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Couldn't post about the closing ceremonies last night due to the FR proxy errors, but wow--I gotta say this is the weirdest thing I've seen in a long time. A few minutes ago a bunch of Chinese youth are singing pop and playing guitars and drumsets (geez, they're more into American pop culture than I am!). And earlier we had drummers hanging from the ceiling, dudes in bright green light-up suits, ladies in yellow dresses with fluorescent silver beads all over them, more drummers in bright orange and silver bike helmets, horrid opera singers so bad I couldn't even tell what language they were singing in, dudes in shiny suits pedaling what look like light-up hamster wheels, and the London performance took the cake for weirdness. An earsore pop singer in a silver dress and a 60-year-old Led Zeppelin guitarist with a pony tail being raised from a London double decker bus while people in weird costumes dance below??!! My eyes! My eyes!

The fireworks were cool though...I like the ones in the shape of the Olympic rings. They had enough going at one point that the Bird's Nest disappeared in a flash of bright white light...looked like it exploded for a moment there...lol. I liked it when all the athletes swarmed in, some wearing their medals. If only Phelps had been there...he could've worn all 8 at once!

My mom walked in at one point and the first thing she saw was a tower covered with silver-clad Chinese doing the wave with red streamers lifted from it fanning out in all different directions....only one thought popped into my mind, and that was one of Calvin's lines from Calvin and Hobbes: "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

But putting that aside, this has, from a sporting perspective, been a great Olympics. 8 medals by Phelps breaking Spitz's record (including one won by .001 seconds), Afghanistan getting its first medal, US finally reclaims gold in basketball, 110 American medals, China's diving dynasty broken on the very last dive, the French swimming trash talk smashed by .008 seconds, underdog US water polo winning silver, US going 1-2 women's gymnastics all-around, Usain Bolt breaking the world record in 100m and 200m dashes, and on and on.

And besides, I shouldn't complain too much. Tomorrow gets a lot worse. The conventions begin.