Nate Silver is the crazy kid who invented PECOTA for Baseball Prospectus and now he's made good in the political prediction world! Can I get a "Woop woop?" Baseball fans? Anybody? Well look, Baseball Prospectus is like The Bible to stat geeks, and PECOTA is like a particularly important passage in that Bible (John 3:16, for example), so the fact that this 30-year-old guy who made it up is suddenly the hottest thing in political polling is unlikely and heartwarming to sports fans and political obsessives alike, to say the least! Nate Silver started writing about how wrong polls were in a little Daily Kos diary, and lo and behold, he ended up predicting the primaries better than anyone! Then all the pros were like, who is this kid? When he revealed himself as a Baseball Prospectus writer, a very thin slice of stat geeks were all like, "ZOMG unbelievably awesome!" Imagine if you found out that Richard Lawson had been selected as the new announcer on Monday Night Football. That's the level of thing that I'm talking about here, people. So of course New York did a big story on this kid, what with his acceptable level of quirk. He's basically the smartest pollster in America now, amazingly. And we'll cut through all the technical mumbo-jumbo and give it to you straight:

ESPN is the USA's sports leader, sanctioned by God, the American Way, and Brett Favre. Males of a certain age (11-75) who don't watch the network risk placing themselves under serious suspicion of being candy ass pansy boy homos, NO HOMO. So you'd think that ESPN wouldn't have trouble drawing young viewers. But America's sports indoctrination machine is flagging because of the internet and the computers and the fatness! So ESPN has been forced to take drastic and, we daresay, un-American measures: Video games in the football broadcasts. This marks the failure of American P.E. teachers:

When will the far East stop its racist stereotyping of the white man? Athletes from across the world define the Chinese by the slanty-ness of their eyes. But China is just as bad. They harbor the ludicrous notion that whites look alike! Listen carefully, China: BBC pundit Steve Parry is a tall, white, goofy former swimmer. But Michael Phelps is a tall, white, goofy current swimmer. Being mistaken for someone else is just one more thing white men in China are forced to endure, like weird foreign food and a lack of readily available American flag bumper stickers. Watch the clip of Parry being mobbed by enthusiastic Michael Phelps fans below:

Last week the Say Anything actor and Hilary Duff mentor wrote a 732-word celebrity blog post commemorating the launch of Huffington Post Chicago — hey wait I thought the internet meant the end of 'placeness'!? — that contained somewhere between eight and infinity errors. Yeah, and it was about his childhood. Most have been fixed, though they are keeping his misspelling of playwright Eugene O'Neill's name, for authenticity's sake presumably. Page Six picked up the story today, noting that even the non-patently false details of John Cusack's love letter to Chicago sports are disingenuous! But if the blogs are to be believed — and in this case they are pretty credible — Cusack made one error so bad, so grievous, so fundamentally retarded, Page Six apparently couldn't bear to share it with you:He misspelled the name "Michael Jordan." No yes, as one blogger so eloquently noted, "Michael freakin' Jordan!" So here's the thing. Blog mistress Arianna Huffington doesn't exactly make a secret of the fact that she has lots of celebrity friends she sweet-talks into writing pointless celebrity blog posts for her big online benefit dinner; I mean, the whole first paragraph of John Cusack's post is about how Cusack was actually in Bangkok — conjuring images of Jayson Blair filing stories about the DC sniper from the Times cafeteria, a little! — but the relentless blog matron had tracked him down the night before to write the thing and for whatever reason — the accent? because writing an incredibly short sentimental missive on one's childhood is not a very difficult task, trust me? — he dutifully complied. But like, why? And why did Huffpo commission Ryan Reynolds to write that inexplicable rumination on competitive eating that one time? And then all the Jamie Lee Curtis stuff? Why did they even give a bio page to my friend Don? If no one at Huffington Post is reading this shit — at least not closely enough to catch a misspelling of the name Michael freaking Jordan — why are we expected to? Oh right! In the event that someone will make some retarded error that the intermob can point at and say: "Wow, that was retarded!" Great. How about: Emily is right, everyone needs to get off the internet already? But barring that: ever read a celebrity blog post you found to be monumentally pointless and/or error-ridden and/or just deeply inane? Be a dear and send it to me so I can cobble together a pointless listicle! [Page Six]

