Flashback to Beijing Olympics

Hmmm... I seem to recall writing something about this before...

Given the Chinese government's low regard for human rights, I was curious... How many people were injured or killed practicing the high-risk evolutions they put into the opening and closing ceremonies?

Why did this just pop into my mind 9 months later?

This showed up in the news today:

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Liu Yan, regarded as China's top classical dancer, was to give the performance of a lifetime: She was to dance a solo at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

She was to perform a dance entitled "Silk Road," a piece intended to convey the rich cultural history of China.

But it never happened.

Twelve days before she was to take the stage at the Olympics, in an event that China hoped would catapult the nation to international glory, she fell while rehearsing the dance -- leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.

Sure, one accident doesn't PROVE my point, but it sure seems to fit with my speculation last summer doesn't it?

Olympics Closing Ceremony

The Olympics Closing Ceremony was another spectacular show put on by the Chinese. Bravo!

It got me to wondering though...

Would anything like the opening or closing ceremonies of this Olympics be possible in a non-communist country where you couldn't just ORDER millions of members of your population to work for 18 hours a day on practicing for the show and paying them whatever the government saw fit to pay them? Those two ceremonies were ten times more extravagant than any Super Bowl half time show, and the Super Bowl half time shows are backed by gajillions of dollars of big name capitalist companies' advertising.

As those hundreds of Chinese comrades did their dance on the side of the remembrance tower and then dozens more were flying up in the air suspended by wires, it occurred to me that OSHA would NEVER have signed off on anything like that. Well, at least not without extensive safety mechanisms that would have made it just that much more expensive to try and accomplish it in America.

Given the Chinese government's low regard for human rights, I was curious... How many people were injured or killed practicing the high-risk evolutions they put into the opening and closing ceremonies? Not like we'd ever know - they'd never allow it to be published.

If you ask me, it's the same thing with the age of the Chinese female gymnasts. There's no way we'd ever be able to conclusively prove they lied. The communists will create whatever documentation they need as "proof" of the gymnasts age, and they'd never allow anything to be published to the contrary.

Even so, I think these statistics are pretty suspicious if not damning. Basically, all of the Chinese Olympic Team's female gymnasts' heights and weights were the same as that of an average Chinese 12 year old Chinese girl, and they're mostly at or below the 3% mark for the average Chinese 16 year old. It's possible they were all 16 years old. Not probable. Just possible. I suppose if you've got a population of 1.3 BILLION people, and you've got a communist government that can boss people around, then you can scour the countryside for those bottom 3 percentile girls and order them to join the gymnastics team.

There's one other point to consider that they briefly mention in that article. The historic values they used for the "average" Chinese girl's height and weight were from 1965. I would be willing to bet that the average Chinese girl's height and weight has gone UP in the past 40 years, making the data on their gymnasts this year that much more unbelievable.

Again... not probable. Just possible.

All that being said, the conclusion of the article makes a good point: Why bother?

I challenge you to name any activity other than gymnastics (excluding obvious things that depend purely on being small in stature) in which someone who practices regularly between the age of 13 and the age of 16 wouldn’t be a whole lot better by the age of 16 than they were three years earlier.

Why would they need to "cheat" and use girls under 16 years old? Where's the motive?

Thank goodness the Olympics are over. They were fun to watch, but they've been keeping me up late at night watching, and my butt is sore from sitting in our Aloha furniture for hours on end. It's time to hit the rack.

I haven't laughed that hard in...

We've been watching the Olympics every night for the past week. Well, almost anyway.

Some of my favorite parts of the Olympics:

- Watching Michael Phelps win the Gold in swimming the 100m butterfly by 0.01 seconds. If you missed it, or even if you didn't miss it, you should check out this photo sequence on the SI website. Absolutely amazing!

- Watching Shawn Johnson win the Gold on the gymnastics balance beam. No offense to Nastia, but Nastia just never looks like she's having fun. Shawn on the other hand with her big, white, toothy grin is fun to watch because you can tell she's actually enjoying it.

- Watching Jonathan Horton win the Silver on the gymnastics high-bar. That was absolutely stellar and worthy of a Gold medal.

