Back in action

No time for blogging over the past month, away in Scotland for a family reunion and then the US for three weeks and also started a new job in online medical publishing at f1000.com.
I'll start back blogging now that I have some more time, a couple of things I wanted to mention.
I've complained before about the state of basketball in the UK and my trip to the States helped to revive my angst. In a country that created the sport you would expect it to be big, popular and host to the best players (not always the case: English cricket, save their recent Ashes win?) I took in an afternoon at Venice Beach in LA, home to one of the most well-known courts and though the playing standard was lower than I expected, still left impressed and with renewed faith in the game.
The Times today has a great article on Luol Deng and the British team's Eurobasket chances. I say great partly because it's so rare to see the game mentioned in UK press but then that's a key feature in the article's text.
Deng's comment that many Brits "still don’t know we even have a British basketball team" isn't surprising given the generally poor coverage and lack of interest by free or pay TV in screening games in normal (ie not 2-5am) programming.
It's excellent to see LOCOG spending big on basketball, hopefully they'll continue the promo push to get more kids into the sport. Though a top three finish is unlikely at the 2012 Olympics, taking a big scalpy down would be enough to hope for at this stage.