So who is, like, winning all the medals this Olympics? Besides Michael Phelps I mean. It's a tricky question! If you're watching at home in U.S. America, you're probably inclined to think "America!" because not only does your capacity for snack food consumption mean NBC is raking in the most ad revenue in broadcasting the games, US media outlets conveniently ranks the countries in terms of "medals won," whereby the U.S. wins (by a hair!) and sits atop the official Medal Count, whereas over in China — and Hong Kong — they're ranking the countries in terms of gold medals scored, and China's winning that race by like 96. (Okay, 17.) In search of true journalistic objectivity we decided to consult some news sites representing countries without a proverbial "horse" in this race. Al-Jazeera!And guess what, Osama Bin Laden's mouthpiece says we won. They know what side of the balance of superpower their anti-hegemonic crusade is buttered (guns-ed?) on! Al Jazeera China Daily (Please note the awesome animated flame on this site!) Related: Did Bush Really Want To Bomb Al Jazeera? [The Nation]

Oh joy: another 'homage' cover from a magazine industry that appears to be running as thin on new ideas as it is ad pages! We will be sure to save this one in the hyperbaric chamber in which Gawker Media stores valuable artifacts of the dying days of print media alongside last month's Esquire's Stephen Colbert cover homage to Esquire's 1968 Mohammad Ali cover and that New York Marilyn Monroe homage cover featuring Lindsay Lohan and Esquire's homage to that disturbing (if your mom ever told you shaving your face would make you grow hair there anyway) 1965 Virna Lisi cover featuring Jessica Simpson and also Esquire's February homage cover ripping off that 1967 Angie (yes that one!) Dickinson photo to which they already paid homage to back in 2003 when Britney Spears could sell magazines not named OK!…are we missing any? Most certainly!It's not as if mid-century was such a golden age for magazine circulations. Esquire got up around a million during its heyday, sure, and now it's probably about 25% off that, but Sports Illustrated is actually significantly more widely read than it was in the seventies. But editors back them were at least a little less the prisoners of cover-testing and circulation departments. So it's no wonder that their more conservative descendents hark back to an earlier era when every tired cover gimmick was still new—and when Mark Spitz somehow convinced the International Olympic Committee to give him his medals on gold chains (check the photo) and the world was cooler then.

The Olympics: yay, a thing I don't need to add a contextual sentence lest you haven't been watching! Of course you're watching! At this point not having watched the Olympics is like not having heard of September 11. DMX himself knows about it! And NBC just got its best Saturday ratings in 18 years, restoring every last eight hundred forty seven million dollars they fronted for the thing along with the whole notion of American mass media. How did NBC do it? New Yorker television columnist Nancy Franklin has an answer: by appealing to the "lowest common denominator"! (Which is funny, because we thought appealing to the lowest common denominator didn't actually work on the Nielsens anymore unless you multiplied the Nielsen rating by some mysterious inflated self-importance multiplier reflective of the proportion of viewers employed in the New York media.) Franklin kvetches that 2008's "not painfully handcuffed but handcuffed nonetheless" Olympics coverage has been the shlockiest yet in an anachronistically curmudgeonly review that sounds… very New Yorker circa 1990!

You would have thought, perhaps, that the embarrassing ad photo of the Spanish Olympic basketball team in the eyelids-pulled-back, "Slanty-eyed Chinese" pose was just a one-off thing. I mean, if they had done this before, they would have had a better apology ready, right? But maybe Asia-mocking is actually a favorite pastime of all Spanish athletes-because their 2008 Federation Cup Tennis team, which beat China to move into the finals, was photographed in the same god damn pose!: Photo from the Spanish Tennis Federation's site:

It was quite an embarrassment for the nation of Spain yesterday when an ad surfaced showing their entire national Olympic basketball team posing in the "Slanty-eyed Asian" position, pulling their eyelids back. We imagine the photo shoot was followed by several minutes of mimed karate moves and Enter The Dragon reenactments, only adding to the awkwardness. So the entire nation of China has been waiting expectantly for an apology. And today they got...outrage that anyone would think Spain is racist! Why, some of their closest friends are from China or somewhere like that!

The New York Times has 32 reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing. Thirty-two! That's quite an investment from a company in the newspaper industry. Any big cash outlay is risky these days. Without relying on the crutch of "official budget numbers," we combined our sophisticated economic estimation skills with a patented "Media Value" formula to determine: Is this Olympics coverage worth the cost? Read on!

