These days I see about enough that a view down into The Birds's Nest looks like a blue blob in the middle of the TV, so when the local affiliate switched from color about local connections to actual drumroll about the ceremony, I excused myself from a visit with TV and headed home to look at internet still shots at a distance and magnification where I can actually see details. The main advantage of that is that I got to miss the THREE HOURS of pageantry and capture a few really fun details.
--I LOVE fireworks. I do not care what all they symbolize. I like watching artistic explosions.
--I love the water cube.
--I finally saw enough of the stadium to understand why it's called The Birds Nest. Duh!
--I found myself turning into parade costume critic: the US team's berets: not so much. The Hungarians have really cool hats, but the red stars on fields of white do not hold up well if one has the least little bit of visual fuzz. The Iranian women were wearing PANTS. They wore headscarves and knee-length jackets but they wore pants!
--Fun in its way to see all the African names and faces on European sports teams. Ditto for all the NBA stars waving flags for their various homelands. Pretty constrained internationalism of course, but still....
--In case anyone thought of getting completely swept away, there were also shots of earthquake survivors in slums listening on the radio as well as some dribble about the 40,000 migrant workers kicked out of town after their work was done.
After a quick pass through various stills, I went looking for the live video promised by MSNBC. There was a women's volleyball prelim in progress between Serbia and Kazakhstan that I would have happily watched, but I lost patience about downloading plugins. Anybody else have pet events they are looking for on MSNBC? Anybody else geek enough to want to know what the electronics rooms running all the tech infrastructure look like?
DoreneC Seattle WA
On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 6:18 AM, Max B. Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
> Yeah, uh, about 1936. The broadcasters were what you could expect,
>
> Providing a sophomoric geography lesson as the teams paraded by.
>
> Maybe it was the goose-stepping color guard.
>
> If I was free of prejudice I ought to feel similarly if it was held in the
> U.S.
>
> The idea of some giant, oppressive machine staging an entertainment
>
> on a grand scale on the theme of universal peace and brotherhood
>
> just rubs me the wrong way.
>
> The spectacle was incredible. Hard to see how anyone could equal it
>
> In the future.
>
> On Fri, August 8, 2008 9:23 pm, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
>
> > Maybe it's just me, but watching the opening ceremonies,
>
> > I kept thinking of 1938.
>
> Were the US broadcasters that bad? I can't listen to mainstream US
>
> sportscasters these days without overhearing something malevolent and
>
> cruel, the murderous echo of Empire (MMM - the Mainstream Media of
>
> Mordor). That's why I watched the festivities via Youtube clips shot by a
>
> Colombian channel. I couldn't follow the Spanish, but the nice thing was
>
> they provided a brief description, then kept quiet and let the spectacle
>
> speak for itself.
>
> The spectacle was pretty harmless, though. I saw a giant globe of the
>
> Earth, little kids attending school, lots of very old Chinese historical
>
> motifs cleverly spliced into video tropes, and some astounding live
>
> wire-work. Nothing creepy there, just the semi-periphery showcasing its
>
> sovereign wealth. Incidentally, the opening was choreographed by Yimou
>
> Zhang, the great Chinese film director.
>
> -- DRR
>
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