Let He Who Is Without Sin...

Crazy Bela is up in arms about the Olympics gymnastics scoring.

Go tell it to Yang Tae Young, Bela. And ask Paul Hamm to give back his stolen gold medal from Athens.

Meanwhile, I am stunned by the performance of Team GB, stunned and delighted. They must have prepared for the Beijing smog and the mass of humanity by going to smoky restaurants and on British public transport (Ah, in-jokes).

I am so happy for all those British athletes who after spending years in the shadows of the more dominant (and less successful) sports like soccer are now feted as national heroes in a sport-mad country. Plus the UK is out-performing Australia, which is ALWAYS a cause for VE Day-like mad abandon street parties.

Wetter, Crapper, Less Complete

Memo to:

Lord Sebastian Coe, Chairman
The London Organising Committee of the Olympic & Paralympic Games (LOCOPG 2012)
1 Churchill Place
Canary Wharf
London, E14 5LN
United Kingdom

9th August, 2008

Dear Lord Coe;

I watched the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympiad last night with great interest. Upon its conclusion, I turned my thoughts to the opening ceremonies for London 2012 and it is to that element of your event I turn my attention now.

Unless you can persuade the Queen or one of her heirs to run around the roofline of the stadium suspended from a wire-fighting rig and then light the cauldron with a Dunhill desk lighter and one her own majestic rose-scented farts, you are screwed. I also think its a safe bet that the British version of the grand pageant of history as symbolized by dance, flash cards, fireworks, and percussion instruments will be a bit rubbish. The Chinese also had genuine Scottish bagpipers, which I imagine annoyed you to no end, as it makes your plans to include Chinese opera seem very derivative.

And that's before we consider the chance of rain.

Sincerely,
Wisdom Weasel
Floreat Expatria
17 Dungrumblin Towers
Rock-around-the-clock-land, Maine.

How Britain will light the Olympic cauldron, 2012

Hello, Dalai

Image by Beau Bo D'Or

If People Only Knew

When I was a lad I used to accompany my mother to the Key Market in Sprowston for the weekly grocery shop. This was for fresh and tinned only, as frozen food required a separate monthly trip to Bejams and then a mad dash back the 100 yards to the Ford Cortina lest the half hundredweight of deep frozen peas and meat "defrost", but it was still a significant provisioning mission.

Influenced by the pernicious ways of advertising, I would trail the shopping trolley begging my mum to buy me McVities chocolate digestives (here's a picture showing the proper deployment thereof). I was fed up with the manky store brand and wanted- as had been suggested in the advertisments- to like high on the hog like some crumb and chocolate covered scion of the landed gentry. Mum always said no, citing a friend of a friend who worked for McVities who claimed that store brand biscuits were made on the same production line by the same company with the same ingredients.

"Bollocks" I thought each time. I continued to believe that this was just another piece of older relative propaganda (like the time my grandfather told me less bubble bath made for more bubbles) until I saw an educational film on United Biscuits* while in secondary school. The film did indeed confirm that biscuits for UBs various brands and for the brands of its nominal competitors (the supermarket own brands) were run off on the same production lines. Well, bugger me!

This all returned to me this morning over breakfast as I was reading a story on the woes of China's manufacturing industry in The Economist. This passage in particular stood out:

"It would undermine the brands that Adidas, Puma, and Nike have spent so much to promote if their customers knew that a Taiwanese contractor called Yue Yuen produced shoes for all of them in China."

This might be the angle to take. People (sadly) will only have so much empathy for the sweatshop workers and slave laborers who make their footwear (and such ridiculous profit margins for Big Shoe). But tell them that the Nike on their foot is almost identical to the Puma on yours and that you both got scammed and you might be able put a new crack in the lifestyle sales pitch these hucksters rely on.

(*An deep understanding of biscuits and confectionery being a mandatory British educational requirement)

Red Menace Fails Significant Test

There is a lot of guff spoken these days about how the rise of China to global prominence threatens the United States' role as the world's sole superpower. As the following photo and caption from the BBC website shows, much of this concern is overstated:

Babies disguised as pandas take part in a crawling contest in a Hong Kong shopping mall.
Call those panda disguises? They are bloody awful. They look nothing like the photo example in the background, which in turn looks nothing like a panda. Utter crap; poor show, Chinese babies. These are quite obviously human infants, not baby pandas. Nothing to fear there, I'd venture.