will give you a view which will either confirm your decision to stay out of downhill competition or make you get all itchy and sweaty because you’re not in the starting gate. For more background on The Downhill, check out this wiki.  

Either way, click the play button to get a racer’s view of the downhill at Garmitsch, one of the classic downhill courses in skiing. Prepare to be simultaneously amazed and terrified.  Also: Video YouTube/Ski Stars….Thanks for sharing. 

 

 

The Fine Print: Photos courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2022 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, who have requested a new expresso machine for this year’s Olympic coverage duty. And bigger speakers.  Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material, media and other resources available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

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Olympic Film Festival: Lindsey Vonn Downhill at Vancouver

Press Clippings:  The U.S. is missing Lindsey Vonn, one of our very best women skiers, at the Sochi Olympics. Vonn suffered a pair of back to back knee injuries in training that took her out of the 2014 games, but even though she’s not at Sochi, it’s always good to remember just how great and fierce a competitor Lindsey Vonn can be. Here’s her downhill run at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and it’s a thing of aggression and beauty. Enjoy.

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The Year In Lists: 2021

 

 Yes. It was a pretty horrible year. All over the world. In Your Country. In Your City and State. Even in Your neigborhood. The year 2021 got bad in a hurry…we were barely into January when a rowdy group of political disfunctionals stormed the Capital, eventually breaking in, creating havoc, deaths, and a string of indictments for violence, trespassing, insurrection, etc. that are now playing out in courts…..the fact that the outgoing President, who lost the 2020 election by over 7 million votes–a huge margin–has been accused of inciting the riot (he denies it, but he’s been known to bend the truth and has a verified reputation for lying –30,000 plus in his four years in office– and who continues to spew the most egregious fibs about how the election was stolen from him) …it wasn’t stolen; he lost it…only adds to the ongoing polarization in America.

And that was just January. So…taking stock in December 2021 about what happened in the previous 12 and it’s..sobering….However, still, we’re wrapping up the year with our annual The Year in Lists post, where we show  you the good, the bad, the unbelievable and the ridiculous of the past year, as displayed, codified, and captured in lists. 

So get a glass of wine or pour a bourbon and settle in, for The Year in Lists 2021. You can’t make this stuff up. 

 Best Albums of the Year (NY Times)

Best Songs of Year (Esquire)

10 Best Non Fiction Books of 2021(Time)

Years Most ambitious Exhibitions (Hyperallergic)

Best Films Of 2021 (Paste Magazine)

Best TV 0f 2021(Rotten Tomatoes)

Times best of 2021 List (NY Times)

Funniest List of Best Lists (New Yorker)

Top Ten lists 

Most Mentioned Films on Critics List in 2021

Fifteen Worst Fashion Brands of 2021 (Zeitgeist)

Worst Shoes a Guy Can Wear 

110 Funniest Twitter Jokes of 2021 (BuzzFeed)

14 of the most anticipated EVs of 2022     (MASHABLE

15 Bundt Cake Recipes to bake (BON APETIT)

4 year end moves to make with your retirement portfolio (MARKET WATCH)

top 10 album of 2021  (LOS ANGELES TIMES)

10 new tv shows not enough people are watching  (BUZZ FEED)

Best sci-fi movies of2021 ( WIRED)

Movies that spat on the books they were based on ( BUZZ FEED)

8 Christmas hazards for dogs and cats   (YAHOO!STYLE)

10 Sports and Fitness Hobbies to check out in 2022(MENSWEAR STYLE)

2021 In The Cannabis World (FORBES)

5 BEST HEALTH BENEFITS OF WALKING (EAT THIS, NOT THAT)

Goodbye 2021 EP (APPLE)

Dave Barry’s 2021 Year in Review (WASHINGTON POST)

50 ADORABLE NAMES FOR BOYS IN 2022(Yahoo)

Royal Family’s Most Unforgettable Moments in 2021 (YouTube)

Best Looking Models of 2021 (FAKOA)

Dumbest Statements of 2021 (Buzzfeed)

Best TikToks of 2021(The Cut)

CNN’s Top 100 Digital Stories of 2021 (CNN)

 Best Racing Moments of 2021 (Road & Track)

 10 Best Fashion Instagrams of the Year (Vogue)

37 of the Best Summer Dresses for 2021 (The Cut)
7 Best SNL Moments of 2021 (Vogue)

The Worst Deal of 2021(Carolina Journal)

Best Teams of 2021 (YardBarker)

Highest Grossing Movies of 2021(Paste)

Best Cars We Drove in 2021 (CNET)

The Hottest Dress of 2021 (Grazia)

The Year of Overflow Culture (Wired)

Most Popular Songs of 2021 (Billboard)

9 Hidden TV Shows from 2021 You Might Have Missed (New York Post)

100 Best Stocks of 2021 (Investors Business Daily)

Photos of the Year(Time)

The Year in Overflow Culture(Wired)

10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2021 (Wired)

Best Investment Watches to Buy Online (Vogue)

Most Hated Stock List for 2022(CNBC)

World Chess Championship in 5 Charts (Five Thirty-Eight)

 

The the first The Year in Posts was produced in 2014. Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. The photo has not been altered in any way. All rights belong to Getty Images and/or their designate. Text(c) 2022 Donald Pierce, all rights reserved; post produced by the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Have a safe 2022, beware of COVID 19 and travel safely. We will, incidentally, add to the lists from time, so check back.  See you..next year. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Re-Set: 2023

