The Para-Olympic Closing Ceremony: Vol 4, Act 9.

Obviously this should be read alongside vols 1,2 and 3 and yes I know it's been about a month since I published them. I'm actually looking at a 2013 completion date for this if at all. Sadly there's not a carefully constructed masterplan at work it's just a matter of me finding the time to write the bloody thing up.

Act 9.

Following the theme of time and the change in seasons this act represented the shift from autumn to winter. So while Coldplay performed "42" the lighting changed from the reds, yellows and browns of autumn to the blues and whites of winter. Centre stage was taken by ice figure skaters gliding around a female, single leg above knee amputee sitting in a gilded cage. Alongwith Strictly Come Dancing, X-Factor, I'm a Celebrity Get me out of Here and Celebrity Big Brother one of the big entertainment shows that marks winter on UK Television is ITV1's Dancing on Ice. In very much the same way that Strictly Come Dancing takes celebrities and teaches them to ballroom dance Dancing on Ice takes celebrities and teaches them to figure skate. So as with the ballroom dancers in act 8 the contrast between the able bodies figure skaters and the disabled "Snow Queen" in the cage was supposed to promote discussion about the possibility of allowing para-Olympians to make some money along side Olympians by appearing on celebrity TV shows. However I think this is less of a priority for Dancing on Ice because last time I checked figure is actually an Olympic sport so including Olympic champions on might be a little bit unfair on the other competitors and make for really dull TV. The title of the show is an intentional joke because in Britain when someone is pushing their luck they are said to be; "skating on thin ice" and celebrities rarely appear on this type of show at the peak of their careers. So the fact the able-bodied skaters were dressed up to look like British comedian Noel Fielding who shares his initials (NF) with the fascist National Front was Britain trying to give the impression that it will now be dismantling the fascist groups like the NF, the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL) that they've been building up because being seen to support fascist groups is bad for Britain's reputation abroad. The way the Snow Queen finally left her gilded cage to join in the skating was meant to be a way to encourage support for cuts to disability benefits by showing that the disabled don't need to be kept in cages gilded by benefit payments because they can do things just as well as able bodied people (although they often can't and the Independent Living Fund needs to be reintroduced to assist them.)

The reference to Dancing on Ice was also an attempt to bring up that other major theme of the ceremony - my sex life. Although it's now presented by Christine Bleakley Dancing on Ice used to be presented by Holly Willougby who grew up close to Brighton. While I was living in Brighton (Hove actually) I did have a very short relationship with a girl - whose name I still can't remember despite appealing for witnesses - whose parents were vague friends with Holly Willoughby's parents. Unfortunately that girl - her given name was definitely Alice - turned out to be a right gold-digging b*tch. After parting ways with me she fully changed her identity (something which normally requires state help) and tried launching a career in the TV/media industry trading on my reputation. After several years of dealing with a series of women who could be this Alice the TV/media industry lashed out with the BBC and the US network HBO using the Valentine Wannop character in the recent co-production "Parades End" to give her more than a bit of a kicking. Further proving that Brighton's a really small place where everybody knows everybody elses' business the friend of mine who now works as a delivery driver once tried selling Holly Willoughby a house when he was doing an unofficial internship at a luxury property development firm. Although I wasn't there according he claims that she recognised him straight away but rather then acknowledging it put on a big performance of getting him to hold the ladder for her while she checked ceiling beams, attic spaces and such like basically
daring him to look up her skirt. As with that time the same 'friend' spectacularly screwed up my efforts to chat up Hannah Spearritt from the pop band "Sclub7" and now the ITV1 series "Primeval" various versions of the Holly Willoughby story get told pretty much every time we get drunk although they almost always seemed to end with the phrase; "But he only looked once and she's been pregnant ever since!" although her husband may want to dispute the connection between the two events.