Life's social dynamic never really changes beyond high school. WIth the Olympics upon us, journalists are feasting on the fit bodies of athletes—so different than their (and our) own! There was the poetic ode to the wonders of swimmer Michael Phelps in the NYT's Play magazine, and now we have (presidential cousin) Billy Bush of Access Hollywood's breathless, "stream of consciousness" description of the "glutes" of the men's gymnastics team:

The folks who are bringing you the Olympics online don't actually want you to watch their coverage. NBC and Microsoft are delaying the most popular events by three hours so that it won't interfere with more profitable TV broadcasts. And you'll have to download Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in to watch in your browser. But a bird's nest of geography and time-delay restrictions worthy of China's Communist Party government is in place. Thankfully, the anarchy of the Web offers plenty of options for having a crowd of curious coworkers surround your computer as you watch live handball, with varying degrees of expense and difficulty. Rather than being the coming-out party for Silverlight Microsoft hopes for, it may instead be the year sports fans learn a few new online-video tricks.Online schedules: NBC's Olympics listings takes a bit of work (you have to enter your ZIP code and select a television provider, even if you just want online listings). However, once you've done the work, it'll send you notifications when events you've selected will be broadcast. Jason Kottke has found Google and iCal calendars, which will allow you a bit more flexibility in setting up alerts, and the New York Times has a schedule as well. And of course, there's an official schedule from the organizers in China, with times listed for Beijing's time zone (16 hours ahead of San Francisco, 13 hours ahead of New York) — probably the best place to go for daily updates, as smog and weather may upset the schedule. Sling Media's Slingbox: For those with more money than time, the best solution might be a Slingbox. Then you can beam your home satellite or cable signal over the Internet to your laptop, desktop, or iPhone, and remotely switch between NBC and MSNBC. Pros: You can get great quality, even HD, if your home Internet connection is fast. There is SlingPlayer software available for a range of not just operating systems but handheld devices as well. Cons: Prices start at $129.99 and your selection of Olympics coverage is limited to what's available from your satellite or cable provider, which means missing early heats and niche events and having to put up with tape delays by the networks. International proxies: It is possible to watch live streams from other countries, such as BBC Sports from the UK or CBC Sports from Canada, by configuring your browser to run through an anonymous proxy. I recommend using Mozilla's Firefox browser with the FoxyProxy add-on installed. Xroxy has a handy list of proxies which you can sort by country to find proxies in the UK or Canada — which must be anonymous, and preferrably running the SOCKS protocol. Your best bet is to get a geeky British or Canadian friend to install a proxy on their machine for you and your Yankee friends. The latency can be frustrating, but once you get a stream started it will work fine. Pros: Quality streams from legitimate providers, and if you're accustomed to jingoistic U.S. coverage, the charming accents from the Beeb's announcers and the humble mien of the Canadians can be quite refreshing. Cons: Takes some technical know-how to set up, and proxies come and go. You might miss an event because you're too busy fiddling with your settings or a proxy fails when too many people sign on. Video on demand: If you're running Windows Vista, you can download events using TVTonic for "Olympics on the Go." Torrent client Azureus works on any system to help download events after the fact, especially the most popular ones like tennis, football, boxing and basketball — Torrentz cross-site search of multiple BitTorrent indexes should make it easy to find the Spain versus China women's basketball game you might miss tomorrow. YouTube's official channel is blocked — even using international proxies — though a reader came up with a crack that works for now. Other less thoroughly policed online video sites like Veoh, Metacafe, Dailymotion and Megavideo will also have videos. Pros: Torrents will be high quality and work for anyone, while video-sharing sites will be easiest to use. Cons: Nothing will be live, obviously, and no one knows how long video clips will remain on sharing sites. P2P Streams: The way I'll be watching online will is through MyP2P, a site that catalogs live sports and television streams from around the Web, listed by event. It helps to run Windows, though not necessarily Vista, because many streams require software downloads — check out MyP2P's beginners guide for tips, including where to find software downloads and optimization settings. I ended up finding live BBC coverage of the opening ceremonies via Justin.tv, which ran just fine in my browser. If you can't find the channel you want in the media format you prefer, check wwiTV, TV For Us, TV Channels Free, Channel Chooser or BeelineTV among others. Pros: Free and fairly easy once you've installed most of the media players listed by MyP2P. And it's fun to watch coverage from other countries — I'll be watching all my football with spanish-speaking announcers whenever possible. Cons: Quality is hit-or-miss, stream links come and go, and you have to think ahead in terms of scheduling to make sure you've got all the necessary programs installed. Also, Mac users will want to install Windows XP through Parallels or Fusion for the widest selection of channels.

