Olympic Opening Ceremony

For me the Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony achieved two things. China celebrated its ancient, colourful history rich in tradition and its polluted, secretive, communist present whilst Channel Seven continued its rich tradition of having completely shit commentary. I mean really, do we need someone to tell us there are "Tai Chi performers, on the floor" when they are in plain sight? Just to get all my broadcaster bitchings out of the way quickly I'd also like to point out how sudden and jarring the transitions into the ad-breaks were. One moment you were watching a softly lit, beautifully orchestrated metaphor for something or rather and in the blink of an eye a loud and brash ad for some garbage TV show is thrust into all of your relaxed senses. So let's just say "fuck you" to Channel Seven and move onto the actual event.





The BOOC was for the most part spectacular; featuring wonderful costumes, performances and that intricate attention to detail that you associate with Chinese design. Because the whole event ran for well over 4 hours I'm going to briefly outline some of the acts. There was:

• A giant scroll that dancers wrote on


• A handful of the most rigidly disciplined soldiers the human race has ever produced


• A Chinese Astronaut


• A Tai-chi light show


• Chinese ravers wearing flouro yellow bodysuits wrapped in Christmas lights


• A more innocent, tolerable and Chinese Niki Webster


• An excruciatingly slow moving duet


• Bagpipes playing Scotland the Brave...for some reason


• A ring of attractive, young, cheerleaderesque girls who were forced to jump, wave and dance about enthusiastically whilst the athletes from every single competing country marched out (plus they were wearing high-heeled cowboy boots...sucks to be them)

• And a giant, cooler version of the round lightshade I have in my bedroom (see the picture above)

Olympic Opening Ceremonies do have a tendancy to drag on a fair bit and the Beijing attempt was no acception. Watching every single competing nation walk a lap of the stadium is probably the largest contributing factor. By this time in the evening you'd be forgiven for forgetting that the Olympics is a sports thing. To be honest though, I enjoyed practically everything else. I think that's about all I have to say. The torch lighting was pretty cool aswell; it seemed to be a symbol of their creation of fireworks (which also played a large part in the celebrations).

I promise that tomorrows post will be funnier...maybe...