Play for me
/Start Grandad mode
Back when I was a kid, we didn’t really have consoles and DVDs to occupy our time, so we did the next best thing… we played in the street.
Fortunately it was a quiet street, traffic wise. Some kids from my street would play football against the kids in the next street, or at least that was the plan.
The trouble was we very rarely got to the stage of kicking a ball.
First there would be the argument on which street we would actually play on. Mine was flat, but had a slight bend, creating a banana shaped pitch, whilst the other street had an unusual camber… resulting in flukey goals and scraped knees.
Then there was the issue of Andy to sort out. Possibly the best player out of the lot of us, he lived on the corner between the two streets… which team was he on?
By this point, other kids from neighboring streets would be wanting to join in…
It was immaterial anyway, more often than not we were so concerned with making everything fair that we had forgotten to procure a ball of any sort. Fortunately tennis balls grew on trees where we lived (or at least, judging by the number of them stuck in trees).
/End Grandad mode
I think the point I’m trying to make is that games of any sort are rarely non-political, no matter how hard the governing bodies try to convince us of the opposite.
This year, the Olympics in China, it was never going to go smoothly. Aside from the political prejudices from all over the globe and human rights issues and Tibet, there’s the fact that we have a tradition to uphold.
Even before the opening ceremony we’ve had protests following the torch relay, trying to extinguish the link between the past and the present games. All good stuff and entertaining too.
It’s not a good Olympics without drama.
Boycotts… starting back with protests against the Hungarian uprising in ‘56 through to the 80s Cold War nonsense that read more like a script for a Rocky film than a sporting event.
Of course you have Mr Owens, in Berlin… sticking it to the fascist man in ‘36.
And I think that’s what has been missing with the last few Olympics. No one cares about the doping scandals, that’s small potatoes we really want political upheaval from our friendly sporting get-togethers.
Which brings me to the 2012 games… held here in merry old Albion. What protests await us, what points can we score off the pitch, so to speak?
I’m really looking forward to finding out what the world thinks of us in Olympic terms. Will the invasion of Iraq come up, or will it solely be about our god-awful logo?
justine on 
The logo truly is horrific, I’d be ashamed to be represented by it if I was the type to feel like I was being represented by such things.
Still… we really could do with something better (and that shouldn’t be hard to achieve).
for £400000? ’cause that’s what they paid for it.
ummm… I would have done it better for free.
While I think the graphic designers will be an outspoken minority regarding the awful logo, I don’t think most people will take much notice of it.
No, everyone hates it. Everyone. I am seriously not joking.
It has been seen as Lisa Simpson doing very naughty things, or generally just a terrible logo.
I reckon it was chosen by Blair as a kind of final revenge for him being basically forced out of office. :c
oh my gosh! after reading that i took another look and im so on board with the lisa simpson view.
I hadn’t heard the Lisa Simpson thing either… oh dear, it’s true as well…
It’s the logo that keeps giving… disappointment, that is.
Ack! I see it too. *shudder*
Thanks.
Lisa was innocent in my eyes, until now….
Meh, sport, yay, not.
Is it supposed to be the islands or something?
Looking at it again, it could be. But if it is, they need to move the London or look like geographically inadequate morons.
I think it’s supposed to be the number 2012. But yeah, it does look like Lisa Simpson and…
OH LOOK THEY TM’ed IT! AS IF SOMEONE WOULD RIP THAT AWFUL LOGO OFF!
Ha, hadn’t noticed that either… classy, I’m going to TM all my rubbish and nonsense.
That logo is reminiscent of a puzzle being done by a drunk during an earthquake. Either that or someone copied the pieces of the broken platter they just dropped on the floor. Either way, hats off to who ever did that piece of crap and convinced someone to pay them good money for it.
Wow… They paid money for that? I’ve not seen anything that ugly in a long time.
Dave, Roo, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
£400000
Man, where can we find the connections this kid had? S/he obviously knew the right people, because that was not picked on merit.
…
You know, I say that, but I recently participated in an art show/contest for biological art, the purpose of which was to choose some art for the new biology building they just finished constructing on campus here. Four purchase awards, $500 each. There were about 200 entered pieces, and as I walked around the show, I realized that I’d probably not win, because there was a lot of really quality art there. Entry had, however, not been juried, so there was also a lot of really bad art there, too. When they announced the purchase awards I just cringed, three out of four were pieces I’d looked at and said to myself, “man, good that guy entry wasn’t juried.” I wish I had pictures so I could express how truly awful some of these were. The group choosing the awards were two biology faculty members, and two art faculty members. No accounting for tastes I guess.
I think that’s always going to be a problem, and possibly one that happened here is that the people selecting the art usually haven’t got a clue.
You can’t hold the designer responsible for this, he churned it outt, sure, but he didn’t ask to be given that sum of money… they gave it to him voluntarily.
I still think it should have been held as a national competition, get the school kids and communities involved. The UK government has done a really good job with making it’s own people feel detached from these games…
I’m tempted to suggest that you start making terrible art, see how far you can get with it… it’s not selling out, it’s selling short.
I really like the idea of competition for this sort of thing. Everyone feels involved, like they got to have a say. Maybe even take into account a public vote for best logo, out of the top ten, or something. could be fun. And school kids can turn out some really good stuff!
As to making terrible art… that’s actually the reason I majored in biology rather than art. To make a living with the art degree, you really need to be in graphic design, and I can just imagine how much that would suck your soul out. I like doing design work, but if I had to sit for 8 hr. a day every day doing it? I didn’t think I’d have anything left for “my” art.
That said, I recently decided to start painting a few more sell-able things. The goal is to have art that is fun to make, not too time intensive, and something that I might actually be able to make money on. To that end, I did an enormous landscape from my last trip to Colorado:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v48/werdnus/ThreeStooges.jpg
And to give you some size concept:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v48/werdnus/ThreeStoogesScale.jpg
It was a lot of fun, because I stretched the paper first, which was novel. Painting on stretched paper is really neat; no deformation at all. And that whole thing took only three hours! And it turned out well! What do you think — something I can get away with selling?
Man, I’m definitely in the wrong line of work then.
True biological art would have been
to judge the people observing the art.
Yeah but you’re not allowed to purchase people anymore. Least not in most countries.
Hahahahaha.
One of my favourite things to do is sit quietly at an art show that I have pieces in, listening to people that don’t realize I’m the artist talking about my art. It’s hilarious!
Yar. One of my favorite things in life.
[...] thing, after the post on Sunday about the Olympic games, I was contacted by Steve Ballinger from the media unit at Amnesty [...]
[...] thing, after the post on Sunday about the Olympic games, I was contacted by Steve Ballinger from the media unit at Amnesty [...]