Monday, August 18, 2008
So You Think You Can High Jump?
Long-time readers will remember that I hate the Olympics, which I regard as the biggest, phoniest waste of time and money on the planet. And this Olympics is certainly no different.
I'm not even going to get into the whole insanity China being chosen as the host and then consistently breaking every promise they made to win the bid. If they caught an athlete behaving like that, he'd be banned from all future competition.
No, my big beef this time around is the constant bitching and moaning that people in small countries like Canada go through about not winning enough medals. Former Canadian medalist Silken Laumann leveled a stinging rebuke at the whole country for not really having a sports culture. The open line shows have been full of people mulling over "superior" systems in other countries that stream elite athletes into special schools that accommodate their training schedules and such.
Man, what a bunch of bullshit. You know, my kid is a talented dancer, yet neither the government nor private sponsors pay for his dance lessons and there are no special elite dance schools that accommodate his rehearsals.
Maybe that's why Canada has done so poorly on So You Think You Can Dance. No Canadian has even finished in the top ten of So You Think You Can Dance. Good heavens, how shall we ever deal with such humiliation? It's a national disgrace, I tell ya.
Sure, the Canadian government puts a few dollars into ballet, but where is the funding for hip-hop, funk and tap? Until this country gets serious about developing a dance culture, we can't expect to do any better on So You Think You Can Dance.
Yeah, I'm kidding of course. If anything, we need to rejig our education system to produce more engineers, not more jocks.
And, really, at the end of the day is the Olympics anything more than another sort of reality show? Try sticking "So You Think You Can..." in front of those events ("So You Think You Can Kayak" for example). Without the Olympic brand, the vast majority of those events are either very silly or crushingly dull.
posted by Mentok @ 12:00 p.m.,
1 Comments:
-
At 1:36 p.m.,
cchang said...
-
Yeah, I'm kidding of course. If anything, we need to rejig our education system to produce more engineers, not more jocks.
Amen, Brotha!
I hate to admit it, but I tend to watch the opening and closing ceremonies more closely than any other event in the olympics. I am, for one, not one of those people who stay up all night watching things like javelin, but you gotta admit flashing bathing suits and rhythmic gymanstics are sure pretty.
Funny you mention government funded arts. I just saw a pretty disturbing documentary trailer called "Beautiful Tragedy" about the Kirov ballet.
