QUOTE (Gold Storm @ Aug 11 2008, 23.54)

They might add cricket too the Olympics for London India would do very good in that.

If cricket the Commonwealth game gets in, than Baseball the just as global game comes back too. Those are my terms.

QUOTE (Benjen Stark @ Aug 13 2008, 00.19)

Even other events where the US is medalling (we took gold, silver, and bronze in women's saber fencing) don't get shown, but at least show the competition for 3rd in the women's gymnastics while you are sitting around waiting for scores anyway, as a for instance.

Huh? You sure. I actually watched all of those I think. NBC itself is putting on the high profile shit, but the other channels (MSNBC, USA, CNBC, and Oxygen which alternate between the Olympics and their normal programming) have been showing alot of other stuff. Caught Russia/Lithuania Basketball this morning. Several boxing matches.

Honestly, I'm pretty pleased with most of the coverage. It seems like all hours of the day at least 2 of those channels are showing something on the olympics, not all of it your standard popular fare. And often its more like 3-4 of the channels. The biggest profile events seem to be US/China centric I'll admit, but to be completely honest...I haven't been watching them as much. I like flipping back and forth curious to see what new random sport might be on, no matter what country is in it and I've definitely found some interesting finds.

Plus with all the channels running the Olympics I can skip every sob story about hard childhoods that inevitably pop up to humanize these athletes. Its a godsend. MSNBC starts playing sad music, BOOM, I flip to CNBC and catch women's beach volleyball.

And I've got to say, this is the most interested I've ever been in the Olympics since 1988. In 1988 I had an immense crush on a female American diver whose name I sadly still recall but i won't say, so that kept me interested. This year has Phelps playing the lovechild of Superman and Jesus and every time he dips his toe into the water I get a dozen text messages telling me to turn my TV on.

But you know what's really doing it? The politics. Fuck the torch run, Tibet, Darfur and China's usually tank running over kids antics. Its just baffling the lengths they'll go to to ensure this ultimate propaganda event goes off without a hitch. Fat girls shoved in the closet while pretty girls sing. CGI'd fireworks from the country that fricken invented the things. 8 year old gymnists passed off as 16 year olds. Cats killed through Beijing to remove a nuisance. Homeless and beggars mass transported to the country for a few weeks. Dissidents under 'friendly' police supervision. All of these things that to a normal (ie: Western) person might seem a little bit or alot bit abhorrent, done eagerly and enthusiastically to make sure that noone gets the 'wrong impression' on their visit to China. The Orwellian lengths they'll go to for good PR. Who are these people? What is this country? Do they live on the same planet?

This along with the usual 'China is the next evil empire!' shit are what makes this Olympics compelling. Think back to the Olympics of old...what was best part? Sports you never see, sure. Amazing athleticism on display. Always. Winning...goes without saying. But what was the best part?

Watching that fucking medal count and hoping to god America beat the shit out of the Soviet Union. Seeing how we fared against the rest of the Iron Curtain. Cheering Rocky 4 style as our hard working, unpaid amateurs faced down the evil Soviet Professionals in everything but name coldly produced from their sterile, high tech, government financed athlete factories. (who the fuck knows or cares if it was true, when I was 8 in 88, I believed that shit. This was Balboa v. Drago in every event)

80 and 84 sucked (not that I remember) cause one of the great empires wasn't there. '88 was the last great clash of the titans. And now we've got it again. America, freedom and apple pie against the evil 2 trillion man behemoth evil empire. That is what makes the Olympics work.

Olympics minus politics BLOWS.

QUOTE (Starkess @ Aug 14 2008, 14.10)

Actually, I believe they used real fireworks for the opening ceremony, but it was impossible to capture it all on video, so they used CGI so that the TV-viewers could see what the live viewers were seeing.

How is it impossible to capture on video. I'm sure they had a bajillion cameras in the air, on the ground, wide, thin, short, long...all over the damned place. Sounds like a post mini-scandal, ad-hoc/pr explanation. Probably bs.

QUOTE (Exa Inova @ Aug 14 2008, 08.31)

I dont know what you are talking about . When I watched the NBA finals I could swear that only the prettiest women got court side seats. China invented CGI? We kill doves. We hate those flying rats. When our queen visits one of our cities this is what we do to our homeless too. Give um a bath too. We place all our politicians under friendly serveillance. Cus' before you know it they produce Fitna or submission.

Benjen covered most of it. Politicians are under surveillance for their protection. Dissidents are put under surveillance so that they don't do anything the state doesn't want them to do. Bit of a difference. Also rural Chinese are brought into the cities as little more than slave labor (can't switch jobs, can't negotiate, can't organize, can't relocate, different passports complete with travel restrictions, isolated to shanty-town style hovels near the outskirts, etc), they built half the shit for the Olympics not to mention other projects, than they're forced out for the duration so that they don't create an eyesore for visitors. The cat shit that Benjen mentioned. Probably a few other eyebrow raising stories I can't recall.

