okay this is going to be a open running thread throughout the olympics.... i'd like to start off with the opening ceremony...

I don't remember seeing any of the other olympic opening ceremonies, didn't really care until this year, but i thought the Beijing opening ceremony has to have topped the charts from years previous... what do you think?

feel free to discuss anything related to the 2008 olympics. i'm currently watching usa vs. japan in 2v2 womens volleyball. looks like the us is going to take this one.

Overall Medal Standings - The official website of the BEIJING 2008 Olympic Games

medal count, america rank 1 so far.

The only olympics I care about are the knitting olympics so I don't know much about the opening ceremonies. What little I accidentally read does seem a bit over the top but that's probably a good thing for china. There does seem to be an awful lot of controversy over athletes though. I keep reading that yet another american has dropped out.

I don't care much about the outcome of the Olympics but I did watch a little bit of the opening ceremonies. They were amazing! They had over 15,000 performers, light shows, martial arts performance, the works! What I didn't like was how they did it. They built a huge stadium, I heard, by relocating over 100,000 people and knocking down their homes. All that communist stuff where people don't matter...

nevertheless still ah inspiring their technology and architecture is just amazing. worlds largest LED screen that was pretty impressive...the box scene were the boxes were popping up and down creating different Chinese characters and performing a wave i thought was done by computer with hydrolics raising the boxes but at the end all these people popped out all done by timing and people raising the boxes.

Yeah it was amazing as a performance can come.

medal update

american and china are 8 medals for a tie for rank 1.

womens gymnastics is on right now... in case anyone cares.

Did you know the medals for the first time ever are in laid with Jade? Not just any Jade, but Burmese Blood Jade! That's right, the athlete's hard work is being rewarded with an award that causes death and suffering to the Burmese people. Kind of sums up the Chinese Regieme.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the olympics started on 8/8/08, the 20 year anniversary of the student massacre in Burma. Bet you didn't see that in the papers....

Every day is the anniversary of something bad...there are only 365 of them, you know.

you can read anything into anything... yoru right ich... china didn't choose to have the oplympics start 8/8/08 the olympic comittee did.