This should be read as a direct continuation of Part 5; http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-2016-sultan-mehmed-games-closing_26.html
Gaby Amarantos: Next up to perform was Gaby Amarantos who appeared at the start of the ceremony and led the crowd in the countdown.
Gaby Amarantos is originally from Pará state. This is one of Brazil's most northern states bordering Suriname and French Guyana. The equator actually runs through Pará state so while Rio was celebrating the Summer games in the depths of their winter it was actually the height of summer in Pará. However the weather doesn't change much in Pará because largely being tropical rainforest it is always hot, it is always humid and there's always a strong possibility of heavy rain.
The capital of Pará state is Belém which is literally Portuguese for "Bethlehem." This is also where IPC President Phillip Craven was banished to at the start of the Opening Ceremony.
However in terms of a political analysis there is not much else I can offer about Gabby Amarantos' performance.
It is here though that I have to raise a bit of a problem.
The UK broadcaster Channel 4 began their coverage of the Closing Ceremony at 21:00 (GMT) - some two hours before the ceremony actually began. The Opening Ceremony began at the very strange time of 21:10 while the Closing Ceremony actually began at 23:00. With Channel 4 only providing a four hour window of when the ceremony would begin this made it quite hard to organise my time around it. Or at least a lot more difficult than it should have been.
To make matters worse having started their coverage two hours early Channel 4 then didn't leave enough time in their schedules for the Closing Ceremony. Rather than cutting off the ceremony before it ended Channel 4 instead cancelled the shows they had scheduled afterwards. However this meant that the recording stopped. Being up and watching I was able to start recording the show that was scheduled afterwards. However for some reason this failed.
As a result what I am about to write is based on notes which at that time in the morning had started getting distinctly sketchy.
Calum Scott: This next performer is from Kingston-Upon-Hull in Yorkshire. As some of you may have noticed Yorkshire is not in Brazil. It is in the north of England in the UK.
The only British singer to perform during the ceremony Calum Scott has teamed up with Brazilian singer Ivete Sangalo to record; "Transformar" - the official song of these games. This obviously highlights the link between the 2012 London games and the 2016 Rio games.
It also touches on the language barrier theme. After all having been reasonably successful in Brazil with his debut single; "Dancing on my Own" Calum Scott demonstrates that Brazilians are happy to listen to songs in English. If only English people were prepared to listen to songs in Portuguese.
The problem is that Calum Scott is not even remotely famous here in the UK. Although he was famous for about a week following a performance on the "Britain's Got Talent" talent show like so many before him he rapidly disappeared from the public eye. The 10th anniversary of the Westwood Cross shopping centre concert is no more a respected music festival than "BBC Look North" and "BFBS Radio" are chart topping music broadcasters.
So while I was able to recognise Andreas Kisser from the Brazilian band Sepultura who appeared earlier in the ceremony as a British person I still have very little idea of who Calum Scott is. I suppose you could turn that into a talking point about the way that British record companies try and dump failed acts on what are viewed as less sophisticated markets. The phrase; "Big in Japan" is still considered a major insult within the British music industry.
If you really want to stretch it I suppose you could turn that into a talking point about the way rich nations keep trying to dump failed policies and technologies on poorer nations.
For example having destroyed any possibility of a market based mechanism this Paris Agreement is demanding that developing nations rely on Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) to fill the massive gap in funding to combat climate change. Meanwhile the US - one of the main advocates of the Paris Agreement - is announcing the end to PFI's in its prison system because they simply don't work.
A particularly nasty offender in this area is Monsanto. They're constantly trying to force Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO's) that they're banned from selling in rich countries onto developing nations as a solution to climate change. Mind you Obama's decision to use taxpayer's money to buy up Monsanto's otherwise unsellable stockpiles of Naled to combat Zika certainly seems to have helped Bayer increase its offer to Monsanto shareholders to USD66bn.
The first song that Calum Scott performed was "Diamonds." This Sia penned song was the first that Rihanna released following her performance at the 2012 Closing Ceremony. It is also the title track of her now infamous 2013 Diamond's World Tour. Needless to say it is not my most favourite song in the whole wide world.
Earlier in the day Rihanna rather helpfully popped up to show us just how much like hard work she can be.
On Saturday (17/9/16) night there was a terrorist bombing in the Chelsea district of New York City. This is less than a kilometre/mile from when Rihanna lives in the SoHo district of New York. It is also about two city blocks away from the 40/40 club owned by Rihanna's mentor Jay Z. In November Jay Z will play his first concert in India as part of the of the Global Citizen Festival. Hours after the New York bombing 17 Indian soldiers were killed in an attack on their base in Kashmir.
So after months and months of silence on top of years of just completely ignoring my advice Rihanna suddenly popped up on Twitter asking for my help. I told her to "P*ss Off." In Morse code.
Because there are some days when only swearing at someone in Morse code will do.
Key to helping keep Rihanna alive during the Diamond's World Tour was a fansite called RihannaDaily who are now surely about to get a verified blue tick on Twitter. One of that sites editors is a Brazilian. I think he may actually be from Rio but I can't be sure.
After all if the 2012 Closing Ceremony was mine and Rihanna's wedding then clear these are our children.
Unlike some people I could mention when I'm under fire I try and keep my children as far away as possible.
The Dying of the Light: It is a matter of IPC protocol that every Closing Ceremony features the Para-Olympic cauldron being extinguished. This Closing Ceremony was no exception although it did rather try and hide what for some can be a sad moment.
Calum Scott was almost seamlessly followed on stage by Ivete Sangalo. She was accompanied by dancers wearing the cloud costumes that featured in the Opening Ceremony. Some of these were carrying giant silver Pinwheels - like the children's toy. These were similar to the kinetic statue that adorned the cauldron.
Almost off camera the wind from these Pinwheels blew out the flame. In the initial Closing Ceremony the cauldron was extinguished by another force of nature - rain. Ironically that was probably the only moment of that ceremony where it didn't rain. So they had to use a rain machine.
Ivete Sangalo: The final performance of the concert went to Ivete Sangalo.
Ivete Sangalo is probably the most famous female singer in Brazil at the moment and is also hugely successful in Portugal. She is sometimes referred to as; "The Brazilian Beyonce." This is a reference both to her style of music and just how famous she is. Ivete Sangalo currently has 15 million Twitter followers while Beyonce can only manage 14.6 million.
