Posted by TFG on 12th August 2008
Eller wins double trap gold | Sports | 2008 Summer Olympics | Reuters
Walton Eller of the United States was in a class of his own in winning the men’s double trap shooting Olympic gold medal on Tuesday.
The deer hunter from Texas dominated the field in the qualification and kept a steady hand in the finals on a hot afternoon in Beijing in front of a fired-up Chinese crowd to clinch the gold with two shots to spare.
I don’t even know what a double trap is, probably some shotgunning thing, but he’s a deer hunter from Texas. Plus, dig the decal on the long gun:
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Posted by TFG on 12th August 2008
Taipei Times - archives
When the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games begins in a few days, viewers will be presented with a minutely choreographed spectacle swathed in nationalist kitsch. Of course, images that recall Hitler’s goose-stepping storm troopers are the last thing that China’s leaders have in mind for their Olympics; after all, official Chinese nationalism proclaims the country’s “peaceful rise” within an idyll of “harmonious development.” But, both aesthetically and politically, the parallel is hardly far-fetched.
Indeed, by choosing Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the master plan for the Beijing Games, China’s government has itself alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a hallmark of 20th-century totalitarianism.
The sins of the fathers shouldn’t be visited on the sons, for sure, but that’s seriously creepy-odd. I mean, Whisky Tango Foxtrot? It seems so implausible and frankly, incomprehensible. Impossible, even, yet…there it is. Am I the only person to not be aware of this vastly strange fact? Is it just a blatant falsehood? Am I the only person completely weirded out by it?
Via Billy Beck, who adds, after a lot of fascinating tech-talk on how dey do dat, “It was all very pretty, but I couldn’t like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples’ labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.” Bingo.
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