I recently saw an ad on TV from AIG that said laughter can add 8 years to your life. Well, the most recent episode of Monk just added about 16 years to my life. LW and I normally watch Monk together off the DVR, but with the Olympics on we totally forgot and didn't even notice the DVR had recorded a new episode of Monk. It wasn't until my mom emailed and asked if I had seen the episode about Monk getting stuck on board a Navy submarine at sea that we hit pause on the Olympics and switched over to watch Monk.

Aside: In case you've never seen the show before, it's about a police detective named Monk who has obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Naturally, he is extremely uncomfortable with even setting foot on a submarine much less getting stuck on one for five days at sea.

The ENTIRE episode is TOTALLY preposterous. They clearly did not consult ANYBODY who has EVER set FOOT on a submarine before they filmed it. It was SO bad it was absolutely comical.

I mean, yeah, the officers wear summer whites on board the submarine all the time, right? We always submerge right next to the pier without so much as a moment's notice. It doesn't take any time to prepare the ship to get underway and we certainly don't make sure we have an accurate count of who is on board before the crane takes the brow off. Oh wait, we just submerge by the pier, we don't actually have a crane take the brow off - we just let that fall in the water behind us, right? Why yes, the COB is qualified OOD, and he can just relieve the Captain of the Conn anytime he feels like it.

I'm barely scratching the surface of their technical errors here, but the thing that really made me lose it was when they're sitting in the crew's mess eating a meal. The boat suddenly starts to violently shake as if they were in a California earthquake. Monk was wigging out about it, but all the crew members just sat and quietly ate their meals. One of the sailors turned to Monk and said, "Don't worry, it's just a little underwater turbulence."

Maybe you have to see it and hear it on the TV to really get the humor from it, but I erupted in a fit of laughter. I had tears streaming down my face and my abs seriously hurt from laughing so hard. LW thought I was going to pass out from hyperventilation. I just couldn't control myself for several minutes after that.

For you guys at prototype and sub school reading my blog, I know you've probably heard stories about the salty experienced guys on the boat playing jokes on the new guys, but rest assured there are NO doors that go into the ballast tanks. I don't want to spoil any more of it if you want to actually watch it and have a good laugh yourself.

If you missed it, you will be able to watch it on the USA website here. It's episode #705, and as I write this they have up to episode #704 posted to the website.

Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony

Holy Cow Batman! Did you see the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics???

INCREDIBLE!!!

That was absolutely spectacular. If you didn't see it, you really missed out. I can't even begin to describe it all. I really liked the globe thing with the people running around it (if you watched the ceremony, then you know what I'm talking about). You can find lots of videos on YouTube.

I had to pick my jaw up off my lap when the grand finale and the lighting of the Olympic torch were complete. WOW! This YouTube video was taken at a slightly different viewing angle than the NBC footage, but still gives you a feel for it.



I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that they really know how to put on a good fireworks show in China.

Update 8/9/2008: My Aunt Ruth forwarded me this article from Gizmodo by Elaine Chow:

So for those of you who caught the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony last night—Holy crap, right? The synchronization, the music, the timed fireworks; it was a spectacle so awesome that for entire stretches of it, I couldn't really think of anything to say but “woah.” It almost goes without saying, the show owes a lot of its splendor to the absolutely amazing amount of technology that went into it. Chinese news sources now have a breakdown of what was employed to create something that'd make a billion nationals proud. Some crazy stats:

• The LED screen at the center of the ground, which unrolled to represent a huge scroll detailing China's 5,000-year civilization, measured 482 feet by 72 feet wide and contained a whopping 44,000 LED beads with a distance of 600 millimeters between each two.
• Technical monitoring systems were employed to keep track of over 18,000 performers through identification codes, a first for any Olympics.
• The fireworks used a digital ignition control system that coordinated blasts in over 30 locations across Beijing. According to Cai Guoqiang, the explosions maestro behind that part of the show, not a single of the 40,000 cannon shots faltered.
• The material used for the paper on the painting scroll was produced by the country's aerospace sector. Similarly, most of the core technologies used in the ceremony had been developed by domestic companies.

As was stated by broadcasters over and over again, China's a country of tremendous challenges—environmental, economic and human rights-wise—and as a journalist heading into that mess some time in the near future, I'm all too aware of the problems that await me. But after last night's performance, I walked away with a small overflow of pride for my heritage and a lot of hope for a brighter future. I guess that's what the Olympics are all about. [Xinhua]