I was surprised how much I liked the Olympics opening ceremonies on Friday. I hadn’t been so transfixed by an Olympic event since Joan Benoit won the first woman’s marathon, leading the whole way. At one point during the opening ceremonies a young girl in a red dress sang a Chinese song. Or so it seemed:
The girl in the red dress with the pigtails, called Lin Miaoke, 9, and from a Beijing primary school, has become a national sensation since Friday night, giving interviews to all the most popular newspapers.
But the show’s musical designer felt forced to set the record straight. He gave an interview to Beijing radio saying the real singer was a seven-year-old girl who had won a gruelling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called “Hymn to the Motherland”.
At the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching a rehearsal pronounced that the winner, a girl called Yang Peiyi, might have a perfect voice but was unsuited to the lead role because of her buck teeth.
Weston Price’s research, described in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, implies that buck teeth are caused by too little of a dietary growth factor, which a commenter described as “the menaquinone-4 form of vitamin K2.”
the ceremony was pretty amazing, what i saw of it. it’s interesting that what visually might have been uninteresting if it were CGI or machinery doing the work (the many people moving up and down in those boxes comes to mind) suddenly becomes amazing because it’s a bunch of actual people doing the work.
at the same time, i found something creepy about the mass-coordination of individuals during the ceremony. i don’t feel that way about dance troupe performances or orchestration, or marching bands. so i’m a little perplexed by my reaction.