Once the figure skaters had finished attention shifted to focus on dancers in full blue body paint performing a sort of tribal dance around a fire. This was a reference to various Norse, Gothic and Anglo-Saxon (Pagan is the generic term) festivals celebrating the winter solstice (December 21st - 23rd) which all generally centred around fire, feasting and another F. This is the reason why Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ (Christmas) on December 25th as the newly converted Roman invaders tried to co-opt winter solstice celebrations in order to convert Pagans to Christianity in order to better control them as an early example of soft power. This is also why the date of Christ's death and resurrection (Easter) moves every year in relation to the spring equinox. The dancer blue body paint was a reference to the 2009 James Cameron film "Avatar" which I've still not seen. However I suspect that along with themes of environmentalism and colonialism another major film of the film is the use of so-called social avatars. This is a practice that began in the world of espionage but has recently begun to cross over into the worlds of business, politics and the industry part of the entertainment industry. It the tame end of the spectrum it is simply a way of solving the problem of one person not being able to be in two different places at the same time. So if there are two meetings schedule for the same time the person will go to one and send a well briefed and consenting person to the other in order to act as their avatar. This is something you see a lot in the US Presidential campaigns where often the candidate will be at some sort of campaign event while at the same time their campaign team will send an avatar to appear on Washington Journal and another avatar to Meet the Press while at the same time the candidates wife will be at another campaign event, the VP candidate will be at yet another campaign event while the wife of the VP candidate will be at yet another campaign event. However in US politics the preferred term is "Surrogate." In the world of espionage which represents the far more sinister end of the spectrum the avatar doesn't know that they're being used in that way and most certainly hasn't given their consent. For example the idea was that I would be used as the Brits avatar during the closing ceremony by drunkenly blurting out things like the "Daddy's Back!" comment which would have stirred up alot of anger in Egypt making it look like the Benghazi attack was simply the result of a spontaneous protest that was all my fault. Another example would be my grandmother's Court of Protection (COP) hearing when the emotionally charged nature of the case, the intimidating environment of the High Court, the lost paperwork and the constant delays were supposed to drive my father and brother into shouting rage forcing me to shout back and give away all my secrets in the process while my father and brother would have been left as clueless as they were angry. Of course neither of those examples actually happened so the Brits might want to have a serious think about whether they've got the talent to play me. Sadly though experience tells me they'll just go off and find a way to convince themselves that it will be different the next time.

The other reason for bringing up the Na'vi from Avatar at this point was to promote discussion about Rihanna's (who was presumably at that point nervously waiting to go on stage) Twitter use. For reasons that still make absolutely no sense to me Rihanna's Twitter fans are known as "The Navy." To further confuse matters someone has decided that this should be spelled "Navi." The reason why everybody is so interested in Rihanna's Twitter use is that with around 26 million followers she is considered one of the most influential people on social media beating out Kings, Queens and Presidents. With more and more marketing and advertising being done via social media and the Libyan and Syrian wars being started by western intelligence agencies using social media to spread made up (black) propaganda a lot of people are really keen to find out what Rihanna's secret is. Having studied it I don't actually think there is a Rihanna social media strategy that can be copied. Instead she simply uses Twitter in much the same way everybody else does - to talk to her friends when she's bored. The problem is that using Twitter in this way simply reveals to a large audience that annoyingly Rihanna is one of those people most people fall a little bit in love with. As a result she now has more friends some nations have populations. Of course the very natural way that Rihanna uses Twitter means that because she's going through a bit of a tough time at the moment she's being a bit quiet because there are some things you'll tell everyone, something's you'll only tell your closest friends and other things you won't ever tell anybody.

Of course because she uses Twitter pretty much like everybody else discussion about Rihanna's Twitter use also promotes discussion about how everybody else uses Twitter. As social media use grows this has become quite an important discussion because a psychologist would describe the practice of clicking onto social media when you're bored as a "displacement activity." Generally displacement activities are considered neutral (neither good nor bad) and in certain circumstances such as sitting in an evacuation centre waiting for a hurricane to hit displacement activity is actually encouraged. However there is a school of thought within psychology that by constantly displacing our boredom through TV, social media and video games we are destroying our imaginations and creativity. Some even go so far as to suggest we are actually changing the structure of our brains on an evolutionary level leading to an increase in the number of cases of Autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It is also well established within the field of abnormal psychology (mental illness) that using displacement activities to avoid our emotional problems leads to those problems getting much worse. Combined with heavy marijuana use (which acts as a cognitive disassociate) and you really have a recipe for disaster. The reason this included during the winter phase of the ceremony was to act as a warning to Britain's youth because shall we just say that it's no accident the cannabis plant doesn't grow in the dark and in austerity Britain if you break there ain't no-one in Britain going to be prepared to fix you.

The act ended with Coldplay performing "Clocks" while the fire the dancers were dancing became a giant flaming ball of fire that rose up into the sky. This was to symbolise that while between the summer solstice and the winter solstice the sun appears to dip in the sky leading to shorter days between the winter solstice and the summer solstice the sun appears to rise leading to longer and brighter days.

00:30 on 29/10/12.