Boxing and the Chinese (Exploration, not Kung Fu)

Anatomy of a Fight

This little piece by the Chicago Tribune, I have to say, was actually pretty interesting. It delves, though not too deeply, into the appeal of boxing to both fans and the boxers themselves. It is pretty interesting to hear why these boxers do what they do. For some it is a job, for others it is life, and for some it is simply both. From the fan standpoint, I think the best comparison that was made was that a boxing match is like a car wreck, for some reason everyone has to slow down to see. The question becomes, what is it we are looking for? To see if everyone is alright or if there is a body? In boxing, the majority opinion is that fans are there to see someone knocked out, not really to see the technical aspects of the sport.
As for the technical aspects of the site, it is basically an audio slide show, pictures with voice overs from boxers and fans. While the pictures are great and the whole thing loads pretty quickly, I honestly think video would have been better for this one. You can hear sounds of the boxers hitting the bags and training in other ways, but the pictures are usually just blurs or shots after the fact. While the blurred shots create their own effect and still images certainly take less time to load, I think the extra loading time would have been well worth it. Also, it might help if there was some information as to who the different boxers were. I am not overly familiar with the sport myself, so the only person I recognized in the whole thing was Don King. If I did not know that Dolph Lundgren was a blond Swedish man, I would have thought the Russian boxer they showed in the slide show was Ivan Drago from Rocky IV.

China's Great Armada

This is another one of those fun and exciting National Geographic audio slide shows, this one chronicling the voyages of the Chinese explorer Zheng He. Zheng He traveled all over southern Asia to Indonesia, India, and all the way to Oman and Yemen, leaving a lasting Chinese impact everywhere he went. OK, time to come clean. When I said "fun and exciting" I was being a tad facetious. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of good information that would probably be more interesting if displayed in a more interesting format. There were plenty of really good pictures, a lot of pictures of people with hooks and the like in them, which did help with entertainment factor. Unfortunately, audio slide shows only go so far. Also, while I do not personally have anything against Chinese music, in fact I on occasion enjoy it and find it soothing, being able to turn it off on the website would have been nice.