Me, too. That's the one thing I don't miss about playing in May in Houston. We get some of it in Austin, but it's not nearly as bad.
heard some amusing comments from live commentary for the olympics about the us team. very large in numbers: most teams finishes in a few shots, but us team's entry took almost two minutes casual outfits: most teams either wear their flag's colors or wear culture outfit. US seems to be wearing just casual outfits 60-70% are blacks. (they were trying to make an association with black being casual) this is when the subject changed to blacks. Including the leading touch carrier? that was born in Sudan? Some guy then jumped in and said blacks usually have freak atheleticism. they have longer lower body as well as a "very round butt". At this point I was ROFLMAO.
Spoiler The flame lighting process is cool. The guy flys and runs across on the wall, kong fu style, along an unfolding scroll. He is Li Ning, Gold medalist in gymnastics and CEO of his namesake sporting company, by the way.
Those of you who just saw the opening ceremony please use the spoiler function as NBC isn't going to show it for another 8 hours. Just watched CCTV streaming telecast and pretty awesome. The opening artistic bit is incredible using state of the art special effects and choreography to bring to life Chinese painting. Unlike some of the other Olympic openings where they have created these massive avante garde Circ de Soleil type openings this one was very Chinese and IMO really captured Chinese culture and history. The parade of nations was pretty decent with a bunch of the Chinese cheerleaders put to use cheering along the route. Since the US uniforms have been shown already I will give my own comment on them. They look the team is going to a preppy funeral. They look they were designed by Ralph Loren on downers. The other thing I noticed was that a few teams had NBA players as flag carriers. Spoiler including Andrei Kirilenko for Russia and Manu for Argentina. It was interesting to note that during the lineup waiting for the Olympic flag to be brought in they showed Kirilenko over in the US team hamming it up with Carlos Boozer. Also I doubt NBC will show her but check out the flag carrier for Jordan. The torch lighting was pretty cool and surprising. and it makes sense why they didn't use Yao Ming for it. Finally some very awesome fireworks throughout the ceremonies and what was great was that they didn't limit them to just the stadium and immediate area but seemed to have fireworks going off all around Beijing. All and all a great opening ceremonies.
Another thing that was interesting to note was the reactions of the political leaders in the audience during the parade of nations. Spoiler Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) looks like they created a different flags for the Olympics. I guess the PRC wouldn't approve of the KMT flag. When they marched in there was a huge cheer but then they showed Hu Jintao (president of PRC) who while he politely clapped didn't look happy. When the Russian team marched in Putin looked bored and seemed to have to be prompted to stand up for the team. They showed Bush a few times and other than the US team coming in he looked bored most of the time.
