An interesting set of photos in the Telegraph showing the Royal Navy’s largest ship, helicopter carrier HMS Ocean being brought up the Thames for a security exercise in advance of the London Olympics:
A tight squeeze as the tugs work HMS Ocean through the Thames Barrier
HMS Ocean passes in front of the O2 Arena on her way up the Thames
Travelling by air to the UK is a good way to discover the joys of forming queues. The British national pastime of days gone by has been making a stirring new appearance at British airports. The agency responsible is doing everything it can … to suppress information and forbid photography of the queues of people waiting for hours to get through customs:
Heathrow Airport has been ordered by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to stop handing out to passengers leaflets acknowledging the “very long delays” at immigration, which have become a serious government concern in the runup to the Olympics.
Passengers flying into the airport at the weekend reported having to wait for up to three hours before clearing passport control. But after leaflets apologising for the problem were handed out by BAA, which owns Heathrow, the UKBA warned that they were “inappropriate” and that ministers would take “a very dim view”.
The airport operator was also told to prevent passengers taking pictures in the arrivals hall, according to the Daily Telegraph, which obtained correspondence from Marc Owen, director of UKBA operations at Heathrow. Pictures of lengthy queues have been posted on Twitter by frustrated travellers.
Faye Planer interviews Will Self in Bristol University’s Epigram on his views about the upcoming London Olympic extravaganza:
I hear that you are unenthusiastic about the prospect of the Olympics this summer. In your eyes, what is the greatest folly of this whole affair?
Rather unenthusiastic is putting it waaaaay mildly: I think the Olympics suck dogshit through a straw. People believe they encourage da yoof to take up running, jumping and fainting in coils — but this is nonsense. They’re a boondoggle for politicians and financiers, a further corruption of an already corrupt self-appointed international coterie of Olympian cunts, an excuse for ‘elite’ athletes to fuck each other, snarf steroids and pick up sponsorship deals, and a senseless hitching of infrastructural investment — if there’s any reality to this anyway — to a useless loss-trailing expenditure on starchitectural bollix. The stadia themselves are a folly. The new Westfield is a temple to moribund consumerism — in ten years time they’ll all be cracked and spalled; a Hitlerian mass of post-pomo nonsense.If the Olympics did not exist, would it be necessary to invent them?
They didn’t exist for thousands of years. The modern Olympics is a fatuous exercise in internationalism through limbering up and then running down to entropy. The modern Olympics have always been a political football — nothing more and nothing less — endlessly traduced and manipulated by the regimes that ‘host’ them. This one is no different, presenting a fine opportunity for the British security state apparatus and its private security firm hangers-on to deploy the mass-suppression and urban paranoiac technologies in the service of export earning. Some peace, some freedom.[. . .]
‘Really, one may say that the whole Olympic process was a pasteurisation of the city… the microbes disappeared and from a hygienic point of view maybe that was positive, but really what happened is that the variety was destroyed in the process…’ Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said this about the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Do you believe that London is being pasteurised too?
No, I’m quite confident that London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It’s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.
H/T to Charles Stross for the link.
I was at the urinal next to Bob Costas once. It was at the 2010 Winter Olympics, just before the Closing Ceremony, during which Canada said goodbye to the world with a nightmarish glowing dreamscape of giant beavers and plaid-wearing lumberjacks and dancing Mounties and flying moose and looming table hockey players and William Shatner, among others. Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk.
But Bob Costas was not drunk, because Costas is a sober and professional man who disapproves of you and your shenanigans, probably. Costas is among the great broadcasters of his generation, as witnessed most recently by his stellar on-camera interview with accused Penn State pedophile Jerry Sandusky. And despite some creases in his face, and perhaps a whisper of greying hair, Costas remains youthful, even boyish.
Like just about everything in television, however, that is at least partly a facade, as Costas’ monologue on Football Night in America on Sunday last week demonstrated. As if channeling Andy Rooney in 1978, Costas inferred that touchdown celebrations are basically ruining the minds of our children, with their iPhones and their pornography and their touchdown dances. If life is a football field, it is time to leave Bob Costas’s lawn.
