Saturday, August 09, 2008

Did You See That?

Good god in heaven, that opening ceremony for the Olympics was amazing! I'm not really surprised though. Zhang Yimou is my favorite director ever. (He even beats out the Coen Brothers in my opinion.) I don't know if Courtney saw this, but for some reason I think she would have really loved it. Gorgeous performance and amazing in its scope.

Of course you can argue that China has much more pressing needs on which it could have spent the very large amount of money it spent on these opening ceremonies and the games as a whole, but if you could think about that during the actual goings on, you don't have a heart. At least an artistic heart.

Now China, it's time to get to work on improving your infrastructure and environmental problems. There's no reason that 70,000 people should die in earthquakes, many in public buildings like schools or top athletes should refuse to compete in their best events because of the air pollution like Gebrselassie. I'll even give you a couple of decades to work on human rights as long as there's a steady improvement, so I'm not asking too much.

But as for Bob Costas, he seems to use some odd pronunciations for words. I thought he was way off base for "quixotic", which I had been taught was pronounced "kee-AH-tic" because the word is derived from Don Quixote, which is pronounced "don kee-HOE-tay", but his pronunciation of "kwik-SOHT-ik" is apparently a standard English pronunciation. At least his pronunciation of French President Sarkozy of "sar-KOE-zee" is wrong. My pronunciation of "sar-koe-ZEE" is right.

Stupid Bob Costas.

2 comments:

Courtney said...

Of course I watched it, and I agree -- it was stunning. I just have an emotional attachment to the Atlanta ceremonies because I was in it. I'm not disputing that Beijing's ceremonies were amazing, because they were.

Julie said...

I did see that. It was awesome.