The Games of the XXIX Olympiad start in a few hours, although I've already watched one of the football matches earlier this evening. I've always liked the Olympics, and I'm really looking forward to my first Olympics in HD.
One of the more interesting stories to come out of Bejing though, other than the rampant air pollution (that's a neat little site to compare the pollution in various city in China to the pollution in LA or London), is the shock from the Western media that China is filtering Internet access to such rouge and dangerous sites such as Amnesty International. This from the same government that has a long history of human rights violations. But at least with all the attention the Olympics get, it might spur the Chinese government to do something about it. And due to the global economy that China is a huge player in, there isn't a simple solution available to diplomatically get them to fix those issues.
The season finale for So You Think You Can Dance was tonight, and Katee totally got robbed. This is the first reality-show contest program that had judges that I ever got into, but that's only because I have a Tivo available to skip past all the boring parts where the judges ramble on. I still don't think I could handle watching it live. But I've always loved dance, and this show has some amazing performances in it. I actually stumbled across it 2 years ago, but it was one of the "judging" episodes where there's only about 5 minutes worth of dancing in the entire hour long program, so I thought it was a waste of time. I didn't find out until this year that there's a 2 hour show the night before the "judging" episodes where the actual dances take place. And where they show stuff like this:
Which was my favorite dance of this past season. And I was surprise dthat I would actually see a Bollywood dance on prime-time national TV:
The guy in that last dance is the one who ended up winning, and the girl is the one who I wish had won. Entertainment Weekly wrote up a list of the top 15 dances from the last 4 seasons. I love that it's a show that actually focuses on the dancers, and all types of dance, and the art of choreography and dance, and not some gimmick like Dancing with the Stars. It makes me wish I had actual dancing ability, and could make my body move like that.
And speaking of dancing and music, I went to the Mammia Mia Sing-a-Long the other day, where all the musical numbers are subtitled to sing (and dance) along to in the theater. It was one of the closest things I think I'll see to spontaneous singing and dancing in public. This is why I love Austin!
Finally, the New York Times has a long article about Obama's work as a law professor. One part I found interesting was a student's recollection that "Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next." This, THIS, is why I want him to be the next president. Someone who understands nuances, that not everything is black and white, and can think through issues to come up with the best, though never perfect, solution.