At one point during her performance Ivete Sangalo was joined on stage by formation dancers who seemed heavily influenced by Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video. This was obviously a reference to Sangalo's superstar status. However unlike in the Beyonce video these dancers were dressed in white rather than black leotards. This very attractive long white line was another reference to illegal drugs - specifically Cocaine.
Obviously Ivete Sangalo did invite Calum Scott back on stage to perform Transformar. The official song of these games
At one point during the performance the word; "Love" in almost all the languages of the World were shown on the giant TV screen. Then performers made their way amongst the aisles waving giant flags also bearing the word; "Love" in numerous languages. This obviously fitted in with the language barrier theme of the ceremony.
Then "Tom" - the games mascot made an appearance. Rather than just being the guy in the costume little Tom dolls were handed out to the medal winners with his hair either being Gold, Silver or Bronze depending on the medal.
Tom's party trick is that he can pull any item he needs from his mass of tree leaf like hair. No doubt a useful skill given the vast array of seemingly random topics being discussed during any games.
Obviously members of the public could buy lower quality replica Tom dolls as souvenirs. This created something of an awkward moment for Channel 4 anchor Clare Balding.
During a live piece to camera she was showing off her Tom doll to a Brazilian child. Suddenly realising that this child couldn't understand a single word that she was saying Clare Balding decided she had to give this child the toy to stop him bursting into tears. Whether Clare Balding would ever get her hands on another Tom became a running joke of Channel 4's coverage.
With sex tourism and one of my ex-girlfriends being such issues in the run-up to the games I should point out that "Tom" is a British slang term for; "Prostitute." "On the game" is also a slang term for prostitution.
As a result conversations about people being prepared to pay anything to get their hands on a Tom - particularly for well known lesbians like Clare Balding - had a certain subtext to them.
The ceremony then ended with a traditional - rather than quantum - firework display and the 'Siri' computer voice wishing us all goodbye.
17:10 on 27/9/16 (UK date).
Edited at around 20:00 on 27/9/16 (UK date) to add;
Having detailed everything that was included in this Closing Ceremony it is now time for me to complain loudly about something that wasn't.
As I've said this type of ceremony is often used to introduce the host nation to the World. A common way to do this is to feature a person from the host nation who is famous globally.
The Closing Ceremony 2010 Vancouver games did this particularly well. This featured a succession of famous people - such as William Shatner - who you would assume are American but are actually Canadian.
Their role in the ceremony was to say; "Hello. I am {first name} and I am a Canadian." This so much resembled the introduction speech from Alcoholics Anonymous you then expected them to go on and detail all the ways in which being a Canadian has ruined their life.
The Rio 2016 games of course picked up the baton from the 2012 London games. These games were utterly obsessed with the short-lived US TV Show; "Firefly." So much so that they even named the specially chartered jet that brought the Olympic flame to London the; "Firefly." Prompting fans of the TV show to tut and go; "The spaceship was named Serenity."
Amongst the crew of Serenity there was a prostitute played by an actress by the name of Morena Bacarin. Christened Morena Silva de Vaz Setta Baccarin she was born Rio de Janerio, Brazil. Following Firefly she went on to find fame playing the wife of "Sgt Nicholas Brody" in the show "Homeland." She is currently starring in the show "Gotham" which ties into the DC Comics universe.
As such you would've thought it would have been a pretty safe bet that Morena Baccarin would have featured in at least one of the ceremonies. After all she's got to be the most famous Brazilian on TV at the moment.
I don't know if the organisers even invited her to appear. After all there seems to be a bit of an issue involving childbirth, divorce and an affair with a Gotham co-star. However because I've now just lost a bet to myself I'm going to describe Morena Baccarin's absence as;
"She's a bitch. Now she's gone all Hollywood she's forgotten all about the old country."
20:40 on 27/9/16 (UK date).
Tuesday 27 September 2016
Monday 26 September 2016
The 2016 Sultan Mehmed Games: Closing Ceremony Pt.5
This should be read as a direct continuation of Part 4 http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-sultan-mehmed-games-closing.html
With the protocol out of the way we returned to the concert.
Saulo: To give him his full name Saulo Jorge Fernandes Navarro de Oliveira is originally from Bahia state. The most southern of what are considered the Northeastern states sits on the Atlantic coast on almost exactly the opposite side of the country from Mato Grosso state where Vanessa da Mata is from. It is to the south of Pernambuco state where Nação Zumbi are from.
Saulo is famous for being one of the early pioneers of a type of music known as "Axé" which originated in the Northeastern region. It mixes traditional Brazilian styles of music such as Frevo with Caribbean styles of music such as Reggae and Calypso.
The word Axé is from the Yoruba language were it is used as a religious greeting where it means the good vibration of a soul of spirit. Yoruba speakers generally live in west Africa specifically around Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Strangely the Yoruba religion actually developed in the Americas - particularly Brazil - and the Caribbean before being exported back to Africa. This raises the point that despite the common misconception the African slave trade was far from all one way with many African tribes happily participating in it.
To look at him Saulo seems gaunt, a bit scruffy and not particularly mentally alert. Being more experienced in this sort of thing than most it's clear to me that Saulo smokes a lot of Marijuana and has smoked a lot of Marijuana over a great many years. However those with less experience may well have mistaken him for a Heroin addict.
This obviously brings up the issue of drug policy. Particularly the way that different drugs are policed.
This was a particular feature of the original Opening Ceremony feature with the Olympic rings being formed by what could well be mistaken to Marijuana plants.
Prior to the US teaming up with Pablo Escobar to fund their Contra death squads in the 1980's the majority of Latin America's illegal drug production was Marijuana. It was the US that switched it to Cocaine. This is particularly true in Brazil's neighbour Columbia.
Today the Colombian government is scheduled to sign a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) finally bringing an end to the US Cold War policy in Latin America some 37 years after is started and 27 years after the Cold War ended.
The challenge now will be to stop the drug Cartels which funded the Contras moving in to take over the Cocaine plantations that FARC used to fund themselves. Moving back to legalised Marijuana production would certainly help a lot.
