I recently lambasted local TV companies for insulting the Indonesian public by not covering the Beijing Olympics.
What I failed to mention was that formerly (or is it still?) state-owned - but now with advertising - TVRI agreed to cover the fortnight's action. Whoopee-do I thought at the time, but figured that I wouldn't or couldn't be bothered to watch anyway as I'm getting a bit bored with sports and more sports.
And anyway, our hero from the last Olympics, Taufik Hidayat, wasn't going to win again. And he didn't. What is more, apparently local viewers are still being cheated. This is a bit of what Agnes Johan has to say in today's Post.
All of Sunday afternoon, when the Olympic Games were in full swing, TVRI was broadcasting a boxing match from several years ago.
From what I've seen so far, half the time is used for advertisements, a quarter of the time is spent listening to the Beijing-based reporter and no sport can be seen. Often the summary of the events of the day show the ultimate winners on the podium, not the last, say 50 metres, winning dive or lift of whatever sports is practiced.
But it's not just Indonesian audiences who are being cheated. It's the whole world.
By all accounts, the opening ceremony was full of oohs and ahhs, with aerial footprints marching pyrotechnically across the sky, except ..... all but the last were computer-generated animations.
Then cute little nine year old Lin Miaoke sang Ode to the Motherland except ... she didn't. Unfortunately for seven year old Yang Peiyi who did sing Ode to the Motherland, she wasn't cute enough to perform it in public because she has crooked teeth which "were considered potentially damaging to China's international image."
Chen Qigang, the event's general music designer, explained to a Beijing radio station, "This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture. Especially the entrance of our national flag; this is an extremely important, extremely serious matter."
So, cute little Lin Miaoke (on the right) actually lip-synched Ode to the Motherland.
In spite of a missing tooth?
All Crap in Jakartass today.
An inflatable dog turd. This giant inflatable was deposited in the Art Playground at the Paul Klee Centre in Switzerland.
20 hectares of playground for the garden show: the farmland to the rear of the three steel hills and the entire tract of greenery from the Wyssloch Valley down to Lake Egelsee are sprouting weird and wonderful objects to form an animated kind of front garden.
American artist Paul McCarthy is subverting the otherwise harmonious landscape sculpture of the Zentrum Paul Klee with his installation Complex Shit – a giant pile of dog faeces.
Except it isn't. On July 31st a sudden gust of wind blew the exhibit, the size of a house, from its moorings and carried it 200 metres, bringing down a power line and breaking a window, before landing in the grounds of a children's home.
Now, that's a lot of flatulence.
More on crappy art can be perused on Rob Baiton's blog. In the comments to this post, he offers to have a public dump and call it performance art. He'll probably be in a shitty mood at the time.
Over at Green Stump, friend Oigal was recently exercised (exorcised?) to hear that his home country's government, in Australia, planned to spend Oz$40 million on investigating cow farts. You see, according to some estimates, livestock methane emissions translate to roughly 7 percent of the world's greenhouse gas production.
I've written to O suggesting that he ruddy well ought to write to his PM Rudd and tell him that the answer's simple: mix some garlic in the food mix.
What it will do to the taste of the meat, milk or cheese is as yet unknown and it's fairly certain that we humans, unless we all go vegan, will continue farting around.
