The Seoul Broadcasting Station in Korea has run footage of a dress rehearsal for next week's elaborate Olympic opening ceremony. The SBS video has the Beijing Organizing Committee fuming. The Wall Street Journal reports spokesman Sun Weide saying the SBS obtained the footage "through irregular means" and that the station has "not acted in conformance with professional ethics."
The Journal says the organizers have made a state secret out of the ceremony, which has been three years and $300 million in the making. BOCOG, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, acted quickly to get the video yanked from YouTube.
But don't worry. The series of tubes is at your service and you can watch a snippet of the video at the Huffington Post, among other places.
Why you would want to do that is a bigger mystery than how the torch will be lit, always the big ta-da! moment. The Olympic opening ceremony is always a ridiculous, seemingly endless affair, sort of a mashup of "Riverdance," "Cats," the dance numbers from "Showgirls," a Super Bowl halftime show, a Soviet May Day parade and a circa-1971 Coke commercial. On steroids.
I don't mean that in a good way, believe it or not.
And you want to watch it twice? You know how NBC's announcers, usually Katie Couric and either Bob Costas or Brian Williams in recent Olympics but it won't be Couric this time, explain to you, the drooling, non-art-appreciating home audience, that each absurd costume or prop or dance move "symbolizes" something?
It's usually world peace or understanding between nations or something, but once I think I saw a kid near the back do this thing with her left arm that symbolized a ham sandwich, hold the mayo.
Wanting to watch leaked video of the opening ceremony dress rehearsal symbolizes that you need to rethink everything. And do it by Friday, or you'll just have to sit through the damn thing for real.
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