Gormogon operative (in charge of our lunar engineering project—laugh now, but when we puts wings on the thing and sail it around the solar system, you’ll say it’s cool) FJR writes in with her thoughts on Vancouver’s opening ceremonies:

Greetings,

The dancing/fiddling was a little too freaky for me. Maybe it’s my aversion to body art and piercings or the fact the participants looked like River Dance meets Road Warrior but I felt like I had landed in an Irish biker bar. I guess they were trying to appeal to the snowboarding x-sport kids but wow, I thought someone had put acid in the Guinness. The rest of the ceremonies were very enjoyable and the whales were amazing.

No kidding. How about that stuff? As for the aptly described River-Dance-cum-Road-Warrior routine, the importance of that makes the Czar a bit skeptical. Evidently the producer-cum-director of the ceremonies met these kids at some fiddling-cum-tap dancing bar, and thought they were great so he put them in. One suspects that 99% of Canadians asked who the heck these kids were and why they were involved. But let us face it: after paying tribute to all these cultural influences on Canada, eventually you had to pay tribute to the Scottish influence. So they went with Gaelic dancing and fiddling; if you wanted to pay respect to the Nova Scotians, you should have had a bunch of liquored up guys attempting to fish with nets while the women changed the locks on their house.

Rumor has it they tried to include the Newfies, but they wound up getting stuck on the escalator when it stopped halfway.

I’m an Olympic junkie but I don’t watch certain events because I personally don’t consider them sports. For me an Olympic sport must meet three simple rules:

1. If you have to wear a costume and makeup it’s a performing art, not a sport. The Czar agrees. In Summer, this takes out synchronized swimming as well.

2. You must race a clock, score points against an opponent or physically do more than your competition. Okay, but we suspect your goal is to take out figure skating. Indeed, points are awarded by some archaic, cryptic means for this very reason. The problem is that figure skating is the winter equivalent of gymnastics: technical and esthetic points are awarded by faceless judges who see different things; there is no clock or universal point system to make argumentation obsolete. All the medals overturned in the last few years have been in what sport? Figure skating! The sport of crybabies.

3. At some point during your competition your heart rate must break your aerobic threshold. This is an interesting one that might make your first two points unnecessary and thus end controversy. It also takes out curling. Baseball and softball already took themselves out of the Olympics because no one wants to participate against the sure-bet Americans. Hmm. This is worth looking into.

I realize figure skaters are great athletes but so are ballet dancers. Sorry folks, figure skating is a performing art. Curling is a game, not a sport. Needless to say I don’t watch a lot of prime time Olympic coverage. Heck, the entire last week is figure skating, figure skating, ice dancing, figure skating. They even have a figure skating event that’s not a competition, what’s up with that? The problem is very simple: figure skating is ridiculously popular among women viewers, which is an essential demographic to NBC (since they annoyed nearly everyone else). The Czar suspects that NBC would be happy to ditch every other competition and just show this. And even show figure skating during the Summer Games as well.

Figure skating, like the poor and ‘Puter’s kleptomania, will always be with us.

Curling is a Scots-Canadian contribution that wound up garnishing more ratings back in 1998 than anybody realized; now, they show it in every Winter Olympics. The Czar agrees that curling, the subject of a high school report on odd sports—making your Czar more informed of the rules than nearly every other biped on the planet—is no different in skill or concept than shuffleboard or bocce, neither of which get the respect of curling. Of course, if we wanted to show a skill that Canadians really excelled at, they would include low-cost-made-for-cable-movie production an Olympic attraction.

Also, and the Czar hates to go here…is there a way we can chuck out snowboarding? Really, is it that different from surfing or skateboarding? Yeah, it is popular with the younger kids, NBC, but keep in mind that it is popular with kids who don’t watch television. Interviews with the 82-IQ crowd are grating beyond belief. Can we strongly de-emphasize it, please?

Fortunately I’m not in charge and there is something for everyone to watch.

Yeah, sort of. The Czar has a detailed Olympics programming schedule, and once again it puts women’s hockey up front until figure skating revs up—then that’s all you get. Want to watch bobsled or luge or skeleton or ski jumping? Stay up until 0330 and check out channel 794 for thirty minutes.

Of course the perennial complaint about NBC returns. If you cut out the human interest stories and why This Olympics Was Almost Her Last fluff pieces, you wind up with a massive hole in your programming easily taken up by Actual Sports. But NBC knows better, right? Which is why coverage of the Olympic games continues to drop, drop, drop in the ratings. An interesting thing ‘twould it be if Fox Sports managed to get the rights for one Olympics.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.