darkoshi | Entries tagged with olympics

Today I started watching the 2024 Paris Olympics Closing ceremony which I had taped with my Tablo, to find that it recorded less than an hour rather than the full 3 hours I had set it to record. So not only did the Tablo fail to tape the breaking competition, it also flubbed this one.

But that is okay, as the Olympics channel on YouTube now has the full ceremony available!
Full Closing Ceremony ✨ | Paris Replays

I found some clips of the breaking events too!

The artistic swimming is quite amazing too - I wasn't expecting to be so impressed by it:

Watch on YouTube

Video title:
The routine that secured them GOLD! 🥇✨ (synchronized swimming duet)
Posted by: Olympics
Date posted: Sep 2, 2024

Gold to People's Republic of China | Artistic Swimming | #Paris2024 (team swimming)

USA Perform to Michael Jackson | Artistic Swimming | #Paris2024 (team swimming)

So now I'm partway through watching the Olympics closing ceremony as well as the Paralympics closing ceremony. (Maybe I'll finish before the next Olympics comes along...)

This year, I took the ornaments off the Christmas tree on May 27. I left the tree up, still enamored with the Twinkle lights on it which can be set to many different color combinations and effects. Today I took the silver garland off the tree branches. I'm still enamored of the lights and won't take the tree down at all this year (possibly the first time ever). It's too late anyway; no point in taking it down now just to put it up again in a few months. In December, maybe I will take it over to Qiao's house for a change.

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I have watched both the Olympics and the Paralympics opening ceremonies. Both were wonderful. I have the closing ceremonies recorded, ready to watch.

I recorded both the opening and closing ceremonies from the Paris Olympics and finally got to watch most of the opening ceremony today. (Due to how it was recorded, I started off as the "L" teams were sailing by, and watched to the end. Now I've also watched from the beginning to the "E" teams. I hope to watch the rest tomorrow or rather later today.)

I've been quite enjoying it; it is so good!

Having started watching it in the middle, it was all quite suspenseful and surprising to me (I didn't know for sure that the boats meant there'd be no traditional parading of athletes into the stadium... nor even a traditional stadium).

The people in flowing dresses on top of long poles on the bridge, swaying back and forth and in circles! Very surreal yet familiar somehow. I can envision/feel myself doing that, despite my usual fear of heights.

In the library segment, I wished they'd translated the titles of the French books they showed. I reversed the video and paused it several times to write down the book titles. With help from a couple of other sites as well as Google translate, they are:

Paul Verlaine: Romances Sans Parole (Songs Without Words / Wordless Romances?)
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset: On Ne Badine Pas Avec L'Amour (Love is No Joke / You don't joke with love?)
Annie Ernaux: Pasion Simple (Simple Passion)
Guy de Maupassant: Bel-Ami (Good Friend)
Leïla Slimani: Sexe Et Mensonges (Sex and Lies)
Raymond Radiguet: Le Diable au Corps (The Devil Within)
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangeureuses (Dangerous Liaisons)
Molière: Les Amants Magnifiques (The Magnificent Lovers)
Marivaux: Le Triomphe De L'Amour (The Triumph of Love)

That segment ended with a presumed threesome as the door closed!

The iPhone commercial where the security cams get wings and take off flying - those look cute to me, even with the single red "eye". It seems a mean thing for the iPhone to blow them up; they were just being curious!

I like the split-screen way the NBC broadcast showed some of the segments, so one could choose to continue watching the boats or other entertainment in the one window while the interviews took place in the 2nd window.

The boats going up and down in the waves! Is it normal for the Seine to have such high waves? Did any of the athletes get sea sick?

The singing decapitated Marie Antoinettes in the windows! With heavy metal and pink smoke!

The silvery mechanical horse running down the river (with silvery rider)! That was so cool!!!

The Eiffel tower light show at the end! The disco music! OMG SO AWESOME!!!

The giant floating fiery hot-air-balloon cauldron!

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Some of the segments looked quite dangerous to me. I am glad no one got hurt. (I hope no one got hurt.)

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I wish the American team weren't shown yelling "U.S.A! U.S.A!" most of the time. It gets so old. I half suspect (only half though) that NBC prompted them to yell it, too. You don't hear most other teams being so nationalistic. I don't watch the Olympics to see the American team in particular, or to cheer on the American team, as NBC seems to want to presume. Nothing against them (let the best athlete win), but American teams and American athletes are shown on American TV all year long.

