Tuesday, August 7, 2012

More Jet Packs, Please: Memories of Olympic Glory

Ever since I was a wee zygote, I have had zero interest in sport. Soccer? Swimming? Table-tennis? Nah. It’s only during the Olympics, when the coverage is so overwhelming that I become aware of what’s going on in the world of running and jumping. And indeed, when I look back, I see that in spite of my indifference I actually have numerous memories of Games past.

Take the Moscow Olympics of 1980 for instance. I was five years old and a girl from my small Scottish town was doing something over there. Our teachers told us all about it. Anyway, she didn’t win a medal, but they did name a street in a rubbish suburb in her honor fifteen years later, so her glory is undiminished, although I can’t actually remember her name.

Nazis, Gangsters, Sex Kittens and Unfortunate Tattoos

Earlier this week the directors of the Bayreuth Festival got into a kerfuffle with the Russian bass-baritone Yevgeny Nikitin when a German TV show revealed that he has a swastika tattoo on one of his man-boobs. This was a problem because Nikitin had been invited to perform the lead in “The Flying Dutchman,” an opera by Richard Wagner, the music world’s most famous anti-Semite, whose work was much beloved by Adolph Hitler, another noted anti-Semite. It was a Nazi supernova!