I”m sitting here inadvertentlywatching the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in China. It’s been very educational. I’ve learned a lot of things I didn’t know. Here are some examples, along with some thougths I had during the show:

• Taiwan, although they have athletes there, weren’t given the dignity of actually being called Taiwan, or even allowed to carry their own flag.
• “Palestine” is apparently a country. Their athletes garb included the terrorist-sympathizing “keffiyeh” made famous by Yasser Arafat. Nice sentiment there.
• Hong Kong is a country? I thought it was part of China?
• They had the world’s largest LED (or was that LCD?) display in the middle of their stadium, almost 500 feet long. Pretty impressive. I wonder if it’s powered by a counterfeit version of Windows?
• It was nice to see that President Bush was the row captain on his row (i.e. he sat on the end). Russian’s Putin was in the middle of the same row. Hopefully he stayed seated when the Chinese National Anthem played.
• Speaking of the Chinese National Anthem, Americans could learn a thing or two about how an anthem is sung. It seems that when we have “celebrities” singing the Anthem here, they treat it as an opportunity to show off their vocal chops. It’s not uncommon to hear the National Anthem butchered here. While the Chinese anthem sounded like some kind of death march, they at least were all on the same page.
• It was nice to see the Iraqi athletes get a rousing ovation when they walked in. Too bad the Olympic bureaucrats didn’t get their head out of their butts in time for all the Iraqi athletes to make it.
• I have to hand it to NBC for actually mentioning some of the controversial aspects of China hosting the games. They mentioned Tienanmen Square at the beginning and were seemingly outraged that China had stripped the visa from someone who’d planned to publicize the Darfur situation.
• The little boy who survived the earthquake, who walked in with Yao Ming… Did you notice that his Chinese flag was upside down? Wonder if it was made in China?
• I can’t believe they’re getting rid of baseball. Must be because it’s an American game.
• Speaking of stupidity on the part of the IOC, when they started letting professional athletes compete, that pretty much ruined it for me.

Overall, the ceremony seemed to be China’s plea to the rest of the world to be accepted as an equal…. this despite the fact that citizens in that country aren’t all equal.  The fact is, China should never have been given this opportunity to host the Olympics until they show more progress towards human rights. I doubt I’ll be watching much more of the games; I wasted too much time watching the opening ceremonies as it is.