17 Feb Ceremony

I hesitate to start this, for fear of luring Olympic-worshiping bores out of their rec-rooms, but US bloggers had a field day with the perfectly hideous opening ceremony in Vancouver. My favorite was Heather Havrilesky in Salon.com, Moneyquotes:

Some dramatic photography paired with soaring music and a lot of melodramatic prose. “Here, where a swerving coastline submits to waves of glacial peaks, where the mapping of the Western world came to an end, the discovery yet begins anew!” Praise Jesus! Who writes this stuff?

Nelly Furtado and Bryan Adams perform the lamest song since that thing they play at the end of the NCAA basketball tournament, “One Shining Moment”: “This is your moment, your time to run like the wind!” I’m flashing back to Up With People. First Nations dancers are jumping up and down like the fraudience at a Miley Cyrus concert.

Now here comes a tribute to “the frigid North.” It’s snowing. Donald Sutherland is murmuring into a microphone somewhere. People in white are walking through the snow….

“The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass speaks to me, and my heart soars,” says Donald Sutherland….

Now here’s a tap dancer on the platform, and more maple leaves. Now there are swarms of tap dancers. Tap dancing doesn’t exactly read in a stadium. Oh, we’ll fix it by adding sparklers to our heels. Wow, this is quite seriously not good. Now more maple leaves are falling from the ceiling. There are quite a few identifiably uncoordinated people in the mix out there. Oh God. When will it end?

Naturally, Canadian readers fired back, including this beaut from someone who styled herself, Sweet Jane.

We put the proudest, butchiest lesbian ever on an international stage to sing the living shit out of a song widely considered to be among the best ever written. Ever. We’re understandably proud of that. You don’t think it was appropriate. Go read the words – conveniently googleable! (Also, that lesbian? Totally allowed to get married here in our hopelessly-decade-behind-the-times little backwater. When, oh, when will we ever catch up to rest of the world?)

Now the good news, for those who imagine such things to be important, Nate Silver’s wonderful poly-sci statistics blog, Fivethirtyeight.com, projects that Canada — Canada! — will win the most medals at these games.

Don’t worry. We’ve sent Nate’s slide rule out to get it checked.

Hat tip: Fritz McEvoy (but don’t blame him for the snarky stuff).