The para-Olympic Opening Ceremony.

Despite the London 2012 parallel (para) Olympics being the first sold out para-Olympics (2.5million tickets available) Britain clearly didn't spend anywhere near as much money on the para-Olympic opening ceremony as it did on the opening ceremony for the Olympics. As a result we got a very stripped down ceremony. Despite this I cannot be bothered to go into every tiny detail such as whether the large piece of stage furniture during act 5 was Copernicus' telescope or a simple sextant.

Entitled "Enlightenment" the main theme of the 2012 para-Olympic opening ceremony was to show that disabled people are still people. This is important because even in a country such as Britain where we will have sensible and grown up discussions about disabled people's sex lives there are still people who believe that disabilities are punishment from the gods. If former England football manager "Glenn Hoddle" thinks like this imagine how bad things are in developing countries like Sierra Leone where a simple outbreak of Cholera will kill hundreds.

The opening ceremony set out to achieve this goal of Enlightenment by juxtaposing scenes from the Shakespeare play "The Tempest" which itself juxtaposed "Prosepero's" rational magic (science etc) with "Sycorax's" irrational magic (summoning the gods etc) with Stephen Hawking narrating (yes narrating even though talking is not really one of his main talents) examples of scientific development e.g the Big Bang, Issac Newton's discovery of gravity and the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. The scenes from "The Tempest" revolved around "Prospero's" attempts to educate his daughter "Miranda" through his books on science. In the play "Miranda" was raised from the age of three by her father alone on a desert island. Therefore she represents innocence/social naivety and sexuality. So by having "Miranda" played by a disabled (wheelchair bound) actress this rose questions about disabled people's right to sexual equality. Although it wasn't covered in the opening ceremony later on in "The Tempest" "Miranda" goes on to fight off a rape attempt from Sycorax's son. These themes of disabled sex and sexual consent fits in perfectly with a scandal that blew up in that morning's newspapers about a care worker who took a 15 year old boy with severe learning difficulties to a brothel to have sex with prostitutes. Therefore I suspect that Britain will now be using the Internet to farm sexually frustrated disabled people in foreign countries to gather intelligence and possibly foment some sort of uprising/coup.

The Internet/computers got a special mention in the opening ceremony which featured a giant apple as part of the stage furniture in the opening act and a mass apple biting ceremony in the 5th. The apple was supposed to be a reference to the apple that dropped on Sir Issac Newton's head leading him to 'discover' gravity but was obviously a reference to Apple computers. The big bite could have been a reference to the need to curtail Apple's market share or a reference to the big bite that Samsung had taken out of Apple by allegedly breaching it's copyright. Basically Britain just wanted to promote discussion and find out what everybody else thinks about the Apple V Samsung court cases.

The giant apple stage furniture was accompanied on stage in the first act by a giant book piece of stage furniture. Although it was used later to represent a book during "Prospero's" education of "Miranda" it was meant to represent the "Universal Declaration on Human Rights. (UNDHR)" This was one of the first documents produced by the United Nations as a response to the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust and begins with the words "Everybody has the right to life." This was point driven home during the performance of the original song "Light" in the first act which quoted parts of the UNDHR only changing the word "Life" for the word "Light." As the UNDHR goes on to explain that you can'st torture people or carry out medical experiments on them without their consent it's inclusion was definitely fighting words from Britain.

The only other thing I found interesting was the 6th act which featured protesters demanding better rights for disabled people while 1970's punk legend "Ian Dury" performed his famous hit "Spasticus Autisticus" - the Spasiticus/Swastika sound-a-like was purely intentional and about 30 years old. During this act performers carried carried red tents with light bulbs in them which looked like poppies. During the ceremony the Royal British Legion that looks after military veterans reported that a shipping container containing millions of poppies - which they use for fundraising - had been stolen. In this time of deep cuts to British government spending this was the Royal British Legion attempting to counter the disabled groups protests for more funding. I think the event organisers answered this pretty well in the 7th act by getting "Joe Townsend" - a Royal Marine who lost both his legs to a Taliban IED in Afghanistan - to carry the Olympic flame into the Olympic stadium on a massive zip-wire. This was a way of reminding the Royal British Legion that technically the entire para-Olympics is one giant protest for wounded service personnel. After all it was founded in 1948 at Stoke Mandeville hospital as a way to help servicemen wounded in World War 2 regain their self-respect/become economically active taxpayers depending on which particular version of the truth it's founder "Dr Ludwigg Guttmann" told you in order to make it happen.

00:55 on 30/8/12.