The Opening Ceremonies have concluded for the first Youth Olympic Games, and the competition is about to start (within the hour, basketball and badminton will start; swimming will be shortly afterwards).

You can watch the broadcast of the Youth Olympic Games live by going to the schedule and clicking on the event you want to see. There will be on demand viewing as well (the Opening Ceremonies are currently up). If you want to watch the events live, you’ll need to know how to translate Singapore time to your time.

If you live in the Eastern United States, translating Singapore time to your time is really easy. All you have to do is change your time from AM to PM. If it is in the evening, it is the next day in Singapore. Those of us who live in other areas of the US will have to add the time difference between our time zone and Eastern time. In my case, since I live in Phoenix and everybody else is on Daylight Savings time, I add 3 hours. Then you switch AM to PM like the people on the East Coast.

If you live in England or many parts of Western Europe, you will have to add 7 hours to translate your time to Singapore time. Paris and Italy will have to add 6 hours. On the East Coast of Australia, you will need to subtract 2 hours. If I didn’t mention where you live, you can check the World Clock. Find a city in your time zone and translate it to your time. Singapore is listed on that page so you can make an easy comparison.

I have to make a commentary on the on demand service of the Youth Olympic Games. I appreciate the fact that this service is offered, especially since they are not on television, at least in the US, but the technology used to provide this On Demand Service really stinks. There is no pause button, and you cannot fast forward. While this may only be a minor annoyance if you’re watching a 90 second interview with Michael Phelps, when you are watching the Opening Ceremonies, which last more than 2 hours, it is a major pain. As I watched the Opening Ceremonies, there were several times that I would have liked to pause the show. After watching the Opening Ceremonies for 2 hours, right after Jacques Rogge announced that the Youth Olympic Games were open, my Internet had a hiccup and I had to start watching it all over again. I went to go read a book while the two hours that I had already seen replayed; it was really annoying to have to replay 2 hours of broadcasting in order to see the final 30 minutes or so to see the Olympic flame arrive in the studio. There are many other on Demand technologies that allow you to pause the show (Glenn Beck uses such a technology with his documentaries); perhaps for 2012 we could update the broadcast to 2010 technology standards.

The first ever Youth Olympic Games starts today. I have not posted about it a lot lately because I wasn’t sure how people were going to watch it. You can watch about any sport that you want on television today… you can even watch the Visa Gymnastics Championships… but you can’t watch the Youth Olympics on television. I’m not sure why NBC isn’t playing even the opening ceremonies on any of its stations, but evidently infomercials are going to attract more interest.

If you live in the US, it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to Tivo the Youth Olympics. Or watch it on your television. Which is a shame; I like to use my exercise bike while watching sports. However, you can watch it on the Internet. You don’t even have to catch it live (which is good, because the opening ceremonies were on at 2 AM Arizona time/5 AM Eastern time). Head on over to the Youth Olympics Broadcasting page and you can watch them on demand. The opening ceremonies are already on.

Now, it’s nice that you can watch these on your computer… maybe by the 2012 Innsbruck games, we can get some of the events on the television too.

The Youth Olympics will be streamed live over the Internet. I like to watch my television via Tivo, so that’s not going to work well for me. If they podcasted the YOG, that would work well too. Then I could just download the events to my iPod. That’s doubtful, as the Olympic organizers (at least in the past) haven’t been hot on letting their stuff be electronically distributed like that.

I know that Universal Sports is going to be streaming it. There should be some television coverage according to recent reports, but how much, I don’t know yet.

Olympians tend to do well on Dancing with the Stars. Just ask Apolo Anton Ohno. Or Shawn Johnson. Or Kristi Yamaguchi. They all have won on this television show, which makes Olympians 1/3 of the Stars’ winners. Evan Lysacek is expected to do well this season. Las Vegas bookmakers expect him to win, and give him a 1.25:1 shot.

Many of the skills that you need for skating transfer over to dancing. On the ice, Lysacek needs strength, flexibility, and timing. All of these will help with his budding dancing career.

On Monday Night’s Dancing with the Stars premiere, Lysacek and his partner scored the second-highest score of the evening.

Particularly upsetting is how animal rights activists have sent Weir death threats because they don’t like how he used fur on one of his costumes. What is more important, animals or people? Of course, some people would say animals, but I have to disagree.