However the US seems to remain extremely opposed to this. During the ISIL games it announced that it will continue to classify Marijuana as an illegal drug alongside Heroin and Cocaine. Both Heroin and Cocaine are physically addictive and toxic to the body so either an overdose or long term use will kill the user. Marijuana is not physically addictive and is not toxic. Therefore to classify it alongside Heroin and Cocaine is without any scientific basis.
The US itself is itself currently going through something of a Heroin epidemic.
Just today I'm reading a report of seven people dying of overdoses in Cuyahoga County, Ohio just on Saturday (24/9/16). This brings the total for this small county to 357 overdose deaths so far in 2016. This problem is far from unique to Cuyahoga County. Over five days in August 90 people died people died of overdoses in near-by Hamilton County.
Yet Ohio is still only the state with the second highest rate of overdose deaths. Nationally you're talking about one overdose death every 17 minutes or. However I should point out that most of these are from synthetic Opioids like Oxycontin rather than drugs like Heroin that is produced naturally from the Opium poppy.
This epidemic of drug deaths is almost entirely the fault of US President Barack Obama and his Obamacare policy. This allows for patients to review their doctors. Doctors that score highly receive extra funding while doctors who score poorly in these patient reviews are stripped of funding. A lot of weight in these reviews is given to pain management.
So basically Obama has created a system which allows drug addicts to impose financial penalties on doctors who refuse them access to the Opioids that they then go on to overdose on.
It's just a further indication that Obama is utterly obsessed with Hashtags and slogans while having absolutely no interest in the details nor the disastrous effects of getting those details wrong. In short Obama's just not a serious President. The fact that Hillary Clinton is now running for President suggests that under Obama America has stopped being a serious country.
What is interesting though is that states such as Colorado which have legalised Marijuana have significantly lower rates of Opioid addiction and overdose deaths.
Throughout his performance Saulo wore a simple, loose-fitting tunic, simple, loose-fitting trousers and a Sarong or "Man-Skirt." This is actually a very common style of dress in hot and humid countries such as Brazil. After all the condition "Crotch Rot" is about as charming as it sounds.
However the dark red/maroon colour is associated with Buddhism which even if you don't realise it makes you think of South East Asian nations like Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia etc. These nations all have extremely strong penalties for drug smuggling including life long prison sentences and the death penalty. The so-called "Bali Nine" being a particularly high profile case along with the 14 people Indonesia executed just in July 2016.
You have to wonder whether these harsh penalties actually do anything to stop the illegal drugs trade. After all hundreds have people have been executed and the illegal drugs trade doesn't seem to have stopped yet.
In fact it's reasonably common for drug cartels to team up with local authorities to sacrifice some low level smuggler to be executed. Then with the public being convinced the authorities are taking a tough line against drugs those authorities just go back to helping the cartels smuggle more drugs.
A South East Asian leader who has taken this war on drugs policy to extreme lengths recently is Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Not only has he ordered the police to murder drug dealers and drug users in the streets he has also set up civilian death squads to help the police carry out these masses of extra-judicial killings.
Duterte has very much modelled himself on the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos who ruled the Philippines between 1965 and his death in 1986. Marcos was installed into power and backed by the US and was very much part of the US' Cold War strategy that saw the US impose a military dictatorship on Brazil between 1964 and 1985.
In his earlier appearance Saulo wore a t-shirt emblazoned with an anatomically correct human heart. This was a reference to the sequence in the Opening Ceremony that paid tribute to the more than 80,000 people that were disappeared across Latin America by US backed death squads.
So at the moment Brazil and the Philippines seem to be heading in completely opposite directions from each other.
However beyond acknowledging that the Duterte story had been in the headlines during the games - particularly at the G20 and ASEAN Summits - the ceremony didn't make any great statement about it.
Nego do Borel: The original Opening Ceremony featured a sequence in which it paid tribute to the Favelas or slums of Rio de Janerio. Particularly the "Passinho" style of dance they produced. Although I'm sure his rivals will disagree when people dance in the Passinho style they often do it to the songs of Nego do Borel.
Nego do Borel is firmly a native of Rio being born in its slums. As if to prove Nego do Borel is the authentic voice of the favelas just before his performance the quality of the stewards by the stage improved dramatically. After all one of Nego do Borel's associates MC Daleste was shot and killed during a similar free concert in São Paulo back in 2013.
For the rest of the ceremony as it had been throughout the games all the stewarding had been done by the Games Makers volunteers. They're just normal members of the public who are mostly concerned with making sure you've got the right ticket or pass and that you can find your way to your seat. During Nego do Borel's performance those stewards had been replaced by much more solid looking men.
Due to it being raining heavily and everyone being wrapped up in ponchos it was hard to tell exactly who they were. However initially I thought that they were members of the Brazil's Military Police.
Over the weekend of the Closing Ceremony the US was struck by a wave of terrorist attacks. These included bomb attacks against a charity run in New Jersey and the nightlife in New York City. Those were very much inspired by the 2013 attack against the Boston Marathon. That attack was carried out to threaten the 2014 Sochi games over Russia's opposition to ISIL and the associated Sultan Mehmed divisions.
So despite Russia being banned from these games during the marathon event that took place on the day of the Closing Ceremony Brazil's Military Police were very much on display. In fact at many points during the race there seemed to be many more Military Policemen in attendance than spectators let alone competitors.
However at one point I seemed to glimpse that one of these guys wearing a jacket reading "Polícia Civil" which would indicate that they were members of the local or municipal civilian police. Others though seemed to be wearing jackets indicating that they were simply private security guards. I suppose though that they could be a mixture of all three.
Policing has been a big talking point in Brazil in the run-up to the games and just generally. Through its Neighbourhood Pacification program Rio in particular has been trying to move away from using the Military Police towards the Civil Police particularly in the favelas. In the meantime those who can afford it have taken to relying on private security guards.
However as with everything else in this ceremony this sequence didn't seem to make any particularly point other than acknowledging the topic.
In fact it may not even have been intended as a talking point so much as a necessity.
17:10 on 26/9/16 (UK date).
With the protocol out of the way we returned to the concert.
