The 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

[mooncliff]

I had the good great luck to get a ticket in the lottery for the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony. Three hours of the most joy I have ever felt. We could glimpse what we could be all day, every day.

The joke after the Beijing Olympics was that London was going to outsource the show... to the Chinese.

Well, MEGA, I just watched the London Opening Ceremony, and it was ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL!
The Olympic Torch is a stroke of genius. (You really must see video of it being lit. A picture cannot convey it. The symbolism is stunning.)
Here are the highlights.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/vide...ceremony-video

I know you think it is a waste of money and will wind up as a loss, but you all looked brilliant tonight!

Our ancestors, even from just a century ago, would be bewildered. What is this television they are looking at? How is it possible that a picture of something happening on the other side of the planet is being shown... and the picture is moving... and in color?
If they had actually been in the Olympic stadium, they would have been amazed at all that colored light.
They would be amazed at the lack of diseases that plagued us all until the very recent past, and how healthy most are.
They would be amazed at so many people gathered from every country on Earth, and they would ask "What do you mean you 'flew' here?" You mean you came on a very fast steamship?
I think they would be amazed at how good everything is and would think that what we think of as "disaster" is a nuisance compared to the wars, economic crashes, diseases, and ignorance they had to live through. I'd like to think they would be proud of the progress we have made. And we ain't seen nothin' yet!

[GRG55]

Re: The 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

+1

The Brits did what everyone thought they couldn't...beat the Chinese...

[mooncliff]

Re: The 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

Sorry, I meant that the British said they would have to outsource to the Chinese...
But it was totally brilliant.

[don]

Re: The 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

It was neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future. Rather, it was a sometimes slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948.

Britain was so poor then that it housed its athletes in old army barracks, made them bring their own towels and erected no buildings for the Games. The Olympics cost less than £750,000, turned a small profit and made the nation proud that it had managed to rise to the occasion in the face of such adversity.

There was that same sense of relief intermingled with self-satisfaction this time. But such was the grandeur of 2012, even in these tough economic times, that 80,000 people sat comfortably in a new Olympic Stadium, having traveled by sleek new bullet trains and special V.I.P. road lanes to a new park that has completely transformed once-derelict east London.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/sports/olympics/in-olympic-opening-ceremony-britain-asserts-its-eccentric-identity.html?ref=todayspaper

Mary Poppins is a series of children's books written by P. L. Travers. Throughout the Mary Poppins series, which lasted from 1934 to 1988, Mary Shepard was the illustrator and acted as a second author.^[1] The books center on a magical English nanny, Mary Poppins. She is blown by the East wind to Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane, London, and into the Banks' household to care for their children. Encounters with chimney sweeps, shopkeepers and various adventures follow until Mary Poppins abruptly leaves, i.e., "pops-out". The adventures take place over a total of eight books. However, only the first three books feature Mary Poppins arriving and leaving. The later five books recount previously unrecorded adventures from her original three visits. As P.L. Travers explains in her introduction to Mary Poppins in the Park, "She cannot forever arrive and depart."

Mary P., at least in her first incarnation, actually interacted with the real economy. Charmingly old-school, indeed . . .

[Chris Coles]

Re: The 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

Being a Brit that watched it all his home TV, rather than attended, of all the aspects that surprised me was the forging of the Olympic ring. An absolutely magnificent scene. I particularly liked the way the pre-event publicity always gave us the impression that the show was going to be all about the "Green and Pleasant land". It was a masterstroke to hide the chimneys and all the grim paraphernalia of the industrial revolution. Then, towards the end, made me realise that we Brits are, at times, very much "in your face" eccentrics, as the wide range of British music showed.

A wonderful show.

Now, I suppose, being a British inventor, I shall have to get myself a Top Hat.