Opening

After dinner, but before playing Rock Band with Jeff, Robin and I watched the opening ceremonies. Even I, a crazed Olympic enthusiast, tends to steer clear of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Usually they are cheesy and ALWAYS they are boring. Um, not so this year. That shit was ca-RAZY. Crazy beautiful, crazy elaborate, crazy impressive, and frankly at times just plain crazy. I was totally not bored. It was an absolutely mesmerizing display of special effects and large scale human choreography.

Pretty much every act was mind-bendingly vast and amazing, but I was particularly blown away by that thing they did with the giant boxes that represented the wind. Robin and I began making jokes about half way through that number that rather than some sort of complicated system of hydraulic machinery, there were people under those boxes, laboriously and with inhuman precision lifting them into the air. The choreography was insane- totally impressive even when we thought is was a machine. Imagine the uproar in the living room when after a few minutes of joking about the poor people lifting those boxes in IMPOSSIBLE symmetry, thousands of smiling, waving Chinese dudes popped out at the end. I refuse to believe that wasn’t trickery. I simply canNOT believe that human beings could be taught and organized to perform that box lifting routine. A lot of the Opening Ceremonies felt like this actually. Sort of like, HOW IN THE HELL ARE THEY DOING THAT?! WOW! I’M BOTH MASSIVELY IMPRESSED AND KIND OF FREAKED OUT. PLEASE POUR ME ANOTHER GLASS OF WINE. ALSO, PASS THE M&Ms.  THIS SHOW IS OUTRAGEOUS.

I loved the first half of the Parade of Nations, but after about an hour when we realized we were only half way to the Americans coming out, the call of Rock Band was too great, and we called it quits on the Opening Ceremonies. I did not see the lighting of the torch because I was making beautiful music with plastic instruments.

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I thought I should give you fair warning about the Olympic coverage you will get at TWC. First of all, I have the next two weeks off. I literally have nothing to do except for watch Olympics all day long every day, but I have no idea how much I’ll actually watch. It might be a ton, but it might be only the evenings. Who knows. I’m a woman of leisure right now. I am surrendering totally to my whims as they unfold. So, you might get wall to wall elaborate Olympic coverage, or you might get none. Heh.

But here’s the important part:

I personally do not care about spoilers. That’s not to say I will be actively seeking out information about events as they occur in Beijing time, but I seriously hate trying to shield myself from spoilers and I prefer to just let information come to me “naturally”. I am comfortable letting the Olympic Gods decide when and how I should find out who won which events. Between the extreme time difference and the massive television coverage, I don’t think I’ll have any idea what is live and what is on tape delay anyway. I’m just going to merrily plod along, writing about whatever captures my fancy. My point is, if you want to avoid spoilers, you should probably wait until after you’ve watched your favorite events to read TWC.