l In the previous few installments I kept rambling farther and farther afield, so in the end I might as well just say a few odds and ends.
l What was I doing during the Olympics? Apart from the daily new anime episodes, I basically had the TV on all day watching the Olympics. In the first half, I watched the Olympics while paging through books, mainly getting through 《大问题》 once. In the second half, I watched the Olympics while pedaling a stationary bike, with pretty good results; in the last few days I exercised nearly three hours a day on average. Unfortunately the Olympics ended, and in these past two days my exercise time has dropped off a cliff… Usually I’d get up around noon and eat a meal of frozen dumplings, and in the evening I’d cook and make rice myself. Every three to five days I’d go to the supermarket to buy vegetables, and occasionally when I felt lazy I’d order takeout a few times.
l The opening ceremony was quite a success; apart from Liu Qi’s speech, which made one a bit sleepy, everything was splendid. Of course, the person at CCTV switching the camera shots was indeed rather detestable.
l The volunteers worked hard; you can tell just by looking at the girls who kept jumping nonstop during the opening ceremony… Sigh, a wave of the hand would have been enough—why did they need to keep jumping the whole time…
l The design of the news channel was pretty good; it would have been even better if they hadn’t inserted the Xinwen Lianbo newscast in the middle. But the commentary on the news channel was truly maddening—on average, they made one mistake every minute. Fine, I can let slide plenty of specialized factual mistakes, but why do they always misread the numbers (headcounts, rankings, results, and so on)?
l Liu Xiang really was terribly unfortunate. I’ve already reposted Yali’s piece, so I won’t say much more. Speaking of which, that morning I already had a vague bad feeling. I woke up very early—before ten o’clock, even though normally I’d sleep until at least after eleven—thinking maybe something unexpected would happen to Liu Xiang, and then I couldn’t fall back asleep. After thinking it over, I decided there was no need to worry; in the end I went to Carrefour for a stroll, and when I got home and turned on the TV, sure enough something had happened…
l Dong Ri Na really is detestable… Not to mention how she thundered Shao Dongpeng into a daze, that stuff about Liu Xiang’s turn being yet another great transcendence and so on was simply incomprehensible.
l He Wenna really is beautiful… mm.
l Emmons really is magical… Einstein said it (learning and reciting on the spot): “A good joke cannot be repeated twice”…
l The fact that we came in first on the gold medal table was indeed surprising and exciting. Calling this result a miracle is also reasonable; after all, it was backed by the whole-nation system plus such a huge population. The whole-nation system itself is not wrong; it’s just that everything must not be taken to excess. The achievements obtained by the whole-nation system can of course reflect national strength, but they are not necessarily a reflection of the public’s sporting activity; rather, they are more a manifestation of the organizational and operational capacity of the state machine. In this respect China truly is number one in the world, though of course that is not necessarily all a good thing.
l Once table tennis had no suspense, it became uninteresting. Although I usually do watch table tennis matches, compared with the other Olympic events, once the suspense is gone it really is no longer interesting. I really wish Persson could have won a bronze medal, although before that I was hoping Wang Liqin would win gold.
l I vaguely remember hearing a commentator mention at one point that Wang Hao and Ma Lin were both Peking University students—so they really were admitted there? In any case, I hope they’ll learn from Deng Yaping and, as university students, really make something of themselves.
l This time it was 51 golds, 21 silvers, and 28 bronzes—just short of one silver, otherwise it would really have added up to 512.2:28. I saw someone repost this in a QQ group: “51 golds, 22 silvers, 28 bronzes, which together make 512228, the time of the Wenchuan earthquake, not one minute off: 5/12 2:28. This is not a coincidence. This is the support of all our compatriots who tragically lost their lives in the Wenchuan earthquake for the Beijing Olympics. China, go! Send this message to other groups; there is no reward, but this is what a Chinese person ought to do” — good heavens, even tens of thousands of wandering souls have come to cheer us on. Why is it that some inexplicable and rumor-mongering messages can spread so quickly in QQ groups? Why, three months after the Wenchuan earthquake, is there still a plea for help about finding a child in Dujiangyan or whatever circulating there? Why has that rumor about AIDS needles kept circulating in different versions for four years since I first started using QQ groups?… When you spread information, have none of you ever thought about taking responsibility for your behavior? Do you think it’s kind to help spread similar messages as a little matter of convenience? But why can’t you think of doing something just as convenient: typing a casual search on Baidu, making even the slightest effort to roughly verify whether the information is true or false? The numbers of gold, silver, and bronze medals can be verified with a quick check any time—so why can’t you, who have the energy to open one group after another and spread it, think of casually cross-checking it? Irresponsible, irresponsible indeed. (All the information I say, write, and spread is “responsible,” which means you can always demand the basis or source for it from me.)