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I recorded the opening & closing ceremonies on my Tablo (4th generation) over-the-air digital video recorder (OTA DVR), which I guess I'm still learning to use.
I had scheduled the Tablo to also record the 08/10 Olympics breaking competition on the Telemundo Spanish-language channel. That was the only OTA channel I found which was listed to show the breaking competition. But I'm very disappointed that my Tablo ended up with no trace of that recording. I had recently been very impressed while watching online videos from some other break-dancing competition prior to the Olympics, and had been looking forward to it.

I didn't get to watch any of the other events except for a small amount of speed climbing which was in progress when I turned the TV on one day. I usually like to watch at least some of the gymnastics. But this year the breaking (ahh, can't I still call it break dancing?) sounded like it would be more interesting to me to watch!

After my other posts about the Olympics opening ceremony, I feel I should at least mention the Uyghur situation and other human rights abuses by China so it won't seem like I'm ignoring it.

It is horrible; it is akin to Nazi Germany and the 1936 Olympics.

I was ambivalent enough about it to not be particularly interested in even watching the opening ceremony. But Qiao recorded it for me, knowing that I'm usually into such things. And I was curious about it, so I did watch it.

I know that the China situation is not the fault of the athletes or all the many people involved in the Olympics. If we only allowed the Olympics to be held in countries without human rights violations, how many countries would be left, and how many of those would even be capable of hosting such a big event?

Would boycotting the Olympics completely do anything to help the situation? How?
And if so, shouldn't we be boycotting everything from China, not just the Olympics? We depend on China for so many products, I doubt that would even be feasible.

So, like so many other things in the world, I don't know what the "right" or best approach would be.

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Other things that struck me about the ceremony:

Xi Jinping is shown wearing a face mask. If I recall right, he took it off to give his speech, and put it back on right afterwards. Sitting in the stands, he wore it.
Whereas Putin is shown maskless, hatless, gloveless, like the cold doesn't bother him. (And maybe it doesn't, if he's a sociopath and if sociopaths don't feel pain as intensely as others.)
But I wonder if Xi Jinping was at all annoyed that Putin didn't wear a face mask.

In the part where the snowflakes with country names were (virtually) spinning in the air before the lighting of the "cauldron", the one for "ROC" (which Russia is competing under) was shown at least 3 times. Seems odd to me. Would China have done that as a nod to Russia?

While some of the speeches were going on, in the part where you could see 4 or 5 young males in the background holding various country's flags, those flag-holders were smiling so cheerfully, for so long. They even looked like real smiles, not forced. Were those people chosen to stand there because they are good at holding a smile? How much pressure was on them (and the other participants) to keep a cheerful face? (I've wondered that about performers in other events too, but this being China, I wonder if there would be punishment given to performers for failing to meet expectations.)

The soldiers in military uniforms who transferred the Chinese flag before it being hoisted... at first, those slow & quick goose steps they did in unison were disturbing to see. But then again, it also looked very neat.

When watching things like the Olympics opening ceremonies (and also various music competition TV shows with a lot of special effects) in the last decade or more, I can't tell how much of it (if any) is computer generated graphics which are only visible on the TV screen, versus what is being shown and seen by the participants in person.

The giant LED screen on the field of the birds-nest stadium, I can understand. I still wonder how much more (or less) wondrous it looks in person. How clear is it? How real? Does it look pixelated up close? Is it real enough to seem like you're looking over a cliff?

But other parts like the "ice cube", I can't even figure out. Is it something physical or not? What do the people in the stadium see? It is a cube of LED screens that rises out of the floor? Is it a cube of glass that has images projected into/onto it? Or is it only a 2-D image on the floor which looks like 3-D from a certain angle? I need to know, in order to be able to appreciate it! Otherwise it seems like just any other special effect in a movie.

Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony: One World, One Family

A virtual ice cube emerges from the stadium floor, where 24 laser beams carve and engrave the names of the 24 previous Olympic Winter Games hosts before projecting the name of Beijing 2022.
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A projection display shows previous Winter Olympic games information during the Opening Ceremony...

What does that mean? What is a virtual ice cube? Are the laser beams real or virtual too? If they are real, what are they pointed at, and how does it work? The next part calls it a projection display, but still, where is the video explaining how it is all done? Maybe I should be doing YouTube searches.

Even the Olympic rings leave me guessing. I guess they are made of some kind of translucent plastic or glass, and are hanging from wires? They are at least a real physical object, right?

Some interesting tidbits I came across.

Team GB's Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics kit is made from recycled ocean plastic

Winter Olympics 2022: Team outfits and the brands who designed them

Regarding the U.S. team's outfit:
The most interesting feature of the jacket is its Intelligent Insulation technology, which is battery or wired tech that expands or contracts the fabric with temperature change. This allows the wearer to extend the use of the anorak.