 The Latest Word:
New Year’s Day is the most important day of the year.
Unlike religious holidays, it is universally celebrated and universally enjoyed.
New Year’s Day requires no special decorations (confetti is nice, but not necessary); has no special set of colors (unlike the red and green of Christmas), is non-denominational and completely international. It wraps the globe like a warm wave of positive energy, moving from culture to culture as the grey line of propagation makes its daily revolution around the planet.
For Americans, the New Year—in this case 2023– starts on one side of the world and in a vastly different time zone (Asia), and then works its’ way around to us, arriving—conveniently for network television—at prime time in America.
Midnight is the demarcation line and seldom has midnight had more importance. Within the space of one minute, one year will go and another one will arrive. One door shuts and another one opens; it’s concrete and finite and everyone on earth knows it.
Unlike much in modern life, it is unequivocal; there is no room for debate or no grey area: 2022 Out. 2023, In. Carry on.
The New Year comes in; the old one goes out and you get a re-set.
Whether or not you are the type that likes to stay up until midnight partying and socializing or prefer to bring in the New Year more privately, the time-space effect is going to be the same: you will say goodbye to 2022 (really, not a terrific year) and hello to 2023 in just a matter of hours and you will join billions on the planet in doing so.
The New Year’s celebration (New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day)is best understood as a two day event, not a single day one, although a bit of partying can easily make them run together and seem like one never-ending holiday. I’ve had those moments myself, although not as much lately as in the past.
New Year’s Eve is the big celebratory party day, starting, depending upon your schedule, at about 4PM and continuing past (or well past) midnight. It is time for partying, eating, dancing, loud music, and new found enthusiasm for kissing people you do not know particularly well as well as kissing people you know extremely well.
“You must remember this, a kiss is a just a kiss, the fundamental things apply as time goes by”, was how Dooley Wilson summed it up in “Casablanca” and you’ll do well to take his advice. 

New Year’s Eve is the last day of the old year. Congratulations: You made it. You have the right to get silly and celebrate. (Safety note: just don’t drive if you drink; crash in place and tell everyone you didn’t want to miss anything when you wake up the next day).
New Year’s Day itself –the daylight portion—is of course, the first day of the New Year and is for recovery, family, football and begging for forgiveness if your enthusiasm for kissing people you do not know particularly well got out of hand, as it often does on such a night. If that turns out to be the case—well, best of luck to you. You may find out the hard way that the old saying that it’s “better to ask for forgiveness than to seek permission” does not apply to random groping and hot twerking in a tuxedo. Just hope that no one from the press or a particularly well-circulated internet site was snapping photos in hopes of making one reputation (theirs) while crushing another one (yours).
In addition to post-celebration recovery and football, and a full day of grazing at the New Year’s Day buffet table, New Year’s Day is also famous for New Year’s Resolutions. As a matter of fact, that (and begging for forgiveness) might be the very best option for New Year’s Day.
Although one can make a resolution at any time of the year, New Year’s Day is always the very best time to do so. Making them in June or July seems a bit pointless and lonesome.
You’re expected to re-start and re-set on New Year’s Day. This is the day of forgiveness for habits past(see above). Have at it. You’ll be in good company. Literally millions of resolutions will be made by sundown of New Year’s Day (and no doubt another million broken by dawn of the next day) but it’s a tradition and a form of personal positivism that should be encouraged. New Year’s resolutions speak to your best intentions, so indulge and encourage yourself. If you want to re-set some part of your life, career, health program, or diet,  New Year’s is the very best day to do it. The timing is in your favor.
Take society up on the open book for reconciliation and change it’s given you and understand the dynamics.
New Year’s Eve is the end; New Year’s Day is the beginning.
So do with yourself what you so often have done to your computer. Hit the re-set button. Enjoy shutting down the old days, the old ways, the memories past (both good and bad), flash  your personal RAM and relish the re-start, the new energy, the revised perspective, the bigger dreams. Simultaneously enjoy the freedom of letting go and the exhilaration of unbounded possibilities. Dream a little.
One day is for reflection; the other for projection. One set of stories and days and events are now complete; another set of adventures and trials and days and nights are to come.
More than any other holiday, New Year’s celebrates the possible, the unknown, the future, the passage of time and the new journey.
Once a year, mankind is all on the same page. And while the moment of synchronicity will disappear in just hours, we are all united by the hope (and promise) of a new year, a new start, a new beginning.

New Year’s Day 2023 remains what all New Year’s Days have been through time: one more chance to really, really get it right.
It’s the New Year. Celebrate tonight. Recalibrate tomorrow.
Re-Set.
This post was originally published on New Year’s, 2014 and has been re-published every year since then. It has been modified to reflect re-posting for 2023. Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. The photo has not been altered in any way. All rights belong to Getty Images and/or their designate. Text(c) 2014 Donald Pierce, all rights reserved; post produced by the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Have a Happy New Year, don’t overindulge, and drive safely. See you..next year. 

Featured

Christmas Time for the Jews

Paying Attention (Special Holiday Edition):
Another in our special series of Saturday Night Live Holiday videos. This one is another classic, “Christmas Time for the Jews”,  a stop-motion video that details all the things that Jews can do while the Christians are home celebrating Christmas. It’s a very funny way of looking at the biggest holiday in the modern western world and it carries a subtle message about diversity and appreciation as well. The animation is classic and so is the soundtrack, which is very heavily Phil Spector influenced. A great piece of once-a-year-insight.
 
 
The Fine Print: Embed courtesy of SNL (SNL Vintage) and our friends at YouTube. It has not been altered in any way. We thank them both for sharing. All rights reserved by their respective rights holders. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. 

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The SNL Christmas Classics: Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood

Paying Attention: 
Another Christmas Classic from SNL, this one from Eddie Murphy with the character (along with Gumby) that made him a star. One of the sharpest of all SNL Sketches. Enjoy.

 

The Fine Print: Embed via SNL and YouTube (thanks guys). All rights belong to their respective rights holders (Broadway Video and others). Thanks for sharing. 

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Why Work? It's Christmas.

Paying Attention:
We all know that things wind down at the end of the year(an investment banking friend once said that if “your deal isn’t signed and scheduled for closing before Thanksgiving, you’re going to have start all over in January, because it’s not getting done before the end of the year”) and in the week before Christmas, they crawl to a stop.
Congrats to Bloomberg.com for seeing the obvious: no one’s working so send everyone home or out to shop or to party.
Great little piece and, guess what, it makes a lot of sense (and what a nice surprise for staff).
Happy Holidays.