l There are always some people whose minds have been dazzled by economics (rather than people with economic brains) who say things like whether holding the Olympics was a “loss,” whether the investment can be recouped, and so on. Actually, even if you look at the Olympics purely as an economic advertising investment, there is no doubt that it would not lose money. Not to mention that the Olympics are not only about advertising. The total Olympic investment was more than 40 billion US dollars, which is to say 300 billion yuan—indeed enormous. But think about how a large commercial company can spend tens of billions advertising its brand; how does that get earned back? Right, in the end it’s by attracting more people to buy products of that brand. So when the Olympics focus the world’s attention on China, that is making an advertisement for the marker “China.” It’s like the effect of advertising the label “Coca-Cola” can make all goods bearing the Coca-Cola label more valuable. You have to know that on a bottle of Coca-Cola there is not only the Coca-Cola label, but also the mark of America or “the West.” And imagine that I am not advertising a single specific brand, but advertising “China”; then all Chinese brands, Chinese enterprises, and things bearing the label China will benefit. How can such returns be counted in mere billions?
l Of course, the Olympics’ investment was not only about running advertisements; quite a lot of infrastructure construction will still be useful after the Olympics. (It’s just that I don’t know how our table tennis hall will be used…)
l The Olympics’ influence in politics and diplomacy is also far-reaching. This includes promoting the domestic system in a more sound, transparent, or democratic (let’s say so for now) direction. After lying, one often has to work desperately to patch up the lie in order to save face; that is the driving force by which the situation develops toward the ideal direction.
l The Olympics’ most important significance is the transmission of a spirit. You can call it the Olympic spirit, the sporting spirit, the spirit of peace, and so on. But I would say it is nothing more than the spirit of play, the spirit of joy, and the spirit of striving to win. These are things that have long been relatively lacking in Chinese cultural tradition; the Chinese spirit has always been too heavy and too solemn.
l The air really has become quite a bit better recently.
l Rogge used “exceptional,” did he? I looked up the original text, and it should indeed have been “exceptional.” Although my English is very poor, I tentatively think this word is more suitably translated as “remarkable”; if you want something a bit more ornate, you could choose “outstanding,” or at the highest level, perhaps “unprecedented and unrivaled.” The standard really is somewhat higher than best, but it still differs to some extent from “unequaled.” We who study philosophy probably think of Anselm and his “ontological argument” as soon as we hear “unequaled,” and know that the concept of “unequaled” is as high as it can possibly get, high enough to qualify for the status of “God.” In Chinese, 伦 means rank or level. Literally speaking, “出类拔萃” means standing out at the top among one’s own kind, whereas “无与伦比” means not only incomparable, but not even comparable at all—fundamentally not the same level, not the same rank. I think this translation really does raise the level a bit too much.
l I’ll continue when I think of more.
August 26, 2008
Latest Comments
- Suiyuan
2008-08-29 10:21:37 Anonymous 124.205.77.136
“The opening ceremony was quite a success; apart from Liu Qi’s speech, which made one a bit sleepy, everything was splendid. Of course, the person at CCTV switching the camera shots was indeed rather detestable.”
It is said that the Olympic opening ceremony broadcast was outsourced, in accordance with standard Olympic organizational rules, to a Sino-foreign joint venture, and the director was Swedish. I suppose communication between the opening ceremony’s design concept and the director’s shot switching was not properly handled, or perhaps they never even thought of treating this as an important issue to solve. Later, when I saw the wonderful images that netizens collected and organized online which the director had failed to present, I realized that a huge amount of switching between telephoto and wide-angle shots had not been completed. This was truly a serious shortcoming. - Suiyuan
2008-08-29 10:27:21 Anonymous 124.205.77.136
For example, when the overall image, as a single cultural element, needed to be shown in a distant static shot, the director instead turned the camera to capture some utterly baffling detail; when the flying-apparition performer and the solo dancer in the image appeared as a single cultural element, the director did not give them a close-up. Later I saw from pictures that even the solo dancer’s costume colors alone used N different kinds; hehe, it really somewhat wasted Master Mou’s painstaking effort and the years of hard work of all the performers.
- Suiyuan
2008-08-29 10:39:30 Anonymous 124.205.77.136
For another example, the extinguishing of the flame in the closing ceremony, as one of the major artistic highlights, has attracted much attention, and the criticism it has received online is also directly related to the above-mentioned problem of directing. The ingenuity of the flame-extinguishing segment lies in making good use of the opening and closing ceremonies’ core creative concept of “one painting” from beginning to end: the picture opens, and the opening ceremony lights the flame; the closing ceremony’s theme is “Beautiful Memories,” likewise using the opening of a single painting, and then reviewing the entire course of the Beijing Olympics on the electronic screen. Therefore, the core idea of the flame-extinguishing segment was probably to “remotely control” the entire extinguishing process by “closing a most splendid scroll.” When the actor playing a foreign athlete on the aerial vehicle slowly and reluctantly closed the scroll in his hands, the torch “synchronously” went out gradually. The core embodiment of this idea required the director to emphasize the multiple shot switches between “closing the scroll” and “extinguishing the flame” in order to display the synchronization of the two. Unfortunately, the director’s camera stayed fixed on the torch going out, and by the time it cut back, the scroll was already closed—so what creative idea was left? Still, for such a large-scale event, some problems are unavoidable. It’s just a pity the organizers had not anticipated in advance how to control these segments.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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