Beijing Olympics 1

Sports Booster Nature Of The Buddha

My three nephews converged on the old homestead like three tropical storms. Instinctively I let the weeding hoe go slack among the ornamental grasses, prairie cordgrass to be exact, and looked up into the sky to search for altocumulus clouds and anvil headed harbingers of tempest. Xyloft and Cymbalta roused themselves from their pantomime of rural blood hounds, and with a wig-waggery of tails approximated a very good look of alertness and positive energy. There were no clouds. The day had just begun. They came for the morning tea, compliments of The Grace Tea Company, New York, New York- a Winey Keemun with a dash of the Black Jasmine. It sounds like a fabled diamond: the Black Jasmine, and so it is in that ineffable, fleeting yet passionate intercourse of tongue and tea. Settling ourselves before the Canadian Broadcasting Company feed of Olympic never-ending buffet, all you can eat until you burst!, we tuned into the live coverage. Most people in the States would have to wait for 12 hours or 12 days or 12 years, or whatever the time delay was that NBC was imposing upon the pix until sufficient numbers of gawkers had assembled south of the Canadian border to satisfy the advertisers. State media, like CBC, do not have to toady to advertisers, only to Parliament, so our Canadian friends get the goods right off. Surely one is totally familiar by now. It is the same way in the States, where we have been learning recently how much better the new State Banking system is, propping up old doddering dinosaurs who can no longer compete in a free market. More anon. I may say that, although I am usually not much for gaudy-night spectacles, never willingly having viewed Olympic bombastia in the past, nor, had I happened to have seen a glimpse, have I ever long-term memorized it, I was appreciative of the effort the new Chinese Empire put on. Oddly enough, within the first day, an American tourist was killed, and a war broke out in Ossetia. Within the first week before the opening, Uighurs killed policemen in Hsinjiang. Within the first year, Tibetans died. I liked the stadium. My nephews said it was called "The Birds' Nest", and I thought this a fitting name for an ungainly object that resembled a recumbent red blood cell, or-worse-a bed pan that had been be-pastaed ("covered with pasta") with the lightly falling spaghetti of the Beijing morn. I liked a good deal of the display. Not the fireworks, however. Never really liked les feu d'artifice since the war, ya know. The theme was the 4 great inventions, and I recall gunpowder was one of them. Hmmm. I thought about that one, but the ironies were all apparent and superficial, and I began to wonder if India were to take a run at the brass ring Olympics thing, what possible inventions would the bureaucrats in New Delhi think up to plan an opening ceremony around? The Buddha? The Mahabharata? Upanishads? All very material, being persons or writings confined to bound volumes, yet not quite material enough, if you catch my drift. Truly, having a song and dance routine around the Lord Buddha is not quite what the Big Business Advertisers have in mind. For one thing, there are a great many companies today- literally a bunker-buster block of companies-that still make and sell gunpowder and its devilish progeny, and they make good money at it. They are still around, thank God, because when Isaiah said to beat their swords into ploughshares and pruning hooks, he wasn't thinking about gunpowder. If he had been, he would not have advised "beating" it into anything. He would have said to tip-toe around it, then scoot. However, how many companies are there today whose names you may use in a sentence conjoined with the Lord Buddha? Not bloody many. I mused on the possibilities that extra-terrestrials have their equivalent to the Olympics. Perhaps a 2001 type baton thrown into the air, reaching zenith, then returning, and bonking a bunch of endangered species-types on the noggins! More later.