Spectacular Olympic Fraud on Aug 8
The Olympic opening ceremony took place on August 8, in Beijing. That huge event was considered a splendor by many spectators.
This opening ceremony could be such an amazing show not only because Beijing has spent a really large amount of cash, but also something was faked in it and, fortunately, not many people paid attention on those frauds. Besides, money wasn’t the only sacrifice paid for this national show-off.
Liu Yan (刘岩) used to be a well-known dancer in China, but not now. “Due to a mishandling of supporting platform, which caused early exit of the equipment than expected, dancer Liu Yan fell from the height of nearly 3 meters, resulting in serious injury of the actress. Liu Yan has paid irreversible price …”, thus said the official statement of situation. [Source]
The truth is, a successful award-winning female dancer was nearly killed in the rehearsal of opening ceremony due to bad organization and man-made fault. With half of her body paralyzed, she is no longer able to do what she loves so much. She’s even not able to walk. Even if the officials have recognized her great sacrifice for the honor of the nation and Olympics, this is too expensive a price to pay.
On the Olympic opening show, a cute little girl in red had given an terrific reverie to all Chinese people who have gone through the days of red patriotism by singing an Ode to the Motherland(歌唱祖国). The moment was really perfect when Lin Miaoke (林妙可) sang with an impressive big smile on her face.
And again, that is not true. Truth is, Lin didn’t sing at all, the sweet voice wasn’t hers and belongs to another equally lovely little girl — Yang Peiyi (杨沛宜). Yang wasn’t chosen for the camera, because she doesn’t look as pretty (really?). And “Yang hadn’t been chosen out of the consideration of international image (of the government), (such arrangement or fraud) is in the interest of the State.” [Source] Holy crap, this is the most stupid excuse I ever heard. And such fake singing, according to a 2005 State Council regulation, shall be subject to severe administrative punishment.
Meanwhile, the foot-shaped fireworks weren’t real either. On the screen, you could see 29 feet exploding over Beijing, and truth is, only the last one was really shot and broadcasted on TV, all other 28 images were created by computer. And the fake-up took almost one year to make the images look perfectly “real” on screen. Wasting most of the preparation efforts made by the fireworks crew. [Source]
P.S. This is another questionable detail, how can you play a piano and make the music heard like this? Was Lang Lang really playing or not? (I don’t know much about piano, so, please correct me if I’m wrong.) (Merci, Véro!)
P.P.S. A came across a meaningful argument [:)]: If someone doesn’t look good enough should not appear on the screen for the sake of State interest, former president Jiang and his plain-looking wife should be kept away from the camera.
Remember the Milk
I am somewhat inclined to mess up all the stuff by forgetting it. When there are too many things to do, this inclination is likely to give me huge collateral damage. So I came to own several notebooks to write down all the tasks on hand. And the new problem is, I always forget on which notebook I wrote something important.
You might be familiar with similar situation, at least second-handedly. As a joke goes, Little Jackie always forget what he has planned to do. So he writes everything down on a notebook. So, last night little Jackie wrote on his notebook, “remember the milk”. And this afternoon, he utterly had no idea what to buy when he entered the near-by store. He did get nervous, because he believed the notebook was with him. And the notebook was not there.
To remind yourself about the milk and other more import stuff, try ,,Remember the Milk” instead of a notebook.
There are many to-do-list tools available on the web, and RTM is not the best one. But it is the most convenient and it adds up new features all the time. Another excellent online task manager is Mangbar, a Chinese website, and English version is also available.
Mangbar does have strong functionality, and is especially suitable for teamworking. You can have “projects” hosted on Mangbar, and projects are further divided as “tasks”, which consists of “steps”. For each project, you can upload pics, docs, notes and share all that stuff with your collegues online. This is really magnificent and all too great, useful and complicated for remembering daily tasks. Remember the Milk is just great enough, quite lite-weight and utterly easy to use. More importantly, RTM provides a lot of considerate features allowing you to sync with your mobile phone and keep all the important things on mind.
The most useful stuff for me, is the service for Gmail (actually it is a Firefox addon, so you need to use Gmail and Firefox.). When you open Gmail, RTM will be loaded on the right side of the interface of Gmail. Now, I can see all the tasks I need to do while I read emails. Keeping everything on mind, and remember the milk. Now I can always stay organized, (or at least pretend to be organized.)
This is how it looks like when RTM for Gmail add-on is installed in Firefox