Saulo: To give him his full name Saulo Jorge Fernandes Navarro de Oliveira is originally from Bahia state. The most southern of what are considered the Northeastern states sits on the Atlantic coast on almost exactly the opposite side of the country from Mato Grosso state where Vanessa da Mata is from. It is to the south of Pernambuco state where Nação Zumbi are from.
Saulo is famous for being one of the early pioneers of a type of music known as "Axé" which originated in the Northeastern region. It mixes traditional Brazilian styles of music such as Frevo with Caribbean styles of music such as Reggae and Calypso.
The word Axé is from the Yoruba language were it is used as a religious greeting where it means the good vibration of a soul of spirit. Yoruba speakers generally live in west Africa specifically around Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Strangely the Yoruba religion actually developed in the Americas - particularly Brazil - and the Caribbean before being exported back to Africa. This raises the point that despite the common misconception the African slave trade was far from all one way with many African tribes happily participating in it.
To look at him Saulo seems gaunt, a bit scruffy and not particularly mentally alert. Being more experienced in this sort of thing than most it's clear to me that Saulo smokes a lot of Marijuana and has smoked a lot of Marijuana over a great many years. However those with less experience may well have mistaken him for a Heroin addict.
This obviously brings up the issue of drug policy. Particularly the way that different drugs are policed.
This was a particular feature of the original Opening Ceremony feature with the Olympic rings being formed by what could well be mistaken to Marijuana plants.
Prior to the US teaming up with Pablo Escobar to fund their Contra death squads in the 1980's the majority of Latin America's illegal drug production was Marijuana. It was the US that switched it to Cocaine. This is particularly true in Brazil's neighbour Columbia.
Today the Colombian government is scheduled to sign a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) finally bringing an end to the US Cold War policy in Latin America some 37 years after is started and 27 years after the Cold War ended.
The challenge now will be to stop the drug Cartels which funded the Contras moving in to take over the Cocaine plantations that FARC used to fund themselves. Moving back to legalised Marijuana production would certainly help a lot.
However the US seems to remain extremely opposed to this. During the ISIL games it announced that it will continue to classify Marijuana as an illegal drug alongside Heroin and Cocaine. Both Heroin and Cocaine are physically addictive and toxic to the body so either an overdose or long term use will kill the user. Marijuana is not physically addictive and is not toxic. Therefore to classify it alongside Heroin and Cocaine is without any scientific basis.
The US itself is itself currently going through something of a Heroin epidemic.
Just today I'm reading a report of seven people dying of overdoses in Cuyahoga County, Ohio just on Saturday (24/9/16). This brings the total for this small county to 357 overdose deaths so far in 2016. This problem is far from unique to Cuyahoga County. Over five days in August 90 people died people died of overdoses in near-by Hamilton County.
Yet Ohio is still only the state with the second highest rate of overdose deaths. Nationally you're talking about one overdose death every 17 minutes or. However I should point out that most of these are from synthetic Opioids like Oxycontin rather than drugs like Heroin that is produced naturally from the Opium poppy.
This epidemic of drug deaths is almost entirely the fault of US President Barack Obama and his Obamacare policy. This allows for patients to review their doctors. Doctors that score highly receive extra funding while doctors who score poorly in these patient reviews are stripped of funding. A lot of weight in these reviews is given to pain management.
So basically Obama has created a system which allows drug addicts to impose financial penalties on doctors who refuse them access to the Opioids that they then go on to overdose on.
It's just a further indication that Obama is utterly obsessed with Hashtags and slogans while having absolutely no interest in the details nor the disastrous effects of getting those details wrong. In short Obama's just not a serious President. The fact that Hillary Clinton is now running for President suggests that under Obama America has stopped being a serious country.
What is interesting though is that states such as Colorado which have legalised Marijuana have significantly lower rates of Opioid addiction and overdose deaths.
Throughout his performance Saulo wore a simple, loose-fitting tunic, simple, loose-fitting trousers and a Sarong or "Man-Skirt." This is actually a very common style of dress in hot and humid countries such as Brazil. After all the condition "Crotch Rot" is about as charming as it sounds.
However the dark red/maroon colour is associated with Buddhism which even if you don't realise it makes you think of South East Asian nations like Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia etc. These nations all have extremely strong penalties for drug smuggling including life long prison sentences and the death penalty. The so-called "Bali Nine" being a particularly high profile case along with the 14 people Indonesia executed just in July 2016.
You have to wonder whether these harsh penalties actually do anything to stop the illegal drugs trade. After all hundreds have people have been executed and the illegal drugs trade doesn't seem to have stopped yet.
In fact it's reasonably common for drug cartels to team up with local authorities to sacrifice some low level smuggler to be executed. Then with the public being convinced the authorities are taking a tough line against drugs those authorities just go back to helping the cartels smuggle more drugs.
A South East Asian leader who has taken this war on drugs policy to extreme lengths recently is Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Not only has he ordered the police to murder drug dealers and drug users in the streets he has also set up civilian death squads to help the police carry out these masses of extra-judicial killings.
Duterte has very much modelled himself on the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos who ruled the Philippines between 1965 and his death in 1986. Marcos was installed into power and backed by the US and was very much part of the US' Cold War strategy that saw the US impose a military dictatorship on Brazil between 1964 and 1985.
In his earlier appearance Saulo wore a t-shirt emblazoned with an anatomically correct human heart. This was a reference to the sequence in the Opening Ceremony that paid tribute to the more than 80,000 people that were disappeared across Latin America by US backed death squads.
So at the moment Brazil and the Philippines seem to be heading in completely opposite directions from each other.
However beyond acknowledging that the Duterte story had been in the headlines during the games - particularly at the G20 and ASEAN Summits - the ceremony didn't make any great statement about it.
Nego do Borel: The original Opening Ceremony featured a sequence in which it paid tribute to the Favelas or slums of Rio de Janerio. Particularly the "Passinho" style of dance they produced. Although I'm sure his rivals will disagree when people dance in the Passinho style they often do it to the songs of Nego do Borel.
Nego do Borel is firmly a native of Rio being born in its slums. As if to prove Nego do Borel is the authentic voice of the favelas just before his performance the quality of the stewards by the stage improved dramatically. After all one of Nego do Borel's associates MC Daleste was shot and killed during a similar free concert in São Paulo back in 2013.
