The Opening Ceremony

Who knew the Queen has a sense of humor? Most of the time she keeps that fact pretty well hidden, at least in public, but last night during the opening ceremony she entered into the spirit of things with gusto, performing in a skit with one of the James Bonds and letting her "body double" parachute into the games like Mata Hari.  Wow. There were other "wow" moments during the ceremony, too, of course, along with a few "ick" moments, as always.  So here's my take on the good, the bad and the ugly of London's Opening Ceremony.

One of the Wows for me was simply the number of nations taking part, some of which I've sort-of heard of but don't know very much about (Andorra, Kiribati, Malawi...), some of which I literally didn't even know existed (Comoros, Djibouti, Nauru, Timor-Leste...), and some of which are so associated in my mind with political turmoil that it's easy to forget that they even have regular citizens and athletes (North Korea, Iran, Syria...) It was fun to see all the athletes walk in the parade, especially when they were in native costume. That's pretty much the only chance we have to appreciate them because these tiny, obscure countries get almost no television coverage during the actual events, at least not here in the U.S. I tell myself it would be interesting to google some of them and see what pops up, which I may get around to doing, or not. 

I was stuck by how attractive the athletes were, or perhaps I should say the athletes NBC choose to focus on. 

Speaking of NBC, the biggest ewwwww of the night for me was the seemingly unending commercials.  In my previous post I called the games a corporate promotional money-fest and boy was I right.  Sometimes the commercial breaks seemed to last longer than the segments with actual scenes from the ceremony. 

On the other hand, there were a couple of commercials that I actually liked.  A Visa spot showing a diver diving off the Burj Khalifa, formerly known as the Burj Dubai, made me smile, simply because I've always been intrigued by the world's tallest building.  And I loved the commercial with little kids doing all the things Olympic athletes do, with the proud Moms watching in the stands.  As cute as that was, however, the tagline "Proud Sponsor of Moms," just bugs me.  What does that even mean?

Finally, no sighting yet of Rafalca but the equestrian events haven't started yet.  Stay tuned.