It all very much has a '36 Munich feel to it when they cleaned up all the kill the Jews signs and prettied up the ghetto's when the world came to visit. Slightly less sinister of course.

QUOTE (Jaime L @ Aug 14 2008, 20.39)

QUOTE (nazfyratu @ Aug 14 2008, 20.19)

I think people are being hyper-critical here. They put on an amazing show. So some of it was an illusion - big deal. Hell, parts of it that people thought HAD to be computerized were done completely by human power (the undulating boxes, e.g.). Pretty amazing accomplishment, in my opinion, and totally outweighs whether 3% of the fireworks were CGI or that they subbed in a prettier girl for lipsynch duty. Like that doesn't happen a hundred times a day everywhere else in the world.

Couldn't agree more. The kind of nitpicks I see from the U.S. press seem to be purposely missing the point.

Eh...actually, I think you guys are missing the point. This is another piece in a pattern of near constant unsettling, Orwellian insanity that has been China's behavior leading up to and into these game. All dedicated to ensuring that their greatest single propaganda event in history goes well. Except the more they try to 'patch the cracks', the worse and more sinister they look because their methods of patching are a tad extreme at times or at the very least unsettlingly odd. Lets take a look at just the shit I recall offhand.

Telling the Beijing locals that cats are evil disease carriers so that the towns people massacre all them...all so the streets look a tad bit nicer come the games.
CGIed fireworks from the country that invented them with a dozen different lame excuses as to why.
Fat girl shoved in a corner, pretty girl up front lypsynching. We made sort of a big deal when Milli Vanilli and the Simpson girl did this, its appropriate here. Doubly so cause it had to be kind of devastating for the ugly girl. Can you imagine? Getting prepped for her big moment and minutes before the officials are like 'You're to ugly to be the face of China, go sing behind the curtain!'
Political dissidents being given police escorts so they don't do or say anything nor approach anyone.
The rural imported slaveworkers who built half the damned Olympic venues shipped back to the country so that they don't disturb the visitors...same with the poor and homeless.
Promised protest zones, still prevented. And i'm sure anyone requesting to protest got a 'warm' welcome.
Low attendance brings the bright idea of trained and uniformed cheer teams...who show up for countries they have no interest in and half the time probably sports they've never seen before...but they know how to cheer damnit!

There's more, but this is enough. One by one, probably not a huge deal. But taken together, this does become quite disturbing. This desperate need to create a fraud of perfection where none exists and none can exist. And their methods in achieving it makes them look worse in the process, yet they don't seem to grasp that. They never do. They would be better served letting flaws exist, they're unavoidable, its more than a tad unnatural without them, and they avoid yet another blunder that makes them look like an alien species to the rest of the world.

QUOTE (The Iceman of the North @ Aug 16 2008, 07.03)

Another spot in this pattern was the way the girls carrying the country names during the opening ceremony was selected. Apparently they had to strip naked in front of the selection committee.

Shit, I hadn't heard that one. And I'm not gonna even buy that under the 'create a fraud of perfection' justification. That's just dirty ole men getting their rocks off I think.

Man, If I was a high official in a country where submitting your individualism to the state was the highest honor....

"Your country demands that you and your entire (legal age) cheerleading squad service me sexually!

QUOTE (The Iceman of the North @ Aug 16 2008, 06.42)

Of course the story doesn't say whether there were any men present during this selection process. What's interesting though, is that these details were mentioned in an article in Beijing News, a state run English speaking news service, on the "rigorous training process thousands of young girls went through before they could appear in the opening ceremony". It apparently didn't occour to anyone that this would be considered problematic.

Which really is the case for most of this shit. They just don't seem to grasp why we find half their actions fricken abhorrent. Fucked up culture at times. No worries though. We'll win them to the light side with MTV and Cheeseburgers!

QUOTE (Wilf @ Aug 18 2008, 08.21)

And Liukin is a real red, white and blue American, right?

Who cares about the age. I mean the Brits entered a 14 year old in the synchronised diving. The point is they're good and therefore should be allowed to compete. No age discrimination!

I don't care about age either. But the rules are the rules. And while they exist, countries should follow them. And be penalized when they don't.

QUOTE (mashiara @ Aug 17 2008, 23.36)

That pisses me off. It pisses me off that athletes are failing drug tests and then try to claim they were set up and it's all a part of some greater conspiracy. I'm all for conspiracy theories but even I will stop before claiming that the IOC has it in for Greek athletes. The sad thing is that about a dozen or more of them have failed drug tests in the past three months.

Hadn't heard about this. Weren't a bunch of greeks busted for performance enhancers in Athens too? Starting to sound like an institutional problem there.