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Schweddy Balls

Paying Attention (Special Holiday Edition) 
Number two in great SNL Christmas videos is one of the most famous (perhaps THE most famous) SNL holiday sketches,  the NPR parody featuring Alec Baldwin, Anna Gasteyer and Molly Shannon as hosts and guest on a mid-west Christmas time cooking show. First broadcast in 1998, it was classic the instant it aired, and no doubt played a large part in bringing Alec Baldwin into the SNL comedy team on a regular basis. Loaded with double entendres, it’s absolutely hilarious. Whether or not it’s safe for work, depends totally on where you work.

 
The Fine Print: Embed courtesy of SNL (SNL Vintage) and our friends at YouTube. It has not been altered in any way. We thank them both for sharing. All rights reserved by their respective rights holders. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. 

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The SNL Christmas Classics: Sump’n Claus

Kenan Thompson brings it as “Sump’n Claus”, the man who has gifts for those who aren’t on Santa’s “Nice” list . Terrific bit with Cecily Strong and Sacheer Zamata as Santa’s little helpers. The music’s not bad either.
Happy Holidays. Everybody’s getting sump’n.
 
The Fine Print: Embed via SNL and YouTube (thanks guys). All rights belong to their respective rights holders (Broadway Video and others). Thanks for sharing. 

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The Christmas Channel: How Hallmark Owns a Holiday

Paying Attention
Maybe you noticed it on the way to another channel–the Hallmark Channel. Not necessarily a destination on your cable TV or satellite TV lineup, but a fixture, always there and always programming a type of show or made-for-tv movie that is quintessentially American.
At no time during the year is the presence (and perhaps necessity) of the Hallmark Channel more powerful than during the Christmas season, when the channel runs a continuing stream of Christmas-themed shows with similar story lines and outcomes that make for a very safe viewing haven for millions of American TV watchers during the holiday season. It’s an All-American look at the American Christmas Season and no one does it better.
It is, as Ted Turner once famously said, “not as simple as it looks” and the amount of effort and detail that goes into programming the Hallmark Channel is impressive. Bloomberg did a piece on the Hallmark Channel and the rather amazing woman behind it, and it’s certainly deep background worth knowing.  Even more interesting, it’ll all come into sharper focus the next time the TV lands–and stays–on the Hallmark Channel.  Happy Holidays.
 
Editor’s Note: This post is number 812 for this site. 
 

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The (Secret)History of Christmas Music

This holiday season, in addition to new posts, material, and videos, we are revisiting some of the greats of Christmas past. When the Media Bunker staff started sorting the Christmas posts, they discovered tons of holiday themed articles and posts…dat’s alot. So, no need to keep it all tucked away in a digital cloud….might as well bring it out again..it’s a tradition. First up, the rather amazing history of the song “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer”…..it’s a lot wilder than you would suspect. Enjoy. And Merry Christmas (and don’t forget…The famous Christmas One More Time playlists start posting on 1 December 2019.

Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer. Elmo and Patsy.
The Hunt For New Music: It wouldn’t be a Christmas without a Christmas novelty song. The story behind this one is even more wonderful (And weird) than the song. Recorded by the then- husband-and-wife duo of Elmo ( Shropshire) and Patsy (Trigg), it was released in 1979 in the San Francisco area, their home. Over time, the song was played on more and more stations across the country and by 1984, it became a national hit; in 2000 the song was turned into a TV special. Oddly enough, Patsy does not sing or play an instrument on this song, which could just be the reason the couple divorced after the song hit it big. Elmo, however, has ridden it to a very amusing kind of holiday fame as each yule season he does tons of radio and TV interviews (in 2005, he was on 11 TV shows and did 150 radio interviews). Last year, “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” was sold on 200,000 CDs in retail stores and—get this—downloaded over 100,000 times as a ringtone, which gives the term ringing in the season a totally new and perverse twist. Elmo is Dr. Elmo Shropshire, Veterinarian, which might explain why he knows so much about the homicidal behavior of reindeer.0

The Fine Print: Posts produced by The Media Bunker and Perception Engineering, all rights reserved (c) 2019 donald pierce and Southchester Group LLC. Need original or focused content for your site, send an email to admin@donaldpierce.com and someone will get right back to you, despite the fact that’s the Holiday Season.

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The Holiday Movie Playlist: Where to see the Christmas Classics

Paying Attention:
Christmas movies and specials are one of the great traditions of the Holidays,  but finding the film or show you want to see can be a bit of an adventure. To make things a whole lot simpler,  here are some very well curated lists of the best shows and movies on the air this holiday season, which starts–semi-officially–on Thanksgiving Day and runs through January 1st.
Holiday Pages has a terrific list of TV and made-for-TV movies, all displayed in a very tight and well-formatted design.
Another great list of Christmas entertainment can be found at christmastvschedule.com, which features the not-so-obvious shows and specials as well as Christmas Classics and good background on all the Christmas themed movies playing over the holidays on the Hallmark Channel.  Very well done.
And, for breadth of coverage, the folks at It’s A Wonderful Movie(dot blogspot.dot com) have it all covered. Click the 2016 Christmas Movie Schedule to see all of the offerings available.
Thanks to the folks and fans who did the research, compiled the lists, and made them available for everyone else to use–that’s a true expression of the Christmas Spirit.
 