For the rest of the ceremony as it had been throughout the games all the stewarding had been done by the Games Makers volunteers. They're just normal members of the public who are mostly concerned with making sure you've got the right ticket or pass and that you can find your way to your seat. During Nego do Borel's performance those stewards had been replaced by much more solid looking men.
Due to it being raining heavily and everyone being wrapped up in ponchos it was hard to tell exactly who they were. However initially I thought that they were members of the Brazil's Military Police.
Over the weekend of the Closing Ceremony the US was struck by a wave of terrorist attacks. These included bomb attacks against a charity run in New Jersey and the nightlife in New York City. Those were very much inspired by the 2013 attack against the Boston Marathon. That attack was carried out to threaten the 2014 Sochi games over Russia's opposition to ISIL and the associated Sultan Mehmed divisions.
So despite Russia being banned from these games during the marathon event that took place on the day of the Closing Ceremony Brazil's Military Police were very much on display. In fact at many points during the race there seemed to be many more Military Policemen in attendance than spectators let alone competitors.
However at one point I seemed to glimpse that one of these guys wearing a jacket reading "Polícia Civil" which would indicate that they were members of the local or municipal civilian police. Others though seemed to be wearing jackets indicating that they were simply private security guards. I suppose though that they could be a mixture of all three.
Policing has been a big talking point in Brazil in the run-up to the games and just generally. Through its Neighbourhood Pacification program Rio in particular has been trying to move away from using the Military Police towards the Civil Police particularly in the favelas. In the meantime those who can afford it have taken to relying on private security guards.
However as with everything else in this ceremony this sequence didn't seem to make any particularly point other than acknowledging the topic.
In fact it may not even have been intended as a talking point so much as a necessity.
17:10 on 26/9/16 (UK date).
Thursday 22 September 2016
The 2016 Sultan Mehmed Games: Closing Ceremony Pt.4
This should be read as a direct continuation of Part 3: http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-2016-sultan-mehmed-games-closing_21.html
Japan's Bit: As is protocol following the ceremonial handing over of the IPC flag from one host to the next that next host then puts on a short sequence. The purpose of this is to give a brief introduction to the country and possibly some of the issues it wishes to discuss in the four year run-up to its games.
I've not yet got around to covering Japan's section of the previous Closing Ceremony. This is somewhat annoying because they seem to have raised most of the issues in that section. This section simply reiterated a few of those issues while putting a disability twist on them.
As with in the Closing Ceremony of the ISIL games the Para-Olympic flag was handed to the Governor of Tokyo Prefecture/Province Yuriko Koike. The fact that she is the first ever female Governor of any Japanese Prefecture almost automatically promotes discussion about the role of women within Japanese society particularly in business and politics.
This is clearly something Japan intend on making an issue ahead of the 2020 games. In the previous Closing Ceremony Yuriko Koike was dressed in a very traditional Kimono. In this Closing Ceremony she was dressed in modern clothes including trousers and brightly coloured, futuristic shawl. This obviously contrasts the traditional role of Japanese women with the modern. Also the flag detail used to raise the Japanese flag was made up of two men and two women. Another little reference to gender equality.
The sequence itself began with the Japanese flag being shown on the giant TV screen. Although this image kept the shape of the flag with the circle at the centre the colours were soon replaced with the words; "Thank You" written in most if not all of the languages of the World. This was very much in keeping with the language barrier theme of the ceremony.
Alongside all the sport there is a sort of unofficial cultural and social Olympiad. The purpose of this is to show who can best identify and understand the issues being raised. This results in a huge amount of spying on these ceremonies as everyone tries to work out what theme the host will be setting before they unveil their vision to the World. With Brazil being home to the largest ethnically Japanese population outside of Brazil on this occasion I don't think the battle was particularly hard fought.
This image of a Japanese flag draped in the black of mourning with a hole in its centre reminded me of the some of the imagery used - particularly by Japanese broadcasters - in the reporting on the March 11th 2011 (11/3/11) Japanese earthquake. The fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere in the World. In that context the messages of Thanks were thanks for the support shown to Japan during that time.
The March 11th earthquake was particularly talked about during recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations on a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol. Although the Paris Agreement US President Obama has dumped on everyone doesn't require anyone to cut their Greenhouse Gas (ghg) emissions the March 11th earthquake is exactly the sort of Force Majeure event that would free a nation from its obligations.
Going off on a bit of a tangent the son of Republican US Presidential nominee Donald Trump has recently been mocked for using Skittles as a simple way to explain the problem of not subjecting irregular migrants from Syria to proper security screening before granting them refugee status. In the aftermath of the March 11th earthquake I remember Fox News presenter Glenn Beck trying to use plastic tubes filled with Skittles to explain how fuel rods in a nuclear reactor function. He was similarly mocked.
However having spent the day trying to come up with a simple way to explain how a nuclear reactor works I do remember watching that and thinking; "I wish I'd thought of that."
We were then shown a video sequence of the 1964 Olympics - the last time Tokyo hosted the games. Obviously Japan and the World has changed dramatically since those black and white newsreels were shot.
Then Japanese fashion model Gimico took to the stage. Fashion is one of the areas in which Japanese cultural influence has spread across the World. At New York fashion week which took place during the games the very famous designer Marc Jacobs unveiled a collection inspired by the fashion of the Harajuku district of Tokyo. Rather demonstrating just how retarded America has become under Obama Jacobs was immediately condemned as a racist.
Gimico however is perhaps not your typical fashion model. Having survived bone cancer her right leg has been amputated above the knee and she makes her prosthetic a key part of her look. This is obviously a very inspiring Para-Olympic story.
Also even if no-one else will admit it if I see an attractive woman with a prosthetic leg wearing a short skirt or in this case not much of a skirt at all I will start to wonder how they have sex. Although it takes me longer I also wonder the same thing about men with prosthetic legs. After all there are clearly some purchase issues involved. Even in nations that are quite forward thinking on disability issues such as the UK the sex lives of disabled people remains something of a taboo. Unless you're talking to Lee Pearson, he never shuts up about it.