(But see below article which indicates the jacket does *not* require batteries and wires.)

Regarding the Chinese outfit:
China also unveiled a uniform with self-heating thermal underwear

What is that?, I wondered. Here is one page that explains it:
SKIINCore, the self-heating underwear that is going to revolutionise winter

Of all the outfits shown in this article, the Kazakh one looks the best to me, a nice light blue/white/black color combination and neat design across the chest. It looks very stylish and pretty to me!
For that matter, the Kazakh flag is pretty too, with a yellow sun and flying bird on a light blue sky, and that same neat design on the edge.

Here's how Team USA's Olympic Opening Ceremony outfits were made

The jackets include a built in smart, honeycomb-like fabric layer that expands or contracts in response to temperature changes — all without the use of a battery or wired technology, they said.

The fashion company said this allows the apparel to have the ability to transition through three-seasons, and from indoor to outdoor environments, which eliminates the need for multiple garments.

Here's what Canada and Mexico wore during the Olympic Opening Ceremony

Mexico's jacket has a (candy) skull image on front which was striking enough that after glimpsing it, I rewound the DVR to see it again.

Canada's outfit includes a puffy-sectioned insulated scarf which looks like it must be very nice and warm. But seeing it worn by the athletes along with their jackets and all else, it looked bulky and awkward to me. But gotta say, they did look warm! And from the group photo shown on this page, it looks like they have a lot of choices on what to wear.

What kind of small flag was the British team waving in their hands while walking in the winter Olympics opening ceremony? It looks like a quarter section of the union jack. Does it represent anything other than Britain? Has it been used before? I searched but didn't find any info on it.

This article has a photo that shows it - the athletes at the top of the photo behind the main flag bearers are holding the small flags:

https://e3.365dm.com/22/02/2048x1152/skynews-winter-olympics-beijing_5662490.jpg

Edited to add at 1:44pm:

Yesterday while searching about that unfamiliar flag, I came across this:
Welsh dragon and St George's cross barred from Olympics as Chinese ban 'propaganda' flags

At the time, that article didn't seem related to me. But this morning after waking up, it occurred to me, is the team using this quarter-union-jack in protest at not being able to show the individual countries' flags? A quarter-union-jack could represent one the 4 countries in the U.K., but if everyone on the team is waving the same quarter flag it's ambiguous enough that China can't claim...

Aha! Now that I look at the above photo more closely, some of the quarter flags have the red horizontal bar on top, and some on the bottom. Simply coincidence, or not? My web searches on the topic still aren't having any success.

Maybe news outlets are purposely not reporting on it, so as to keep it under China's radar?

Update, 2022/02/27
I still didn't find a definitive answer, but I did find someone else curious about the same thing:
Great Britain Question: small flags are one quarter of the Union Jack?

This photo (from this Team GB tweet) has great detail and shows the small white round design on the small quarter flags is a "Team GB" logo. The flags in this photo all have the red bar at the top, not the bottom. But this image still seems to show one flag with the red bar at the bottom.

Team GB's outfits were designed by company Ben Sherman. It's possible the small flags were designed simply to look good, matching with the team's sweaters, which also show only a portion of the flag. But it is still an odd thing to do for an actual country's flag, small or big, versus a flag design being put on clothing or other merchandise.

Watch on YouTube

Video title: Start Your Impossible | Never Stop | Toyota
Posted by: Toyota Global
Date posted: May 30, 2021

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I'm back to watching the Olympics opening ceremony. That was in one of the commercial breaks. It caught my eye enough that I stopped fast-forwarding thru the commercials and backed up to watch it.

I'm also back to cringing internally when seeing people on TV not wearing their face masks properly, or wearing ones that aren't fitted properly to them. So many masks slipping below noses. Quite a few purposely pushed down.

The male Iraqi flag bearer was wearing a face mask but the female flag bearer was smiling broadly without a face covering. What's up with that? My web search didn't find an answer on her masklessness, but instead found this:
Mask-shy Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan rain on COVID-compliant opening parade

The way they have the stadium seats randomly covered in different colors sure makes a good imitation (from a distance) of the stands being filled with people.

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Oh gosh, this cat commercial is good too :D

Watch on YouTube

Video title: 2021 Chevy Silverado – Cat | Chevrolet
Posted by: Chevrolet
Date posted: Jul 23, 2021

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Well, I'd better stop the recording again for now and go to sleep.