 
 

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Why We Love Christmas Music

The Inside Track 
Why does Christmas and Holiday music always seem so magical?
The easy answer is….it’s traditional. It’s something we look forward to, something we expect, a tradition with which we are all totally familiar. And now, of course, there are more channels for Christmas music than ever before–from CDs, radio, satellite radio, streaming internet sites, TV music channels, even the music beds for commercials (Coke does a great job of breaking new Christmas songs via TV commercial).
If you want to hear some Christmas music, you have a lot of options, starting in early November and running through New Year’s.
Christmas music comes out of the box once a year and when it does, one resonates with the sounds of holiday seasons past, stirring warm memories, and it’s all good. And Christmas itself is tied to your past memories. During the Christmas season, the events of the past year pile up like leaves on a just raked fall lawn, just in time for holiday retrospection and New Year’s resolutions. And, of course, Christmas itself is something of a depository of your entire life history and that of your  family. It’s where great memories from the past are remembered and retold again and new memories for the future are created. And it all needs a sound track.
Music is very good at that—bringing back memories. Five bars into “My Girl” by the Temptations and suddenly you’re back in the fraternity house at a post-game party, squeezing someone tight with one hand and holding a drink in the other.
But the resonance of music with memories may not really be the impetus behind our affection for holiday music.
Perhaps the real reason is that Christmas/holiday music is a known commodity—my goodness, we’ve been listening to the stuff since we were old enough to recognize sounds—and each year we hear a huge group of new interpretations of Christmas music (every hot recording artist puts out a Christmas album, shamelessly promoted by artist and record company alike) which serves to both enlighten us about the potential of individual expression and to make old songs new. “New water over old rocks” a mountaineering friend of mine calls it and I think that sums up the situation pretty well.
The tradition builds on itself every year, as new favorites emerge, new interpretations shake up the Christmas music landscape, time passes and the meaning and affection for the season evolves and changes.  And, Christmas music cuts across a lot of demographic lines: young, old, rich, poor, white, black, urban, suburban, country. It’s a unifying soundtrack for a unifying season and even when you know the song, you may still be surprised at the rendition, interpretation, or production.
The re-casting of traditional songs combined with the influx of new soon-to-be favorites produces a warm and memory-filled soundscape for the season.
So turn it on, play it loud, enjoy the memories and build some new ones.
It’s Christmas music–one of our very best traditions.

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The Christmas Playlist Series: No. XI

The Hunt For New (Christmas) Music:

This is the 11th in a series of Christmas music playlists, featuring old classics along with many new songs that you may not have heard before.
As always, enjoy The Best of the Season, musically.

Just click the link:

https://sptfy.com/72a6

Happy & Merry!

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Christmas One More Time, X

Continuing, in our series of the finest Christmas music, brought you through efforts of the staff at The Media Bunker and the kindness of Spotify.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.  Click the play button the playlist and then you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) or take advantage of one of their specials which provide access to the Premium version which has a few extra features the freebie doesn’t have –wider selection and no commercials. Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and thanks to our friends at Spotify for enabling the embed music link. 

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Christmas One More Time, IX

Another in the tradition of our truly great, very carefully curated Christmas Playlists, brought to you streaming in high def audio via our friends at Spotify.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.  Click the play button the playlist and then you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) or take advantage of one of their specials which provide access to the Premium version which has a few extra features the freebie doesn’t have –wider selection and no commercials. Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and thanks to our friends at Spotify for enabling the embed music link. 

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The Christmas Playlist Series: No. XII

The  Hunt for New (Christmas) Music:

The last in our series of Christmas music playlists for 2016.
There are lots of great songs on these playlists–dig some of it out and give it a listen.
Next up: setting one (or more) of the Playlists on click-to-hear Spotify link.
Happy Holidays

Just click and the Elves at Spotify will take care of the rest…

https://sptfy.com/72ab

Enjoy. And Merry and Happy…..

The Fine Print: Image courtesy of our friends at Getty Images (all rights reserved), who graciously make available their vast archive of photos to non-profit bloggers and websites. Check it out–they have the last century on file. Thanks, guys, as always, for sharing.

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Baby, It’s Sweater Weather Outside (Re-setting Christmas Classics for the Modern Era)

Editor’ Note: Originally published in December of 2018, when the PC police went one song too far and came after “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”….and republished this year because traditions are important and it’s also important to realize the false pretense and logic of trying to apply one generation’s cultural perceptions vs. an earlier generation’s ideals….we side with Mel Brooks on the PC movement: not a good idea and very bad for comedy.

Paying Attention:
Embed from Getty Images
A radio station in Cleveland,Ohio has completely lost both their nerve and the holiday spirit.
WDOK (FM 102.1) has pulled all versions of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from their holiday playlist because of a complaint from a single listener–although the station said, in a namby-pamby press release–that the move was the result of a “decision by our listeners”. The station cited a poll as the basis for the decision but–in a namby-pamby move–didn’t give the results of the poll.
On Facebook, another source said the station’s site noted that “92% of the listeners favored the song” and only “8% were for removing it from the playlist. ” The station’s program director pulled it anyway, showing true namby-pamby spirit.
The usual suspects also chipped in with over-reaction to the song, saying “it’s not something I want to promote” in commenting on the lyrics of a song first published in the 1940s and played during every Christmas season since.  We have seen this problem before, when someone applies standards (not necessarily advanced) of one century to cultural icons and practices of the past.
It’s always a disaster. Different time periods. Different standards.
Wait until they start going after all those early suggestive paintings, like Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or Goya’s “The Nude Maja”. Oh boy…….
Here are the lyrics:

“I really can’t stay (Baby it’s cold outside)
I gotta go away (Baby it’s cold outside)
This evening has been (Been hoping that you’d dropped in)
So very nice (I’ll hold your hands they’re just like ice)
My mother will start to worry (Beautiful what’s your hurry?)
My father will be pacing the floor (Listen to the fireplace roar)
So really I’d better scurry (Beautiful please don’t hurry)
Well maybe just a half a drink more (I’ll put some records on while I pour)
The neighbors might think (Baby it’s bad out there)
Say what’s in this drink? (No cabs to be had out there)
I wish I knew how (Your eyes are like starlight now)
To break this spell (I’ll take your hat, your hair looks swell) (Why thank you)
I ought to say no, no, no sir (Mind if move in closer?)
At least I’m gonna say that I tried (What’s the sense of hurtin’ my pride?)
I really can’t stay (Baby don’t hold out)
Baby it’s cold outside
Ah, you’re very pushy you know?
I like to think of it as opportunistic
I simply must go (Baby it’s cold outside)
The answer is no (But baby it’s cold outside)
The welcome has been (How lucky that you dropped in)
So nice and warm (Look out the window at that storm)
My sister will be suspicious (Gosh your lips look delicious!)
My brother will be there at the door (Waves upon a tropical shore)
My maiden aunt’s mind is vicious (Gosh your lips are delicious!)
Well maybe just a cigarette more (Never such a blizzard before) (And I don’t even smoke)
I’ve got to get home (Baby you’ll freeze out there)
Say lend me a coat? (It’s up to your knees out there!)
You’ve really been grand, (I feel when I touch your hand)
But don’t you see? (How can you do this thing to me?)
There’s bound to be talk tomorrow (Think of my life long sorrow!)
At least there will be plenty implied (If you caught pneumonia and died!)
I really can’t stay (Get over that old out)
Baby it’s cold
Baby it’s cold outside
Okay fine, just another drink then
That took a lot of convincing!” 
–Songwriter, Frank Loesser, Lyrics (C) Kobalt Music Publishing Company

The people who thought “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is not proper ought to take a few minutes to listen to some rap lyrics if they’re looking for verbal targets. Good luck with that crusade……those are guys are going to tell the too-easily-offended to beat it–although in much more colorful language.
There will not be a poll.
The solution to this particular type of my-taste-is-better-than-your taste/ my-perception-sees-sexual connotations-where-there-are none situation is dead simple: if you don’t like the song or it’s lyrics, turn it off or change the channel and don’t listen.
Freedom of speech covers the right to play the song and also the right to not have to listen to it. Just because some see evil in every lyric or photo doesn’t mean that others do.
No one needs a press release or a quote from the self-appointed PC police. Just turn the song off on your radio and keep it to yourself.
As for the rest of us?
Baby it’s cold outside.
We’re turning it up.

The Fine Print: Photo embed courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This image has not been altered in any way. All rights belong to GettyImages.com or their designee. We thank them for sharing. Have a Happy Holiday season. 

 

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The Christmas Channel: How Hallmark Rules the Season

Paying Attention:
Embed from Getty Images

Continuing with our look back at how we’ve covered the Holiday Season, here’s a post that went live in December 2017–before everyone in the world was watching–and has proven to be absolutely dead on in terms of predicting how the Hallmark Channel has become one of the icons of an American Tradition. We were paying attention then and we pay even more attention today. Here’s the background behind America’s favorite Christmas Channel…

The most watched channel during the holiday season is not ESPN, Netflix, MSNBC or Disney. It’s The Hallmark Channel. Why? It’s the programming: Hallmark values, as expressed in the movies shown on the two (soon to be three) Hallmark Channels closely match the values that most Americans associate with the Holidays: love, sincerity, generosity, kindness, goodwill toward men, and finding/understanding the true meaning of Christmas. In an America which has just completed one of the darkest of sociological/cultural/electoral years, the programming of the Hallmark Channels brings us back to a world that’s kinder, nicer, easier to understand and live in, and which represents core American values that we don’t want to lose. A couple of hour’s worth of Hallmark Channel programming is all that’s required to re-center even the most frazzled of holiday shoppers and party goers. The production values are consistently good, the scripts solid if predictable, the acting professional and believable. More good news–not only does Hallmark get it, the company is making it easier to see its programming, by expanding the number of channels and technologies on which you can see its programming. For a closer look at why so many people like the Hallmark Channel, read this piece from the Christian Science Monitor…
Although lots of my friends and contemporaries (including a surprising number of TV producers and editors) have developed the Hallmark Channel habit this holiday season, The Nightshift and Media Bunker team were early in, highlighting the rise of this very American media outlet, with this post published over a year ago. 
If you’re not (yet) a Hallmark Channel fan, there is no better time to dig into the alternate vision of America that the Hallmark presents than right now, because seeing is believing.
Set the Holiday mood, check out the Christmas One More Time XV playlist at Spotify…just type http://sptfy.com/12dC into your browser and you’ve got music to get you through all your projects.

Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c) Donald Pierce, all rights reserved. Enjoy the holidays.

https://donaldpierce.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-22-at-4.56.01-PM-1.png

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The SNL Christmas Classics: Santa’s My Boyfriend

Another in our continuing series of the best Christmas sketches from Saturday Night Live…this one, a legendary opening with three of the show’s top female stars.

Paying Attention:
Amy Poehler, Kristin Wiig, and Maya Rudolph produce another Holiday Winner with “Santa’s My Boyfriend”, a racy musical number that was used to open a Christmas time telecast of Saturday Night Live.  Another classic from an era that produced a lot of the show’s very best work.
The Fine Print: Embed via YouTube (thanks guys), made available by SNL. All rights belong to their respective rights holders (Broadway Video and others). Thanks for sharing.  

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Christmas One More Time, VIII

The theme: More for the Holidaze. Here’s more Christmas music, courtesy of our friends at Spotify.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.  Click the play button the playlist and then you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) or take advantage of one of their specials which provide access to the Premium version which has a few extra features the freebie doesn’t have –wider selection and no commercials. Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and thanks to our friends at Spotify for enabling the embed music link. 

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Christmas One More Time, VII

More of the season’s best holiday and Christmas music. Enjoy, through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.  Click the play button the playlist and then you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) or take advantage of one of their specials which provide access to the Premium version which has a few extra features the freebie doesn’t have –wider selection and no commercials. Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and thanks to our friends at Spotify for enabling the embed music link. 

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Christmas One More Time, V

The Hunt for New Music: 
Another Christmas playlist composed of new songs you probably haven’t heard before combined with some old favorites re-done by new artists…pay particular attention to the first song, which is a pretty great remix of a classic holiday song. All in all, a very good list and yes, there is music you can dance to. Enjoy the music and the season.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.  Click the play button the playlist and then you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) or take advantage of one of their specials which provide access to the Premium version which has a few extra features the freebie doesn’t have –wider selection and no commercials. Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and thanks to our friends at Spotify for enabling the embed music link. 