Bruce Arthur, “NFL Picks, Week 13: NFL players can dance if they want to”, National Post, 2011-12-02
He’s quite right: this has to be the nadir of international sporting debates:
Where do you stand on the controversial issue of a Great Britain football team? Disgusted that the British Olympic Association is threatening the independence and proud traditions of the home football nations? Angered that the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish associations are trying to thwart the Olympic dreams of their young players? Or, like me, do you want to be woken up when The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever is over?
If you’re wondering why the proposal for a unified British football team has caused such controversy, let me explain. There has never been a single UK football association. Instead, all four countries — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — have their own football associations. Each country is recognised by FIFA as a separate entity even though they are not sovereign nations. It’s one of the residual privileges enjoyed by the nation that invented the game. Although the Brits have minimal influence within FIFA, as the 2018 World Cup bid and the farcical presidential election demonstrated, all four UK nations are represented on the eight-member International Football Association Board (IFAB), which is the sport’s law-making body. The home nations also retain the right to appoint a FIFA vice-president. Although the English FA is keen on fielding a British team in the 2012 Games, the other national associations fear that their independence and FIFA privileges will be jeopardised as a result.
The debate took a farcical twist this week when the British Olympic Association (BOA) announced that an ‘historic agreement’ had been reached with all the home nations to field a Great Britain team at the Olympics. However, no sooner had the BOA made its announcement than the Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland football associations angrily denied that any agreement had been reached. Oops!
You know how some people, having mastered a particular software tool, keep trying to fit every task into the one tool they know even when it’s awkward to do? I’ve seen people using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word or another word processor to produce letters — and people using Word to do spreadsheet-like tasks. The old adage seems to still apply in the software world: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It’s apparently not just small companies that suffer from this sort of problem:
The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world’s population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation’s entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel.
A job vacancy currently advertised on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) website is offering a competitive salary to someone who can maintain and report on data held in Microsoft’s spreadsheet software.
Now, a small biz with few customer accounts might consider Excel to be fit for purpose. But surely housing an Olympic stadium-sized database on a standalone spreadsheet is bonkers, isn’t it?
That’s a mighty big nail for such a small hammer.
If they’d wanted to be sure that the sport got more media attention, they sure chose an effective way to do it:
In an attempt to revive flagging interest in women’s badminton as the 2012 London Olympics approach, officials governing the sport have decided that its female athletes need to appear more, how to put it, womanly.
To create a more “attractive presentation,” the Badminton World Federation has decreed that women must wear skirts or dresses to play at the elite level, beginning Wednesday. Many now compete in shorts or tracksuit pants. The dress code would make female players appear more feminine and appealing to fans and corporate sponsors, officials said.
The rule has been roundly criticized as sexist, a hindrance to performance and offensive to Muslim women who play the sport in large numbers in Asian countries. Implementation has already been delayed by a month. Athletes’ representatives said they would seek to have the dress code scrapped, possibly as early as Saturday at a meeting of the world’s badminton-playing nations in Qingdao, China.
“This is a blatant attempt to sexualize women,” said Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. “It is amazing. You’d think at some point, somebody would have said: ‘Wait a minute. What are we doing?’ ”
There are about 85 players at my badminton club. Only two women regularly wear skirts to play. Despite this ruling, I doubt that many of our players will choose to switch.
They’ve suddenly realized that the truth was staring them right in the face the whole time:
The 2012 London Olympics are more than a year away, but Iran already is threatening to boycott them. According to Bahram Afsharzadeh, secretary general of Iran’s National Olympic Committee, the 2012 Olympic logo secretly spells out the word “Zion,” which makes it “racist.” The Iranians also claim that use of the logo “is a disgracing action and against the Olympics’ valuable mottos.”
H/T to Mark Frauenfelder for the link.
Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” responded to the post entitled SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing with a long comment tying together the Olympics and the omnipresent SWAT teams:
I have to say that I really don’t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can’t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.
Lickmuffin then provided an extended discussion on the same theme:
It’s quite simple, really: if you want to host the Olympics, and you want to have a succesful national Olympic team, you have to have armed-to-the teeth SWAT teams.