Perhaps feeding into the discussion about the role of women Japanese attitudes to sex are what I think many outsiders would find unusual. I seem to remember having Japanese pornography rules described to me as; "You can show whatever you like provided you don't show pubic hair." That type of rule not only allows for child pornography it seems to actively encourage it. However Japan did finally ban child pornography back in 2014 and actually started enforcing that ban in 2015.
Next to take to the stage was Koichi Omae a reasonably famous Japanese ballet dancer. Having his left leg amputated below the knee following a drink driving accident Omae gave up dance and fell into a deep depression. However he returned to dance with the help of a special prosthetic and regained his love of life.
Again this is obviously a very inspiring Para-Olympic story. However it also serves as a warning to anyone planning to visit Tokyo for the 2020 games. Japanese laws against drink driving are extremely strict. If caught not only will they prosecute the drunk driver they will also prosecute any passengers in the vehicle for being irresponsible enough to allow someone to drive drunk. They will then go and prosecute the vendor who sold the driver the alcohol in the first place. In the UK a drink driving conviction means you have your driving license suspended. In Japan it often means a prison sentence for all those involved.
So if you are going to the 2020 Tokyo games don't even contemplate drink driving. It will likely lead to a diplomatic incident.
Finally the stage was given over to Akira Hiyama who is a blind artist who creates visions of the world as he experiences them through his other senses. This of course was very much in keeping with the Synesthesia references.
Akira Hiyama's performance piece was centred around a song called "7pm in Tokyo" which I'm assured is very famous in Japan. However I've never heard of it and it seems that neither has Google. I'm guessing though it has some connection the Japanese practice of playing 2 minutes of music over the National Disaster Warning speakers at 5pm everyday to test the system and signify the end of the working day. It would be roughly 7pm before you get to meet up with people socially.
At around 15:15 on 22/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up after I've cleared my head a bit.
Edited at around 16:25 on 22/9/16 (UK date) to add;
Akira Hiyama's piece featured many performers including Gimico and Koichi Omae. However it seemed centred around four female dancers dressed to resemble what can only be described as military air hostesses. If the military had such a thing as air hostesses. If you are travelling to the 2020 Tokyo games you will no doubt encounter a number of air hosts and air hostesses but this reference also served as a reminder to anyone who may have missed Japan's gender balanced flag detail.
Also central to Akira Hiyama's piece seemed to be the Tokyo skyline. He used a 3D model of it as a sort of sensory keyboard and also drawings of it appeared repeatedly on the giant TV screen. This obviously introduced you to Tokyo's skyline. However it also seemed to be a reference to Stephen Wiltshire an Autistic British artist whose party trick is to draw complex skylines from memory after seeing them only once.
This combination of Akira Hiyama's visual impairment and Stephen Wiltshire's Autism very closely resembled Saulo Laucus - the visually impaired, Autistic man who sung the Brazilian national anthem. So much so you kind of wonder who was copying whom.
Thank You All Involved: There was then a short video sequence thanking all the volunteers involved in the games. This not only included all the Games Makers who worked in and around the venues but also all the performers involved in the ceremonies along with the people of Rio who've had to put up with all this over the past six weeks.
Closing Speeches: It is IPC protocol that each closing ceremony must feature a speech by the head of the local organising committee - in this case Carlos Nuzman - and the IPC President Phillip Craven.
I really declined to cover the opening speeches because by that point the games were nearly over. I didn't really want to influence the closing speeches too much by going through what had been said in too much detail.
During his opening speech Nuzman did seem to almost deliberately whip the crowd up into a frenzy of booing by needlessly mentioning the government. He then immediately handed over to Craven who then bore the brunt of that booing.
This time Craven had come prepared beginning his closing speech with a moment of silence for Iranian cyclist Bahman Golbarnezhad who died on the penultimate day of the games. The thinking being that the crowd wouldn't boo during a moment of silence.
Speaking briefly about Golbarnezhad's I think it was just an unfortunate accident. It is not that uncommon for competitors to be killed during Olympic events - particularly at the winter games. Just at the 2014 Sochi games Australia started the games one team member short because Matthew Robinson had been killed in competition just before the games. The Closing Ceremony of the ISIL games featured a sequence to remember German canoe coach Stefan Henze who had been killed in a car crash in Rio.
However it is not unheard of for competitors to be killed in desperate efforts to draw attention to themselves. Georgia's Nodar Kumaritashvili at the 2010 Vancouver games being the most recent example. Those of course were the first games since the 2008 Beijing games in which Georgia launched its war against Russia. That resulted in Georgia very much being banished to the diplomatic cold. Kumaritashvili's death made them rather hard to ignore.
By contrast through the wars in Yemen, Syria and Iraq which are all being fought by Saudi Arabia to limit Iran's regional influence along with the deal over the nation's nuclear program Iran are very much talked about at the moment. Therefore they've got no need to send one of their competitors to their deaths for attention. If anything they could probably do with less attention at this point.
As it turns out Guzman did not decide to wind up the crowd with his closing speech. However with some people wrongly considering him to be part of the Brazilian government his mere presence was met with a certain degree of disquiet. What really ruined the moment of silence though was that at this moment the heavens really opened drowning the arena in rain. This sent many in the arena fleeing their seats in search of shelter.
Although it wasn't anybody's intention this did rather give the impression that everybody in the stadium suddenly turned their backs on Craven and began walking out just as he started speaking.
Despite being visibly a little worried he was being snubbed Craven went of to award the Paralympic Order to the people of Rio. Although they seem to give out between 3 and 5 every year this is the highest honour the IPC can bestow. It was given collectively to the people of Rio for their services to the Para-Olympic cause by staging the games.
Be Brazil: We were then shown a short video sequence of the sights of Rio and Brazil more generally. Ending with the Twitter hashtag #BeBrazil this seemed to be an advert by the Brazilian tourist board.
17:20 on 22/9/16 (UK date).
Japan's Bit: As is protocol following the ceremonial handing over of the IPC flag from one host to the next that next host then puts on a short sequence. The purpose of this is to give a brief introduction to the country and possibly some of the issues it wishes to discuss in the four year run-up to its games.
I've not yet got around to covering Japan's section of the previous Closing Ceremony. This is somewhat annoying because they seem to have raised most of the issues in that section. This section simply reiterated a few of those issues while putting a disability twist on them.