The Olympics are the most popular entertainment spectacle in the world. Or are they? Pictured above is a Google Trends report comparing web activity for "Olympics" to that of "Super Bowl." As you can see, outside of very short spikes coinciding with the actual games, the Super Bowl is the more consistently popular item. And that's just an American thing! How do the Olympics stack up against several other, more universal, pursuits? Three comparisons below give you all the perspective you need:

Peyton Manning, Derek Jeter and LeBron James today announced they've joined an $8.6 million funding round for social network Weplay. Weplay isn't going to work out — vertical social networks are so 2007 — but at least the sports-star troika can take heart in knowing they're following the same path as other fading jock stars. A bubble ago, John Elway, Michael Jordan, and Mike Piazza also let slick schemers take advantage of their egos and cash, funneling them into ill-thought-out, poorly timed investments on the Web. Our three favorite athlete-startup bloopers, below.

While most of the punditocracy is demanding that Sid Ganis engrave Heath Ledger's name on the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor before the month of July comes to a close, the notoriously contrarian ESPN talking head Skip Bayless isn't quite convinced. During today's episode of their afternoon gabfest 1st And 10, Bayless got into a heated argument with the equally opinionated (read: full of shit) mouthpiece Stephen A. Smith about whether or not The Dark Knight was better than Tim Burton's Batman. As these conversations generally go, the topic of conversation quickly switched to Heath Ledger's universally lauded performance as The Joker. That is to say, universally lauded by everyone but Skip Bayless.

We have Olympic fever! But not as much as Beijing-ians. The Chinese government is like an overanxious mama, worried her kid might start picking his nose on stage at his preschool graduation. So they're bombarding the wayward citizenry with propaganda posters directing them how to act when all the weird foreigners get to town. The oddest thing is that they go to great lengths to explain how to make pale Westerners feel at ease, when in fact much of the etiquette advice seems totally unrelated to American life. It's a culture clash that will make you chuckle! Below, actual instructions to the Chinese: Whatever you do, don't ask what someone does!

Nike's new ad campaign for its Hyperdunk shoes features a series of pictures of basketball players getting dunked on in what's considered the worst way possible: the dunker dangling off the rim, his balls dangling in the face of the man being dunk-ee. They all have dynamic slogans like "That Ain't Right!" The company has been plastering them around NYC's most famous streetball meccas, like Harlem (home to The Rucker) and West 4th St. Their rollout coincides with a big foofaraw this week (which some critics say is stupid oversensitivity) over whether the ad industry is making blatantly homophobic ads. All of which raises the question: Are these Nike ads a new low in homophobic advertising? Or do the gays just not understand basketball?

Today on Fox News' morning show Fox & Friends, discussion turned to well-hung soccer star David Beckham. And cohost Brian Kilmeade got outed for having a big gay crush on him! Female co-anchor Gretchen Carlson says he called Beckham "gorgeous," which leaves Brian tongue-tied like a (gay) little schoolgirl. He mumbles about how, hey, anybody can tell Beckham is attractive; then heterosexual cohost Steve Doocy looks at him with an expression that says, "Sure, flamer." Then Kilmeade runs off the set in embarassment-probably to go masturbate to a picture of David Beckham. Click to watch this stunning example of News Corp.'s homosexuality exposed.

Everyone's nervous about the Olympics this year. The Chinese government's politicization of the ceremonies reminded sponsors and spectators alike of its human rights record, particularly in Tibet. Broadcasters are pushing back against restrictions on TV reporting. Athletes are concerned about air quality. In short, the Olympics are the same politicized mess they've always been, and more commercial than ever. How to keep everyone focused on the athletic action? Easy, just keep the cameras pointed at the lithe young hardbodies that flock to this competition every four years. And if that seems like a lecherous degradation of a noble event, remember this: the Olympians themselves are notoriously bad at keeping their hands off one another once they get eliminated from competition. Remind yourself by browsing this photo gallery of hot Olympic athletes past and present, curated by intern Nicola Gherson.

Bob Costas has more than 20 years of experience as a sportscaster. He's done the Olympics six times. But he's most famous on the internet for inviting wild-eyed sportswriter Buzz Bissinger on his talk show in April to rant and project bits of spittle towards absurdly civil former Deadspin editor Will Leitch. Now Costas-one of the most refined and experienced personalities in all of sports broadcasting-is forced to talk about Leitch and Bissinger in every single interview he does. It's his legacy!