I'm looking forward to the handover at the closing ceremony, where they hand over the flame to the British Organizing Committee.

I'd like to suggest we have someone in a hoodie come up, shank the Chinese torch bearer from behind, and then run away with the prize.

In true British fashion, my mum has already conceded defeat and declared that we'll never be able to compete with the Chinese opening ceremony. It does seem like they spent a wok-load of moolah on this.

\ BTW, Octang Frye is still okay, earthquake free, and continues to refer to himself in the third person.
\\ Strings!
\\\ And for those who think I'm belaboring the point, you don't hear me in a lawyer's domain talking about the note of certiorari.

For those who want to see, these are some amazing pictures from the ceremony which will be shown at 7:30 tonight.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/200..._ceremony.html

I watched it earlier on a low-quality feed and it was still pretty amazing. I'll be much happier to watch tonight on the big HD even with the commercials.

And yeah, it will be hard to top.

Smug bastards acted like they actually invented fireworks

It's not as is they actually had to pay anyone who worked on the event. Most of the staff would have been happy enough just to be let out of the gulag for a couple of days.

All that glitz and glory on the backs of the poor hard working men and women in china who have lost their freedom, their homes and in some cases their lives......what a price to put on peoples lives....

It's a good thing that our society never built anything on the backs of hard working people who at any time might have lost their freedom, their homes or their lives. Let me know when you would like a list. As much as I disagree with many things about China, massive numbers of Chinese have come a long way economically etc. One has to recall that they are many decades behind us on this road to capitalism and, as we can recall, too fast a change brings about disastor in many ways. One need only look to Russia for that lesson. Basically a country run by criminal oligarchs and mafia type organizations. Oh, by the way. Russia is currently bombing and invading the break away, and free nation, of Georgia as we speak. Wonderful country that Russia is. I'll give the Chinese one thing, they would have taken the ****wits that brought about the collapse of the Savings and Loans, Enron, Mortgage companies and banks, all from greed and illegal activity, all costing hardworking people their savings, their retirement, their homes, they would have taken them and ****ing shot them.

The parts I just watched were breath taking. The goosebumps I got when they played the "I have a dream" speech in Atlanta have never been beaten though.

Not to mention marching into a sovereign nation and igniting a civil war that's killed over 100,000 people. I guess some countries propoganda machines are more polished, they were of course actually fighting for democracy and freedom

It's a trial run, you see..... we're perfecting democracy in other countries before we apply it to our own.

So what goes on for fun in your house? I'm guessing not a whole lot.

Sorry kids can't take out that game its made in china.Oh what about this game .. .. ...

I really enjoyed the opening of the olympics, was about the only decent thing to watch during the day. Of course the plus side of being stuck here in the UK was that I got to watch it live and on BBC HD so no adverts!

I loved the swimming this morning! Now im watching spotty 20 year old guy gymnasts swinging round a horsey thing!

Hell, i need to get out more!

We're proud to be a china, vietnam and korea product(s) free home and we have been this way long before it was "fashionable"........!

Well, now with the murder of the US men volleyball coach's FIL, and the Iranian swimmer refusing to compete in the same pool with an Israeli (though whether he made the choice or someone made it for him is unclear), this is beginning to feel like the 1936 Berlin and 1972 Munich games.

NBC is broadcasting most olympic live events (2200 hours worth by time the olympics is over) that are not shown on TV at this site. What I've seen so far has been commercial free (except at the beginning) as well as commentary free (commentary is text only).

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/index.html

Whooda thought such an innocent thread title would contain such insightful and provocative content?!

I wonder if we'd ever have had Trafalgar Square, 'The Mall', Buckingham Palace, the "Tower of London", the 'crown jewels', and all that other crap we are all so proud of as Brits if there had been a conscience back then about who was doing the building, and ... more to the point ... where the money was coming from ... raping and pillaging half the globe for the glorification of mother England ... (but we did leave behind railway systems ... ... )

It was a defining moment in my education to learn that Ghandi came to Lancashire to protest the fact that Britain did not allow Indian cotton goods into the country ("... Lancashire's mass-produced textiles had destroyed the hand-loom industry in India. Britain even restricted imports of cotton goods from India ...") (a defining moment, in part, because I didn't realize there were places in the world poorer and shittier than my home county of Lancashire!).