NBC couldn't get past introducing the opening ceremony before its first dead relative sob story. Yikes.
Opening ceremonies have been badass though. Far prefer to that overblown nonsense in Beijing four years ago.
Beijing was amazing.
London? Absolutely duck*ing dreadful. Hideously awfully horribly disastrously grotesquely terrible. Anyone involved with the planning of it should be marched into the sea at daybreak, drowned and then shot. And then stabbed. And dragged back onto the beach and set on fire. And then tied to a boulder and dropped back into the sea. And then someone should stand on shore for a year to make sure they don't resurface.
There were exactly two watchable moments...the entrance of the British athletes and Sebastian Coe's welcome.
The rest was a grease fire.
The first nine hours of it was a summer stock Dickens' performance on acid. Then, the James Bond/Queen thing that would have been painful as an SNL skit. And, to finish off the audience and the self-respect of an entire nation, they inserted Mr. Bean into an orchestral performance of the Chariots of Fire theme. The Queen looked like someone peed in her Cheerios. Paul McCartney, for his part, looked a lot like the Queen.
And NBC was dismal.
Lauer and Costas talked the thing to death - my favorite part was when they talked over the band covering the Beatles' tune to let us know that it was a really good cover of a Beatles' tune.
In short, the whole thing sucked monkey nuts.