In this interview with Johnny Weir on the George Lopez show, Weir seems to imply that the reason why he did not get a medal was because the judges wanted diversity on the medal stand, and Evan Lysacek was already guaranteed a medal. That’s not really keeping history in mind. In 2002, two Russians took the top spots; in 1956, all three top spots wen to the US; Norway took silver and bronze in 1920, and in 1908, all three top spots went to Sweden. In women’s skating, the US had two medals in 2002, took the top two spots in 1998, and received two medals in 1992; in 1920, Sweden took the top two spots; in 1908, Great Britain won two medals. This may not be a large amount of years when one country took two places on the podium, but if it truly was political, Weir would have come in fourth, not sixth.

Weir was turned down from Stars on Ice because he was not “family friendly” enough. While his controversial life outside of the ice really doesn’t necessarily translate to how he would skate on tour, I guess they have the right to choose who they want to feature or not.

Johnny Weir will be on the George Lopez show tomorrow, so if you are interested in seeing him, you might want to watch. In the meantime, here’s a video of him skating to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”.

Sales and viewership of the Paralympics have been stronger than was originally expected. The Paralympics will have a total of 60 hours of broadcast coverage in Canada.

United States viewers will still have to watch the Paralympics on the Internet.

I personally never thought much about the Paralympics until 2008, when Natalie du Toit entered the Open Water Swim, becoming one of the few people to participate in both the Olympics and Paralympics. I’m not even sure that I had heard about them prior to that. I was impressed by her story, and I’m sure that there are a couple hundred other great stories like hers in the Paralympics. With a potential treasure-trove of human interest stories in the Paralympics, I wonder why they are not more popular. Here are some of my ideas:

• The Paralympics, which are competitive, are confused with the Special Olympics, which encourage trying and feeling good about participation
• People are uncomfortable with seeing disabled people because they are reminded of their own fragility
• Most disabled people that the average person comes in contact with is old and perhaps a little slow. Perhaps they get the impression that the events will not be that exciting.
• The most popular events, like short track speed skating, figure skating, and snowboarding, are not Paralympic events (yet).
• The Paralympics do not have the same kind of advertisement
• The Paralympics are not broadcast on television.

What are your thoughts?

I’m talking about YouTube. Universal Sports is already on the bandwagon, and the IOC would do itself a tremendous favor if it would join in.

The YouTube of today is not like the YouTube of two years ago. There are more opportunities to control your content, and there are ways to make money off your content, at least for bigger companies like the Olympics.

I can see why the IOC wouldn’t want everybody posting Olympic YouTube videos up all over the Internet. They are very protective of their brand, and if anybody could embed Olympics programming on their web site, it might dilute their brand. The problem, however, is that they are not posting them up anywhere. If I want to see the award winning performances of Dorothy Hammel or the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics, I can’t; at least I’m not supposed to. There are some Olympics videos that sneak by and aren’t taken down for a while, but there is a lot of footage that is not available.

The IOC could post their videos on YouTube, disable embedding, and get more people interested in the Olympics. People like to browse on YouTube, and they like to search things that interest them. So in four years, when someone references Shawn White’s gold-medal winning halfpipe performance, people could look it up.

There are decades of Olympic videos just sitting in some vault that nobody has the opportunity of looking at. They aren’t selling videos of all this footage on Amazon.com; they might as well get some use out of it.

If you were thrilled by Evan Lysacek’s gold-medal winning performance and wish that you could see a bit more of him, you’re in luck. He will be taking part in this season’s Dancing with the Stars, starting March 22nd. He won’t be the first skater to dance in the starlight, Kristi Yamaguchi is also a Stars veteran (she won in May 2008).

Apolo Ohno and Shawn Johnson are other Olympic athletes that have taken their turn dancing (and winning).

Another athlete scheduled to appear this upcoming season is Chad Ochocinco of the Cincinnati Bengals. Pamela Anderson and Buzz Aldrin are also scheduled to compete.

More information about the next season of Dancing with the Stars is available at Yahoo.com.

His body was found in Vancouver’s Stanley Park yesterday. His parents believe that he committed suicide. He was depressed prior to his death. Prior to leaving his Venice, California apartment, he had been giving away some of his things. He left for Vancouver to visit friends, and then never returned on his flight home.

Growing Pains was one of the most popular television shows in the 1980s, back in a time when many people used to watch the same shows in the evening. His death is a sad event for many.