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I am enjoying the Olympics for the most part, but there are a few things that are bugging me.

1. China’s use of deception in the opening ceremony. Evidently there are at least two different parts of the opening ceremony that were misrepresented: a. The fireworks outside the “birds nest” were mostly CGI. Whatever. Not really a big deal, but it’s a symptom. b. The second deception: the little girl who sang. Amazing singing talent, right? Nope. The real little girl singer was “too ugly” by the Chinese Politburo’s standards, so they got this girl to lip sync. Here is her picture:

The “performer” is on the left and the actual singer is on the right. Don’t tell me that kid isn’t cute. Just because the girl on the right looks like she’s mainlining happy-juice, that doesn’t make her cuter.

Another thing that bothered me? The fact that China still refuses to recognize Taiwan (also called The Republic of China or ROC) as an independent country. So they refuse to allow the Taiwanese Chinese to appear under their own flag, but instead make them declare themselves “Chinese Taipei”. To bring this home, consider this: The 2012 summer Olympics are going to be in London. How would you, as an American feel, if the British refused to let us use our flag (and substituted a generic “Olympic” flag), and made everyone refer to us as “The British Colonies”. Not that it’s likely, but it gives you an idea of how the Taiwanese must feel.

Kim and I watched the women’s synchronized diving today. I hate watching events with subjective judging. It seemed kind of odd how the judges kept giving the Chinese girls really high scores, and everybody else got lower scores, even though there really wasn’t much difference in the performances . Specifically, I found the New Zealand judge to be doing this. No, I am not an expert, but when there are six judges, and five of them give the Americans 7.5, and the New Zealand judge consistently gave the Americans scores around 4.5, a full three points lower than the other judges. Suspicious.

The final problem (so far) that I have had with these Olympics is in regards to the women’s gymnastics competition: I noticed the same problem with the judges (the commentators even mentioned the strangeness of the Chinese getting better scores than they deserved, and the Americans getting lower scores than the commentators expected. After watching one performance, and seeing the score, one of the announcers made a comment about “wow, I thought that should have been much higher.” And those ARE professionals. They usually hire sports professionals to announce those things.

One minor note, Bela Karolyi mentioned to Bob Costas that the Chinese “women” were underage. Olympic rules state that competitors must be 16 years old. . I remember commenting about that to someone at work earlier this weekend. I said, “if that girl is 16, I’ll eat my hat.” They are more like 13. I guess it’s possible, but what are the odds that the Chinese found six girls who were very flexible, started training them at age 3, and all six just happened to have a delayed entry into puberty? Yeah.

We aren’t even going to get into the human rights stuff or the pollution.