As with in the Closing Ceremony of the ISIL games the Para-Olympic flag was handed to the Governor of Tokyo Prefecture/Province Yuriko Koike. The fact that she is the first ever female Governor of any Japanese Prefecture almost automatically promotes discussion about the role of women within Japanese society particularly in business and politics.
This is clearly something Japan intend on making an issue ahead of the 2020 games. In the previous Closing Ceremony Yuriko Koike was dressed in a very traditional Kimono. In this Closing Ceremony she was dressed in modern clothes including trousers and brightly coloured, futuristic shawl. This obviously contrasts the traditional role of Japanese women with the modern. Also the flag detail used to raise the Japanese flag was made up of two men and two women. Another little reference to gender equality.
The sequence itself began with the Japanese flag being shown on the giant TV screen. Although this image kept the shape of the flag with the circle at the centre the colours were soon replaced with the words; "Thank You" written in most if not all of the languages of the World. This was very much in keeping with the language barrier theme of the ceremony.
Alongside all the sport there is a sort of unofficial cultural and social Olympiad. The purpose of this is to show who can best identify and understand the issues being raised. This results in a huge amount of spying on these ceremonies as everyone tries to work out what theme the host will be setting before they unveil their vision to the World. With Brazil being home to the largest ethnically Japanese population outside of Brazil on this occasion I don't think the battle was particularly hard fought.
This image of a Japanese flag draped in the black of mourning with a hole in its centre reminded me of the some of the imagery used - particularly by Japanese broadcasters - in the reporting on the March 11th 2011 (11/3/11) Japanese earthquake. The fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere in the World. In that context the messages of Thanks were thanks for the support shown to Japan during that time.
The March 11th earthquake was particularly talked about during recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations on a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol. Although the Paris Agreement US President Obama has dumped on everyone doesn't require anyone to cut their Greenhouse Gas (ghg) emissions the March 11th earthquake is exactly the sort of Force Majeure event that would free a nation from its obligations.
Going off on a bit of a tangent the son of Republican US Presidential nominee Donald Trump has recently been mocked for using Skittles as a simple way to explain the problem of not subjecting irregular migrants from Syria to proper security screening before granting them refugee status. In the aftermath of the March 11th earthquake I remember Fox News presenter Glenn Beck trying to use plastic tubes filled with Skittles to explain how fuel rods in a nuclear reactor function. He was similarly mocked.
However having spent the day trying to come up with a simple way to explain how a nuclear reactor works I do remember watching that and thinking; "I wish I'd thought of that."
We were then shown a video sequence of the 1964 Olympics - the last time Tokyo hosted the games. Obviously Japan and the World has changed dramatically since those black and white newsreels were shot.
Then Japanese fashion model Gimico took to the stage. Fashion is one of the areas in which Japanese cultural influence has spread across the World. At New York fashion week which took place during the games the very famous designer Marc Jacobs unveiled a collection inspired by the fashion of the Harajuku district of Tokyo. Rather demonstrating just how retarded America has become under Obama Jacobs was immediately condemned as a racist.
Gimico however is perhaps not your typical fashion model. Having survived bone cancer her right leg has been amputated above the knee and she makes her prosthetic a key part of her look. This is obviously a very inspiring Para-Olympic story.
Also even if no-one else will admit it if I see an attractive woman with a prosthetic leg wearing a short skirt or in this case not much of a skirt at all I will start to wonder how they have sex. Although it takes me longer I also wonder the same thing about men with prosthetic legs. After all there are clearly some purchase issues involved. Even in nations that are quite forward thinking on disability issues such as the UK the sex lives of disabled people remains something of a taboo. Unless you're talking to Lee Pearson, he never shuts up about it.
Perhaps feeding into the discussion about the role of women Japanese attitudes to sex are what I think many outsiders would find unusual. I seem to remember having Japanese pornography rules described to me as; "You can show whatever you like provided you don't show pubic hair." That type of rule not only allows for child pornography it seems to actively encourage it. However Japan did finally ban child pornography back in 2014 and actually started enforcing that ban in 2015.
Next to take to the stage was Koichi Omae a reasonably famous Japanese ballet dancer. Having his left leg amputated below the knee following a drink driving accident Omae gave up dance and fell into a deep depression. However he returned to dance with the help of a special prosthetic and regained his love of life.
Again this is obviously a very inspiring Para-Olympic story. However it also serves as a warning to anyone planning to visit Tokyo for the 2020 games. Japanese laws against drink driving are extremely strict. If caught not only will they prosecute the drunk driver they will also prosecute any passengers in the vehicle for being irresponsible enough to allow someone to drive drunk. They will then go and prosecute the vendor who sold the driver the alcohol in the first place. In the UK a drink driving conviction means you have your driving license suspended. In Japan it often means a prison sentence for all those involved.
So if you are going to the 2020 Tokyo games don't even contemplate drink driving. It will likely lead to a diplomatic incident.
Finally the stage was given over to Akira Hiyama who is a blind artist who creates visions of the world as he experiences them through his other senses. This of course was very much in keeping with the Synesthesia references.
Akira Hiyama's performance piece was centred around a song called "7pm in Tokyo" which I'm assured is very famous in Japan. However I've never heard of it and it seems that neither has Google. I'm guessing though it has some connection the Japanese practice of playing 2 minutes of music over the National Disaster Warning speakers at 5pm everyday to test the system and signify the end of the working day. It would be roughly 7pm before you get to meet up with people socially.
At around 15:15 on 22/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up after I've cleared my head a bit.
Edited at around 16:25 on 22/9/16 (UK date) to add;
Akira Hiyama's piece featured many performers including Gimico and Koichi Omae. However it seemed centred around four female dancers dressed to resemble what can only be described as military air hostesses. If the military had such a thing as air hostesses. If you are travelling to the 2020 Tokyo games you will no doubt encounter a number of air hosts and air hostesses but this reference also served as a reminder to anyone who may have missed Japan's gender balanced flag detail.
Also central to Akira Hiyama's piece seemed to be the Tokyo skyline. He used a 3D model of it as a sort of sensory keyboard and also drawings of it appeared repeatedly on the giant TV screen. This obviously introduced you to Tokyo's skyline. However it also seemed to be a reference to Stephen Wiltshire an Autistic British artist whose party trick is to draw complex skylines from memory after seeing them only once.
