Gretzkyface!

So I happened to actually watch the opening ceremonies from Vancouver on Friday night and… wait, what’s that, Wayner’s face? … Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt about it, too.

Now normally this would be the part of the post where I put a link to a video of the cauldron-lighting malfunction, but apparently the IOC is way more efficient at placing copyright claims on YouTube clips than they are at planning an opening ceremony. So… I’m sure you can find it at CTVOlympics.ca or NBC Sports or something. Or, given how good it looked on them, maybe not. (And actually, there’s an even better Gretzkyface picture over at the Slanch Report, which was the whole reason I even titled this post Gretzkyface, but it’s some kind of a screen grab from the TV broadcast and we figured we’d best not push our luck and went with the legit one above, from Getty Images.)

Anyway, as for the ceremonies and the stories from the games themselves go, for my money you can’t beat going outside the Canadian media vacuum and following the coverage from The Guardian, who give us their perspective on the glitchy opening ceremonies, tell us that other athletes blame Canada’s insistence on maintaining their home advantage for the death of Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili (whose story is heartbreakingly told in this piece from CTVOlympics.ca), and who lambaste IOC officials for sending out lugers to answer questions from the media that haven’t adequately been answered by the IOC and the International Luge Federation themselves. Great stuff.

And the outstanding Orland Kurtenblog from the Vancouver Province has some fun stuff that VANOC probably doesn’t care to have out there either—like pictures from the “non-smashy-smashy” protests that took place Friday, and people unironically rocking out to Bryan Adams (seriously?) at Molson Canadian Hockey House, which… what’s that line about Circus Circus from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? It’s “what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” Yeah, that sounds about right to me.