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Happy Birthday to abishag

Right. Olympic flag flap of the day...
There's a political party in Canada based in Quebec that wants Quebec to separate from Canada and be their own country or sovreign state (so yeah, be your own country but use Canada's money and social system and of course their federal MPs don't mind taking the Canadian pensions that are mucho topped up because they're an MP, when they retire, do they?). Parti Quebecois (with the federal version being Bloc Quebecois). Apparently they're pissed because the Olympic athletes from Quebec were not allowed to wave their provincial flag, only the flag of the country they're from. These are some of the same people that agreed with a letter that was written to protest Paul McCartney's appeareance at a huge outdoor free concert there last month because his presence "raises painful memories of the British conquest of the French in 1759". Get over yourselves!

In other Olympic news, gacked from ang_o, the little 9 year old girl that sang at the opening ceremonies wasn't singing. She was lip synching to a recorded version a 7 year old sang. Reason? They deemed the 7 year old not cute enough to be on telly. This is wrong on so many levels but it only makes it more evident that the Chinese government really sucks. I mean, the people are lovely and the country, from all accounts and photos, can be really beautiful. Politically, though, leaves much to be desired. They're desparately trying to put a perfect face on for the world to disguise all the bad stuff. Someone here remarked that it's not that different from the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Der Fuhrer. Apparently though they've said there have been millions of ticket sales to the events, some of them are not very well attended and they've had volunteers fill up some of the seats so the television viewers won't notice empty seats. They blame the weather. They blame scalpers for buying large blocks of tickets to resell. In my mind, the fact of the matter is that there are just way too many different events for the summer games and not enough people interested in some of the less popular sports.

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Well that was an exercise in annoyance.
I thought, it being the one and only nice day this week, that i would wander the waterfront to watch some of the Buskers. I guess i just picked the wrong time or day. Basically all i saw was dozens of vendor booths, thousands of people, a small handful of performers that spent more time setting up or fucking around making jokes with the crowd or begging for bucks than i did actually seeing them do anything. I don't even know if i'll bother uploading the few pictures i managed to take from the back of hundreds of people surrounding the "stages". And i got to the area where my favourite band sets up to see them.... finished their set. Not on for another hour and a half by which time i was fed up. When this started 20 years ago, The waterfront was covered with Busker acts. You could walk from the Casino to and including Bishop's Landing and see a good dozen acts or more. Now there are four or five main "stages" and another area where some musical acts may set up. The rest is vendors selling all sorts of things and one wharf that has kid stuff like a bouncy castle and a pillar that is set up like a rock climbing wall.

In the end, i came back to Scotia Square where i work, went up to the office since i remembered i'd left my mobile on my desk and took the bus home.