Sporting Event Attendence

Not quite sure what got me started on this, but the numbers kind of surprised me. Baseball draws more spectators than anything else. College games draw more than professional sports. Motor sports draw a fraction of those.

What I was wondering were how many people are attend these games religiously. I'm guesstimating it's about half. Knowing how many season ticket holders there are would help, except that if the vibe isn't there, the entire high dollar section will be empty. 

If you look at the total, it seems like everyone in country must have attended a game. However, divide that by 100 (to adjust for multiple games in one season and fans who follow more than one sport) and you get 3 million which is roughly one percent of the people in this country. Funny, one percent is also the number of people who die in this country every year.

The people spend something like $50 billion on sporting events every year. Last year probably didn't measure up.

Meta Video

The Greatest Title Sequence I've Ever Seen

The content of the video is about how much effort went into making a title sequence for an obscure British TV show. Tom expounds at length about this while walking up the same hill that was featured in the subject title sequence.

It is pointless for Americans. However, it is pretty spectacular in its own right. The video is divided into two parts of roughly equal length. Tom Scott talks nonstop with no cuts or splices (as near as I can tell) through both parts while walking up a big hill. Equally impressive, or perhaps more so, the cameraman records the whole thing walking backwards, uphill. How the heck do you do that? At the end there is an outtake where the cameraman stumbles. Checking the monologue, it appears it happened near the end of the second part, which means they must have tried to record this at least twice. That makes me wonder how many attempts they had to make before they got it done to their satisfaction.

Title sequences are an art form all to themselves. Every TV show or movie has their own. Depending on my frame of mind, they can be boring and tedious or they might be quite spectacular. Producing title sequences is an industry in itself. I imagine there are probably several thousand people around the world who are employed producing these things.

On a somewhat related note, I think I figured out why people applaud at live performances. It's not so much whether it was fabulous performance, it's more along the lines of appreciation for the work the performers put in preparing for the show and the bravery they demonstrate by getting up on stage.