How’s this for saying what so many privately think?

“Instead of spending a fortune on the opening ceremony, we should begin with a simple ceremony,” he says.

“Perhaps if the Queen walked in to the main arena and declared the Games open with a short speech along the lines of, ‘You will all be delighted to learn that the cost of a lavish opening ceremony has been saved this year and all of the money that would have been spent has instead been sent to Africa to be used for much more worthwhile causes’.”

He then went on to joke that there should be two Games: one for clean athletes and one for the steroid users.

Two thumbs up, Peter, for pointing out the absurdity of the Olympics—nationalistic dick-waving at its finest—in this day and age.

There’s currently an excellent (and quite balanced) opinion piece by Adele Horin at the Sydney Morning Herald that is quite critical of Australia’s funding of elite sports:

But how much public money is a gold medal worth? In Beijing, each gold medal has cost Australia at least $50 million, says Kevin Norton, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Australia. Or, to put it another way, $12 million came out of the public purse for each medal of any colour. Now we’re told these sums are a pittance compared with what is needed to maintain our ranking in London.

[...]

So it would be a brave politician to resist the calls for more sport funding. But brave they should be. Stephanie Rice made us all proud, but that fleeting feeling came with a $150 million price tag. Politicians may consider that a price worth paying for her three gold medals. It bought sport-mad Australians a lot of pleasure, and that can translate into votes.

I’ll be up-front and admit to watching a small amount of the Olympic coverage—if our public funds are being depleted by this empty nationalism, we may as well get some small enjoyment from it.

But with a crumbling health system and a public education system that desperately needs more attention, not to mention a lack of funding in science and technology—you know, stuff that actually has practical, beneficial applications—we are still happy to blow up to $50 million dollars on just one Olympic gold medal. How can anyone justify this with a straight face?

Between this and the fact that the current host nation is a blatant violator of human rights, are these Olympic Games anything but a complete farce?

Those wacky Chinese can’t keep themselves from opening fire on Tibetan protesters, even while the eyes of the world are on them during this delightfully shambolic Olympic Games:

Chinese troops fired on Tibetan protesters this week and 400 people have been killed since unrest erupted in March, the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying in an interview published on Thursday.

The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader denied a comment attributed to him by Le Monde newspaper that 140 people had died on Monday when the Chinese security forces opened fire. But his office said there were casualties.

“The Chinese army again fired on a crowd on Monday August 18, in the Kham region in eastern Tibet,” said the Nobel Peace prize winner who is on a 12 day visit to France.

Zzzzz…

Let’s get back to discussing faked opening ceremonies and under-aged gymnasts!

Tonight I was giving a techie walkthrough for a friend via MSN (a.k.a. “Windows Live Messeger”) when I had the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

Man, was I pissed off. So it was that much sweeter when I read that the BSOD itself had a cameo during the Olympic Opening Ceremony. How cool is that?

At the exact moment Li Ning was rounding the lip of the Bird’s Nest during the amazing torch-lighting climax, someone snapped this photo of our good friend the BSOD nestled amongst the Nest’s steel twigs. Perhaps an Opening Cermonies IT dude spit out his coffee on the machines in the server room when Li took to the sky?

Resolved: This is more embarrassing for China than their smog and human rights record combined!