Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Ditchings are rare, but there've been a few. Planes would still be safer than cars if they locked the doors on takeoff and carried no cabin crew, IMHO.
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How many heats would you have for every individual and team event if every single participating country was entered in everything?
Four rounds (and 42 individual races), if you have eight people in a heat and the top two go through. (Up to 256 countries, so quite a few heats would have seven people).
The marathon could be run as a single event, just like the London or Boston events, but with many less people.
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Russia has declared war on Georgia. The United States declared war on Iraq but some of us think the Chinese are the real bad guys
I'll try not to troll on this subject, but colonialism is bad whoever does it. Even when it's because the colonised people are sooo much better off without their nasty primitive governance, or where the colonists population are overwhelmingly in favour.
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What London has over most other places in the world is the vitality of its popular culture.
Definitely. And the $5 disco biscuit.
They could get the marathon competitors all loved up and accompanied by huge sound trucks. The race would take 12 hours with all the stopping for group hugs. And at the end the St Helena competitor would get carried over the line and given a gold medal. With blinkies round the rim.
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online bitching about ...... and Quinn
You mustn't mention that word. It's bad luck!
a wee montage of All the Ways We Have Fucked Up Our Colonies in *their* opening ceremony
That'd be great. Unless there's a revolution in London, I won't be wathing those Olympics, either. And if they have a revolution, the new government will hopefully either cancel the games or turn it into a corporate-free, amateur event in line with the original concept. Plus it'd be nice if each country was expected to put up their top competitor in each event, whether or not they are actually any good at it.
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Also Marina Hyde says it much better than I could.
I particularly like this from a book by Dick Pound, a former IOC member. He quotes Samaranch (former IOC president) as saying: "'Leesten, Deek,' he said to me at one point. 'For [the Olympics], it is much better to go to these countries. There will never be security problems.'"
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The Green Olympics
That's an oxymoron if ever there was one. It's about as green as Formula One.
Huge scale construction, thousands of people flying around the world for a couple of weeks of nationalist flag waving (and a side-dish of "sport") in one of the worlds nastier totalitarian states.
I'm not watching a moment of it, and I've been careful not to patronise any of the sponsors products for the last few months. I even got the bank to swap my Visa for Mastercard.
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That "Look & Learn" thing reminds me of the classic "do they have supermarkets in New Zealand?" question on Usenet. It seems to have sadly disappeared from the net but went something like:
Q: Do they have supermarkets like Coles and so on in New Zealand?
A: Sadly not. It is illegal to eat any food that you haven't hunted and killed yourself - followed by ritual cleansing in the juice of the Kiwifruit. -
The Worlds Strangest Bird
Nah. That's Bjork.
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I'd suggest one improvement to MMP would be abolish dual voting, so one's party vote went to the party of the chosen electorate candidate. With maybe a reverse threshold as well (so an electorate candidate would have to get 5% of the national vote as well as a majority in the seat to be elected).
Or, more radically, have only list MPs.
Or, to get complex, a system of regional lists with the number of elected MPs being corrected to achieve proportionality.