The question comes up every time there's an Olympic games significantly east of North America: Should we give the results?
Beijing is 12 hours ahead of Eastern time, 15 ahead of Pacific time, so the fat part of the day happens when America is snoring. By the time most of you head home from work to catch up with the 82 hours of TV coverage from that day on your DVR, the events will have long since been completed.
And when you're done watching the 82 hours from that day, you'll want to tune in to NBC's prime-time show, most of which is taped. If you live in the Pacific or Mountain time zones, even the "live" events on the prime-time show will be on tape delay.
This is good news for your employer, because it means you'll be conscientious during the day about avoiding places on the Web where you might catch a glimpse of some results and spoil your evening's viewing. This is sure to save your boss billions of dollars.
All but a few of you. And you know who you are. You'll blithely surf the Web, expecting those of us who work here to keep quiet so you won't see anything you don't want to see. And then you're going to complain about it, going to yell at us for not putting the words "spoiler alert" in big block letters at the top of every story that mentions results.
Well, here you go. You can print this out and tape it above your monitor whenever you come to Salon:
SPOILER ALERT
We're giving things away. Salon's not the place to come to get comprehensive results, but if we're writing about an event, we're not going to avoid saying what happened just because you might want to watch it later. Dodging the news is your responsibility. And that goes for events NBC is showing on delay too. NBC's nice and everything, but Salon doesn't get its editorial policy from NBC.
So if you don't want to see results before you've watched an event, stay away from Salon. We won't be offended, and the good news is you can come back later. Read what we wrote after you've watched. We'll be here. Stuff stays up forever.
So far, anyway. And hey, another few seconds just went by and everything's still there.
We feel your pain. It's hard to avoid the news, especially when forays onto the Web, with all its dangerous teaser headlines and links, are a part of your job. I've unhappily run into results of games I'd planned to watch later many times. Occupational hazard. But I can't complain. As a reader and surfer, it's on me not to see what I don't want to know.
So let's none of us be like the person who wrote in angrily to Salon years ago after we'd written something about the movie "Citizen Kane." Ridiculously, this person complained, some 60 years after the release of the flick, that he'd been planning to rent "Citizen Kane" someday and our writer had ruined the experience by revealing that "Rosebud" was -- uh, hang on a second ...
SPOILER ALERT
a sled.
We wrote back and told him all about Keyser Soze.
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