To fund the Olympics and Olympians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.
When you have confiscatory tax rates, you’re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.
Some of those people are going to engage in dodgy and risky behaviour, such as importing, growing, manufacturing or just generally dealing with narcotics.
Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businesses.
To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.
Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:
Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.
What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? “Sorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.”
It’s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.
It’s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.
It really does cover all the ground, doesn’t it? Just lacking the obligatory German rendering of SWAT as Sturmabteilung, and we’re golden, as they say.
I originally just added this as a comment on this post, but it appears to have a bit more life in it.
Gil LeBreton made this pithy observation in his column about the Vancouver Olympics on the 28th of February:
After a spirited torch relay ignited pride in every corner of the country, the Olympic Games began and quickly galvanized the nation.
Flags were everywhere. The country’s national symbol hung from windows and was worn on nearly everyone’s clothing.
Fervent crowds cheered every victory by the host nation.
But enough about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
I thought it was amusing, so I just added it to the comment thread, but I guess I wasn’t the only one to notice Mr. LeBreton’s insight:
So true. The parallels between Berlin 1936 and Vancouver 2010 are clear, if you just pay attention.
Not everyone has the perspicacity to discern the neo-Nazi threat north of America’s borders. Fortunately, Mr. LeBreton does. Because he’s more observant than most. He makes the cognitive connections others miss:
“For 17 days we were barraged with Canadian flags, rode buses and trains with people in sweatshirts and jerseys adorned with Canadian maple leafs, and were serenaded at venues by Canadian spectators, lustily cheering for Canadian athletes.”
My God. It’s spine-chilling.
The rest of the world was lulled into complacency and Olympic fever. But the Star-Telegram’s crack reporter wasn’t fooled by the crafty Canucks. Their display of patriotism reminded him of something. Something terrifying.
“I didn’t attend the ’36 Olympics, but I’ve seen the pictures. Swastikas everywhere.”
You see? Maple leaf flag equals swastika. Damn you, Canada.
He’s so right. Connect the dots! Look it up, sheeple!
Apparently, the Russian government is taking the relatively poor showing by the country’s Olympic team very seriously. The “fat cats” who were responsible for training the athletes have been ordered to resign or “we will help them”:
President Medvedev said those who trained the Russian team before the Vancouver games should “have the courage to step down” as a result of Russia’s woeful medals tally. If they refused to resign “we will help them”, he said bluntly.
Over the weekend Medvedev abruptly cancelled a scheduled visit to last night’s closing ceremony, apparently in disgust. “We must drastically change the training of our athletes . . . We have been living on Soviet resources for a long time. But that is over now,” Medvedev told the ruling United Russia Party.
He added: “Unprecedented investments are being made in sports in Russia. But money is not everything. We should think about changing the training methods. The new training system must focus on athletes rather than on fat cats.”
Opposition politicians demanded the sacking of the sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, and Russian Olympic committee president Leonid Tyagachyev, both close allies of Putin. The pair were antiheroes, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said, ridiculing Tyagachyev’s Panglossian prediction Russia would finish in the top three.
It would probably be wise for the so-called “fat cats” to get out while they can. An embarassed Russian government will probably not be acting with grace or tact.
It may not have been the most important hockey game in Canadian history; the 1972 Summit Series has a pretty good argument, and does the 1987 Canada Cup. There were no political implications here, just sporting ones.
Nation-stopping sporting ones, true. If you ever wanted to knock off a bank in Lloydminster, Sask., this was probably a good day to try.
The game was played with a desperate ferocity, and at eye-watering speed. Every goal-mouth scrum was the fall of Saigon; bodies were being thrown around as if everyone involved forgot there is a quarter of the NHL season left to play. Every puck mattered; every play mattered. Everything mattered.
And there was hostility but no fighting; hitting but no headshots; talent so rich that when the NHL starts again today, it will look like a pale shadow of what the game can be.
“I think both teams are winners,” said Wilson. “And maybe more than anything, hockey in general.”
Bruce Arthur, “Crosby makes leap from superstar to legend”, CBC Vancouver Now, 2010-02-28
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