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The Etiquette of Christmas

Paying Attention: It’s Official: the Christmas Season is on. There are ground rules and just in case you didn’t get the memo, here’s a refresher course. to the guidelines to what should be (but often isn’t), the most polite, kindest, generous, and thoughtful time of the year. If you follow these guidelines, you’ll have a terrific holiday. And  If you don’t? It won’t be much of a holiday for you (or your friends).
 
1. Holiday Cards matter. Sending out Holiday Cards is a very small task but has a very big effect. It’s a way to let people that think you have forgotten about them know that you haven’t forgotten about them. Make a List. Pick some cards. Send them out. It’s a good thing. Plus….the Christmas stamps are always very, very cool.
2. Take care of those who take care of you. You know who we’re talking about: the guys who do your lawn.  The service writer who cuts you a break on getting your Porsche fixed. The bartender who always gets you a  drink, even in the middle of a mob-sized crowd.  The dry cleaning lady who has a security clearance. The garbage team that takes all your trash away, even when you pile up too much of the wrong thing.  The neighbor who watches your place when you travel. Look after them because they look after you, and…it’s the right thing to do.
3. Decorate. Put up lights, hang a wreath, decorate a tree. Find some poinsettias and put them out. Make your house or home or ranch or condo reflect the spirit of the season. If you don’t join in– and the rest of the neighborhood is all in–then you run the risk of being judged a grinch for the holidays and perhaps beyond. Decorating at this time of the year is not necessarily religious-centric, it’s season-centric. Do it. You’ll feel better. And so will everyone around you.
4. Spend a little bit of time learning how to wrap a package. Why not? It’s time, right. So learn to do it right. There’s a video on how to wrap a Christmas gift at the top of  this post (and YouTube has a lot more of them). And yes, of course you can spend some money and have them wrap the gift for you at the store but….wrapping presents is an excellent way to get fully into the season. Plus–it’s a skill you really need to master.
5. Party. You have every possible reason to party at this time of the year(end of the year, the Holidays, office gatherings, friends gatherings, family get-togethers, bonus time, whatever), so get out there and do it. And…consider having a party of your own. Invite a few friends or a lot of friends over, serve some good wine, appetizers, and a lot of good music and host until you drop. It’s THAT time of the year. Do it. Just be careful and don’t overdo it. Party. It’s a part of the season. Go all in.
6. Reach out. You have friends from way back when and way back there. Once they were in your life just about everyday and now…maybe not. But they’re still important to you. Reach out and tell them. Re-connect. Re-establish a friendship that is timeless. There is no better time of the year to do it than the Christmas/Holiday season, so reach out. You’ll be very, very glad you did.
7. Charity. Give to others, causes, special organizations, shelters, The Salvation Army, your school. It’s the right thing to do. Do it because you can and do it because you should. And do it with the right attitude: you are in a position to help others who are not so lucky. Share.  At this time of the year, in particular, it means a lot to give.
8. Help. Someone. Some cause. Some place. It can be as small as opening a door for someone with an armful of packages or as big as donating a needed piece of equipment for a playground. But Help. it’s a form of giving that works 24/7/365 and one that everyone needs to practice. Do it. Helping is essential to humanity.
9. Embrace. Get engaged with a group, a movement, a charity. Take up a cause or a challenge, embrace it, support it, go all in, and see where it leads. To create a  better you  and a better set of things that you believe in. Get after it. Now.
10.Moderation works. The Holidays offer plenty of chances to over-indulge. Don’t. Don’t overspend, over-drink, over-flirt, over-act, over-talk, over-reach.  Don’t. No is a very reliable form of quality control. Don’t exit the holidays with a crisis that you created because you got out of control–that defeats the whole idea of the season.
 

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The Logistics of Christmas Music

Big data is everywhere and it’s involved in more than you think.
Do you believe the selection of Christmas music that you hear on the radio–or even that you buy–is just a random,  traditional playlist composed of old favorites that are mixed and matched?
Not quite.
The number-crunching wizards at fivethirtyeight.com looked a little deeper into the music of the Holidays and what they discovered is simultaneously surprising and not surprising.
First–the Christmas music you hear on the radio? It’s all programmed, and more tightly programmed than ever before. Big data drives the playlist. Theoretically, it’s what you want to hear (by the numbers, not the notes).
It’s well beyond an inspired mix of traditional holiday music and more like an index of the best of the season.
And your personal Christmas playlist? That list is  also not quite as personal as you might think.
The Bottom Line: Every element of our life is subject to increasingly detailed data observation and analysis.
Even the one time of the year–the Holiday season–that is (theoretically) the most traditional and emotion packed.
It’s all about the numbers.

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Christmas One More Time V

The fifth in a series of our carefully curated Christmas Playlists.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of Spotify’s excellent web player. Special note: when you click the link, you will be taken to Spotify’s web player. There, you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; or signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did). Here’s that link Either way, you should check it out if you like holiday music. Image courtesy of our friends at Getty Images, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This image has not been altered in any way. We thank Getty Images for sharing. Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering.

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Christmas One More Time, VI

And the beat goes on….the sixth Christmas One More Time (COMT) playlist for the season, brought to you through the magic of our friends at Spotify.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.  Click the play button the playlist and then you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) or take advantage of one of their specials which provide access to the Premium version which has a few extra features the freebie doesn’t have –wider selection and no commercials. Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and thanks to our friends at Spotify for enabling the embed music link. 

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Christmas One More Time IV

Another day, another playlist. This one (again) available on Spotify. Turn it on and turn it up. Happy Holidays.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify.  Click the play button the playlist and then you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) or take advantage of one of their specials which provide access to the Premium version which has a few extra features the freebie doesn’t have –wider selection and no commercials. Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and thanks to our friends at Spotify for enabling the embed music link. 

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The Best of SNL Christmas

One in a series of reposts of the best Christmas bits from Saturday Night Live.

