Olympic Descent

Best Part of the Night - Monty Rules!

Well at least I’ll get some of my evenings back now that the Olympics have ended.  Kudos to the British for putting on a truly spectacular and for the most part completely incident free games.  It’s kind of sad that in today’s world we consider an event without some sort of incident or attack a success based simply on that criteria.  I’ve always liked watching the closing ceremony, at least until last night.  The ceremony, as shown by NBC, was like the worst part of some really bad acid trip and seemed to have very little to do with the games themselves.  One of the parts I’ve always liked about the closing ceremonies was seeing the athletes celebrating together but there was precious little of that.  Whoever thought up this thing should be drug tested immediately.  They started out with a bunch of cars coated in newspaper simulating a traffic jam, I think, with Winston Churchill spouting something out of the top of Big Ben.  This was followed by some really weird bicycle riders wearing some sort of orange insect like headgear.  Anne Lennox came in as some sort of zombie queen on a ship of the dead and there was a fat Batman and Robin.  Why?  There were a couple of nice moments like the tribute to John Lennon and Eric Idle stole the show with his rendition of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.  These were however the only bright moments in a four hour torture session.  I don’t count the Spice Girls because, well, why should I.  I blame NBC for their coverage and their abysmal sound system.  Most of the singers were almost undecipherable due to background noise and the NBC announcers provided almost no commentary.  When they choose to show so many tight, close up shots the announcers need to provide some sort of setting and background – total fail.  As I was cruising the net this morning to find some photos there was a lot of the ceremony that NBC edited out, almost all of the parts with the athletes, apparently.   I wrote earlier in the Olympics how I thought NBC had progressed and gotten away from too many human interest stories at the expense of the athletic coverage.  The second week brought back all of their worst tendencies as we had a lot of the great track and field events distilled down to 3 minute highlight segments while we were bombarded with nonsensical commentary and endless interviews by the every smarmy Costas.  I’m something of an Anglophile (could be the really hot English girls I dated in Germany in the late 1970s but I digress) so I kept hoping the closing ceremonies would capture some of the British majesty but the combination of the dreadful NBC coverage and a truly daft ceremony plan doomed that hope.  Well I can now get back to The Wire and watching the Red Sox continue to implode.

Still Don't Get It

What the Hell Were They Thinking?

Huh?