Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Olympic Update

- Turns out that the Olympic organizers added in some computer animation to enhance the opening ceremony.

Media gets their panties in a bunch because: It lessens the originality of the experience.
I don't care because: It was still awesome to watch in HD. I was exhausted from a 10 hour flight and watched the whole recording without getting tired, it was riveting in my opinion and one of the finest performances I've ever seen.

(Over two years, consistently, I keep forgetting how badly I need to make it into one of these opening ceremonies. Then another one happens and they rarely are less than amazing. I'd read somewhere that someone was able to get a ticket the morning of the ceremony for $400. That is an absolute steal in my book; I'd easily pay that to go.)

- Turns out that little girl that sang in the ceremony wasn't singing; she was lip-synching the words sung by a less-cute girl.

Media gets their panties in a bunch because: Thou shalt never call any child cuter, less cute, more cute, or anything other than "everyone is just perfect in their own way."
I don't care because: It still sounded awesome. Singers sing songs written by less cute people all the time. As far as I'm concerned, it's a great example of division of labor. One sings it, one performs it. China could use all of the market improvements they can get.

3 comments:

Thomas said...

I think the issue isn't that one is less-cute than the other; it's that people thought that the girl on-stage was the one singing. I'm guessing that they didn't say, "And now, Ode to the Motherland will be sung by Yang Peiyi, with cuteness provided by Lin Miaoke." I'm guessing they said "...sung by Lin Miaoke." The cute girl, merely by virtue of being cute, is getting credit for something she didn't do.

Justin M Ross said...

My favorite thing about this is it demonstrates that you don't need a consumer culture to be extremely vain.

Thomas said...

You might also be interested to know that some of the fireworks were faked on TV as well.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26139005/