The Holidaze:
Saturday Night Live has been on television for over four decades now. The show is an American cultural icon, and it’s introduced us to actors and writers who have dominated and influenced film, TV, music, and comedy: Seth Meyers, John Belushi, Will Farrell, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley, Steven Colbert. The show lives in the moment, and so each weekly show contains bits that can be seen as a snapshot of our current social/ideological/ pulse. Among the very best–and most long lasting–of the bits produced for Saturday Night Live are the Christmas show sketches and short films. Continuing our tradition, each year we showcase the best of SNL’s Christmas material in our “Holidaze” series; this year, we start with a sketch produced for the 15 December 2018 show (with Matt Damon as host), featuring Matt Damon and Cecily Strong. It’s an instant classic, and no doubt it will resonate with just about everyone.

The Fine Print: Video embed via YouTube and courtesy of SNL/Broadway Video. All rights belong to SNL/Broadway Video. This video has not been altered in any way. We thank our friends at SNL and Broadway Video for sharing and YouTube for providing the publishing channel. Have a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidaze, from your friends at Perception Engineering and the Media Bunker. 

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Christmas One More Time II

The second in our series of hand-selected and carefully curated Christmas Music Playlists. You can listen to the playlist via our friends at Spotify.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify via Spotify’s excellent web player. Special note: when you click the link, you will be taken to Spotify’s web player. There, you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; or signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) Here’s that link Either way, you should check it out if you like music, Holiday or otherwise. The holidays are a great time to discover a lot of great new music. Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker. 

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Christmas One More Time III

The third in our series of seasonal playlists. You can listen to the playlist via our friends at Spotify, who provided the appropriate links below.

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of Spotify’s excellent web player. Special note: when you click the link, you will be taken to Spotify’s web player. There, you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; or signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did). Here’s that link Either way, you should check it out if you like holiday music. Image courtesy of our friends at Getty Images, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This image has not been altered in any way. We thank Getty Images for sharing. Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering.

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Christmas One More Time I

The Hunt For New (Christmas)Music:
For over a decade, I’ve been putting together a Christmas playlists.
The goal is simple: Introduce friends to new Christmas music they probably haven’t heard, or old Christmas music performed in a new version by a new artist or reprising some traditional holiday songs. In the spirit of Christmas, it’s time to share these lists, all of them, starting with the very first playlist. There are now over 15 playlists in total and they will be posted every few days, starting on  December 1st. Along the way, we will toss in some Christmas classic videos, with Christmas themed post running all the way up to Christmas day, 2020.

It’s been a brutal year in almost every area–all the more reason to be thankful for the season, your friends, your health, your accomplishments.
It’s the season for great music–Christmas and otherwise–so spread the spirit of the season by playing and sharing. These Christmas lists are are available for you to listen to now, on Spotify. Click the link and you can play from the Spotify embed.

 

 

You can enjoy the entire playlist through the courtesy of our friends at Spotify via Spotify’s excellent web player. Special note: when you click the link, you will be taken to Spotify’s web player. There, you’ll have a couple of choices: sign in if you currently have a Spotify account; or signup for a free Spotify account (you’ll be glad you did) Here’s that link Either way, you should check it out if you like music.  The holidays are a great time to enjoy a lot of great music. Enjoy…and Happy Holidays. Special thanks to DJ Tschugge for compiling the list, along with the team at the Media Bunker. 

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The Poetry of Rock: John Prine

Angel From Montgomery

 

For a couple of years, the idea has been kicked around the Media Bunker that we need to do a series of posts on the Poetry of Rock. We’re the type that really listens to music, all of it—the intros, the solos, the backing vocals, and the words, especially the words. 

There are plenty who love music, but really don’t do the deep dive into the lyrics, where so much of the soul and message of a song live.

We do, because so much of the magic of music is in the lyrics. Everyone knows a song that could be great, but the lyrics hold it back…..for a song to be complete, to be totally great, it’s got to have both a great tune and outstanding musicianship and great lyrics. The bar is high.

Most of us were introduced to poetry in school at some level but eventually moved away/on from it as we got older. When was the last time you actually bought a book of poetry, by anyone?

But poetry’s still here, a bigger part of our lives than you would image if you just recognize that it now comes wrapped in music as the lyrics of the songs we hear all around us. Like all art, beauty is in the eye (or the ear) of the beholder. Some lyrics are great, some are nonsense, and some are unforgettable and legendary. Here in the media bunker, we lean in to the unforgettable and legendary, and so it’s time to resurrect the “Poetry of Rock” series (and we are including all forms of music in the Rock category, just to keep it simple) and so will be bringing out some examples of the great lyrics that accompanies great music (and vice versa) to show our appreciation for the genius level art that can surround us, if we just look a bit, do a drill down. 

This post was brought to the top of the editorial calendar by one event: the death of singer/songwriter John Prine. Prine was a humble man with an uncommon gift—he was one of the very best songwriters of his generation, good enough that he was someone Bob Dylan listened to. That’s good.  You can read about Prine’s life in this obituary from The New York Times. It’s well worth your time, as is this editorial from the Times that focuses (with performances)  on a key selection of John Prine’s best songs

One of Prine’s very best songs–and he had a bunch of them–was the song “Angel from Montgomery”. The lyrics are below:

I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child who’s grown old
If dreams were lightning
And thunder were desire
This old house would’ve burned down
A long time ago
Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go
When I was a young girl
Well, I had me a cowboy
He weren’t much to look at
Just a free ramblin’ man
But that was a long time
And no matter how I tried
The years just flowed by
Like a broken down dam
Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go
There’s flies in the kitchen
I can hear ’em there buzzin’
And I ain’t done nothing
Since I woke up today
How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning
Then come home in the evening
And have nothing to say?
Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Prine John E
Angel From Montgomery lyrics © Walden Music Inc., Sour Grapes Music Inc., Walden Music, Inc., Sour Grapes Music, Inc.

