The Olympics had begun, y’all.
I was at Katie’s wedding last night so I missed most of the celebration during the first broadcast. However, I did catch the US and Thai national teams marched into the stadium. And I tivo’ed the rerun to watch again this morning.
“Cousin” Nicky is reporting prolifically from Beijing on their adventures so far. And tonight, May takes the court. So please tune in on the computer at 9 p.m. PST (California time), Thais and Americans everywhere, to cheer her on.
LA Times Olympics Blog also got to talk to May a bit as she recap Uncle Noi’s harrowing near “great fall down the Great Wall” as well as her experience so far.
Now, back to the opening ceremony.
Holy. Mackerel! As Brandon summed it up best, “Nobody can out-pomp the Chinese!”
The LED screen on the floor is amazing. Performers, brilliant and are you sure they’re human? I mean, that kind of precision for that big a group is INSANE!
This would mark the 2nd Olympics of my life time that I actually would remember how the torch was lit. There’s the 1992 Barcelona with the archery and then this running up the wall thing in Beijing.
Suddenly, I think I heard the Londoners let out the resounding, “Aw, shit. Now we have to top THIS?” You poor, poor Brits.
As much as I enjoyed the ceremony and I quietly accepted the delay broadcast, I must say that someone should slap a piece of tape over Bob Costa’s mouth.
The tidbits about each country marching out is great. Good to know. Thanks, guys. The cultural commentaries about the ceremony are also helpful. Again, thanks. But Bob’s “Hey, I’m a witty sports commentator guy! Hear me make what I think is hilarious injection!” not only wasn’t funny, it was disrespectful.
There were too many moments to count but notably, as the 2,008 Tai-chi masters ran into formation around the stadium, he blurted out something along the line of one misstep and that’s a cranium wreck. Come on.
And there was more of those little comments that he made that would’ve been funny during an NFL game, but seriously, not here at the Olympics.
Talk about comments, I was also bothered about the politically laden commentaries throughout the broadcast. I understand that there are a lot of controversies. I’m sure everyone see this differently, but I thought all the political analysis and comments from Tom Brokaw before the show started was enough right there. But not for NBC apparently.
They kept saying that the Olympics opening ceremony is one of those moment when you put everything aside and celebrate the world coming together. But throughout the show, they kept throwing in the political tidbits.
Oh yes, here’s Sudan. Oh yes, here’s Thailand where President Bush made that speech the other day (instead of talking about the fact that Thai female athletes won first medals in the country’s history, a fact they pointed out with other countries). Oh yes, here’s Iran and its nuclear program.
How is this supposed to be a UNITY event when the newscasters keep bringing up the controversies every few minutes?
Oh, whatever. We’ve all moved on by now. After all, that was so 12 hours ago.
At this moment, it looked like the Chinese already out-gold-medaled the U.S. NBC is keeping tabs on the total medal count, but to me, the only medal count that matters is the gold.
Thailand is coming in pretty strong this year with returning champs. Let’s see if we can beat our records last year!
