The Five Ring Circus to the North

I am an avid follower of all things sports so of course the five ring circus in Vancouver has not escaped my notice. I call it the "five ring circus" because I remember that in 2002 when it was here, anybody that even thought about using the "O" word in print or on merchandise without paying royalties was threatened with a lawsuit.

I have no doubt that as small as my readership is and in spite of the complete lack of monetary recompense for my services; any unauthorized use the "O" word would surely get me hunted down like the dog that I am.

I watched the opening and frankly I thought Salt Lake was a million times better; though I may be biased. The totem poles looked so much like Boris Karloff in "Frankenstein" that even my kids noticed. Moe asked, "Why do they have zombies?"

Good question.

I liked some of the special effects, though I'm still wondering whose brilliant idea it was to have a beat poet read. What the heck? I love poetry more than the next man, but that guy was A)the single most out of place moment in the history of the five ring circus(Poetry? What a blatant Man Card Violation), and B)was pretty sucky anyway. All he really said was "Hey, eh. You hosers stop making fun of the Great White North. Now take off!"

What, were Bob and Doug McKenzie booked elsewhere?

Personally, I think the judicious use of Bob and Doug would have been a terrific move. NBC could have used them as "Sideline reporters"to interview athletes and comment on the show. The potential for much needed comic relief was enormous.

Since I had no McKenzie brothers to keep me entertained, and the "culture pageant" was boring me to tears, I had to find my own fun. It didn't hurt that I was in a pretty snarky mood, so I started to invent bets for myself and think of creative broadcast ideas.

Of the latter, the best one I came up with is the Loner Channel. Its a cable station like NBC shopping or whatever that is devoted to covering the athletes from nations with fewer than 10 participants. I wanna see the cross country skier from Bermuda perform. And I am totally cheering for the Irish women's bobsled team (and not just because of my culture and heritage; those chickies are not hard to look at!). I also think it would be very interesting to see the stories about how these people from the middle east and tiny, tropical islands found themselves on skis and skates.

As far as the bets went, they were by far my favorite part of the evening. I was counting the number of Gretzky references (my pen ran out of ink after about ten million). I put even money on either a Celene Dion or Alanis Morissette performance, and was glad to lose the bet so as to be spared the broken eardrums (though Brian Adams was scary enough by himself, wasn't he? Can you imagine the deafening sound of channels changing if Brian Adams and Celene sang a duet? shudder).

Perhaps my favorite bet of the night was on a contest that won't be taking place. I wanted to see what would happen if a pack of PETA protesters and the Native Canadian dancers went at it, Gladiator style. Pardon the guilt of an easy pun, but I'll bet the fur would really fly.

Hmmm, not really politically correct, but a better fight than the last heavyweight boxing match, I'll bet. I wonder what Bob and Doug would have made of it?

Ah, well. I'm off to watch "Cool Runnings". I felt really old when I found out four of my kids had no clue as to why Jamaican Bobsled references were funny.