 

The song is mournful, painful, biographical, real, raw. The lyrics are short, the poetry is brief, but what’s not included in word is implied by its absence. It is, in short, a bit of a miracle. To fully grasp the genius of Prine is to hear his music performed, and one of the very best versions of this song is the one by Bonnie Raitt. But to add to the depth, we managed to find another live performance, by Bonnie with Prine, that you will find quite marvelous.

John Prine gave us a lifetime of great music. No better time than now to stop and appreciate it.  

 

 

 

The Fine Print:   Performance of “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine and Bonnie Raitt courtesy of YouTube and Austin City Limits. Bonnie Raitt solo version of the song provided via our friends at YouTube. We thank them for sharing. Text and Post produced by the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. We thank the researchers and site programmers for digging through the code to get this one up, after a software upgrade challenged everything. Unless otherwise noted, all rights (c)donald pierce and Southchester Group LLC. Got comments? Got you covered. Drop us a note via the comment feedback. Thanks for reading and listening. 

Featured

HOW TO SHOOT FOR NETFLIX

You did it. You wrote the script (documentary or feature), worked with some of your producer friends to break it down and get a rough budget, pitched it to NETFLIX and they Greenlighted your project. You’re a “go”. 

Now comes the hard part: producing the film.

Netflix is a very productive company and they have totally changed the paradigm for movie/tv production in Hollywood. They’ve come a long way from a company that sent out DVDs by mail to clients to being one of the biggest–if not THE BIGGEST–movie studios in the world.

They didn’t get there by chance. Netflix has its’ own set of standards about the shape and format of the film/video that you shoot, and cruising across the net, researching video production, the gang at the Media Bunker came across their official guidelines for cameras to be used for production.

Here’s the link: Netflix Image Capture Cameras and Standards

You’ll notice every camera must be at least 4k in resolution and some are 8K. The output format that’s acceptable is also specified.

The point is that Netflix is very button-ed up on what they expect to receive from producers and production companies who are shooting projects for them. Click through to see the level of detail that Netflix goes to in terms of setting up the camera for their productions.  They don’t take technical risks; instead, like very sharp studio guys, they take the risks on the content. There’s a lesson there.

 

 

 

 

An Arriflex 4F video production camera, one of the cameras approved by Netflix for production shooting of Netflix content/features. Image copyright 2021 Arriflex. All rights reserved. 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at Arriflex, This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved.  DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers.   For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

Featured

9/11

The only two articles you need to read today about 9/11

This weekend is going to be one of mixed emotions.

It’s another college football weekend. Things are looking up after a very tough summer.

Fall is a time of optimism and we could sure use some now.

But today is also 9/11.

And the 20th anniversary of the terrorist act that forever altered America’s view of itself, its’ safety, and its’ place in the world.

So throughout the weekend there are somber reminders about that singular day and it’s impact on our lives, culture, future.

You can get buried in the media coverage this weekend, but perhaps seeing/reading less, not more, is a better option.

Below, two articles that expand our understanding of what happened on 9/11.

The first is about the famous “Falling Man” photo, and was originally published by Esquire. 

The piece was written by Tom Junod and it’s stunning.

The second article is about the journey of Air Force One, with President George W. Bush onboard, as it navigated the skies of America after the attack on the World Trade Center

This one is from our friends at Politico, and is by Garrett Graff. 

That’s all you need to read on 9/11.

But it’s not all you need to think about.

 

 

 

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. We thank our friends at ESQUIRE and POLITICO for making their articles accessible via link. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers.   For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Wrestling

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Wrestling

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Weight LIfting

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Weight Lifting

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Water Polo

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Water Polo

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Volleyball

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Volleyball

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Triathlon

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Triathlon

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Trampoline

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Trampoline

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Track Cycling

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Track Cycling

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Tennis

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Tennis

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Tae Kwon Do

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

TaeKwanDo

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Table Tennis

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Table Tennis

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Swimming

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Swimming

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Surfing

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Surfing

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Sport Climbing

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Sport Climbing

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Skateboarding

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Skateboarding

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Shooting

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Shooting

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Sailing

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Sailing

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Rugby

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Rugby

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Rowing

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Rowing

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Road Cycling

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Road Cycling

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Rhythmic Gymnastics

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Rhythmic Gymnastics

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Mountain Bike

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Mountain Bike

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Modern Pentathlon

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Modern Pentathlon

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Marathon Swimming

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Marathon Swimming

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Karate

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Karate

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Judo

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

 Judo

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Hockey

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Hockey (Field Hockey)

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Handball

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Handball

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Golf

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Golf

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Football

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Football

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Fencing

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Fencing

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Equestrian

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Equestrian

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Canoe/Kayak Flatwater

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Canoe/Kayak Flatwater

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Boxing

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Boxing

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Canoe/Kayak Slalom

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Canoe/Kayak Slalom

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Diving

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Diving

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: BMX Racing

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

BMX Racing

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Cycling BMX Freestyle

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Cycling BMX Freestyle

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Beach Volleyball

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Beach Volleyball

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Basketball

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Basketball

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports:Baseball/Softball

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics: 

Baseball/Softball

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports:Badminton

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics:

Badminton

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Athletics

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Athletics (we’d call it Track & Field

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports: Artistic Swimming

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Artistic Swimming

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

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The Olympic Sports:Artistic Gymnastics

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Artistic Gymnastics

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe). 

 

Featured

The Olympic Sports: Archery

A short introduction to the games of the Tokyo Olympics. 

Archery

The Fine Print: Photo courtesy of our friends at GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. This photo has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. Text Copyright (c)2021 Donald Pierce and Southchester Group LLC,  all rights reserved. DonaldPierce.com is produced by the team at the Media Bunker and Perception Engineering. Opinions expressed are those of the writers. We thank the Tokyo Olympics and the Olympic Committee for making this material available to share.  For daily world news coverage please check out nightshiftnews.com, our sister site, which has links to every major English language newspaper in the world. Thanks for reading. Come back soon (and stay safe).