This combination of Akira Hiyama's visual impairment and Stephen Wiltshire's Autism very closely resembled Saulo Laucus - the visually impaired, Autistic man who sung the Brazilian national anthem. So much so you kind of wonder who was copying whom.
Thank You All Involved: There was then a short video sequence thanking all the volunteers involved in the games. This not only included all the Games Makers who worked in and around the venues but also all the performers involved in the ceremonies along with the people of Rio who've had to put up with all this over the past six weeks.
Closing Speeches: It is IPC protocol that each closing ceremony must feature a speech by the head of the local organising committee - in this case Carlos Nuzman - and the IPC President Phillip Craven.
I really declined to cover the opening speeches because by that point the games were nearly over. I didn't really want to influence the closing speeches too much by going through what had been said in too much detail.
During his opening speech Nuzman did seem to almost deliberately whip the crowd up into a frenzy of booing by needlessly mentioning the government. He then immediately handed over to Craven who then bore the brunt of that booing.
This time Craven had come prepared beginning his closing speech with a moment of silence for Iranian cyclist Bahman Golbarnezhad who died on the penultimate day of the games. The thinking being that the crowd wouldn't boo during a moment of silence.
Speaking briefly about Golbarnezhad's I think it was just an unfortunate accident. It is not that uncommon for competitors to be killed during Olympic events - particularly at the winter games. Just at the 2014 Sochi games Australia started the games one team member short because Matthew Robinson had been killed in competition just before the games. The Closing Ceremony of the ISIL games featured a sequence to remember German canoe coach Stefan Henze who had been killed in a car crash in Rio.
However it is not unheard of for competitors to be killed in desperate efforts to draw attention to themselves. Georgia's Nodar Kumaritashvili at the 2010 Vancouver games being the most recent example. Those of course were the first games since the 2008 Beijing games in which Georgia launched its war against Russia. That resulted in Georgia very much being banished to the diplomatic cold. Kumaritashvili's death made them rather hard to ignore.
By contrast through the wars in Yemen, Syria and Iraq which are all being fought by Saudi Arabia to limit Iran's regional influence along with the deal over the nation's nuclear program Iran are very much talked about at the moment. Therefore they've got no need to send one of their competitors to their deaths for attention. If anything they could probably do with less attention at this point.
As it turns out Guzman did not decide to wind up the crowd with his closing speech. However with some people wrongly considering him to be part of the Brazilian government his mere presence was met with a certain degree of disquiet. What really ruined the moment of silence though was that at this moment the heavens really opened drowning the arena in rain. This sent many in the arena fleeing their seats in search of shelter.
Although it wasn't anybody's intention this did rather give the impression that everybody in the stadium suddenly turned their backs on Craven and began walking out just as he started speaking.
Despite being visibly a little worried he was being snubbed Craven went of to award the Paralympic Order to the people of Rio. Although they seem to give out between 3 and 5 every year this is the highest honour the IPC can bestow. It was given collectively to the people of Rio for their services to the Para-Olympic cause by staging the games.
Be Brazil: We were then shown a short video sequence of the sights of Rio and Brazil more generally. Ending with the Twitter hashtag #BeBrazil this seemed to be an advert by the Brazilian tourist board.
17:20 on 22/9/16 (UK date).
Wednesday 21 September 2016
The 2016 Sultan Mehmed Games: Closing Ceremony Pt.3
This should be read as a direct continuation of Part 2; http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-2016-sultan-mehmed-games-closing_20.html
Some More Competitors: Following the handing out of the Whang Youn Dai award five more competitors were invited on stage.
In the Olympics these would be the competitors who'd been elected to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). However the IPC doesn't do this. I certainly don't remember such a sequence taking place at the 2014 Sochi. Therefore I have no idea what this sequence was about.
However what I suspect happened is that the IPC handed the Whang Youn Dai award to Tatyana McFadden and Ibrahim Al Hussein simply to make a political point about the effect the US' behaviour towards Russia is having on the people of Syria.
For example in 2014 the male award went to Toby Kane for his role in holding the Australian team together following the death of teammate Matthew Robinson in a competition just weeks before the games. Neither McFadden nor Al Hussein had shown that sort of leadership or altruistic behaviour. McFadden in particular is very keen on the type of self-promotion which the Whang Youn Dai award is supposed to frown upon.
Therefore I think these five competitors were being recognised as the people - politics aside - who should have won the Whang Youn Dai award. There were;
They were then joined on stage by Brazilian singer Saulo. He actually went on to do a full set later on so I'll discuss him in more detail then. Saulo was dressed in a t-shirt with an anatomically correct human heart on it. He sang a version of Bob Marley's "One Love" while the competitors and athletes danced with him.
This was intended as a reference to the end of the Parade of Nations in the Opening Ceremony when an image of a human heart was overlayed over pictures of all the competitors. It referenced all the connotations of that sequence.
Highlights Montage: We were then shown a video montage of the highlights of the games just gone. Here several things did stand out to me.
The first of these is that it did seem to feature a disproportionally high number of female competitors wearing the Hijab. In fact I think every competitor who wore the Hijab was featured in the montage. Looking back over the games the Hijab or more specifically the Burkini was one of the big talking points of the games. This was particularly true in the swimming events.
For example there was that Dutch swimmer whose name I deliberately ignored who wore the Keffiyeh scarf as she made her way to the pool. Then there was the British swimmers and their black coats. Worn to keep the competitors muscles warm as they wait to race on average sized swimmers these looked perfectly normal. However when they're worn by Dwarves like Ellie Simmonds - particularly with the hood up - they do start to closely resemble Niqabs or Burqas.
Another UK dwarf swimmer Ellie Robinson became a bit of a celebrity because of her coat. She walked out in this big coat with the hood up and then threw her arms out to the sides in a sort of Hip Hop power pose. In true Para-Olympic fashion apparently what actually happened is this shy 16 year old girl was simply trying to raise her hands above her head to return the applause of the crowd. Then her shoulders suddenly locked as sometimes happens to dwarves and she was forced to just try and style it out.
So rather than making a further point the Hijab was featured here as a way to look back at the games and go; "Do you remember when we talked about...?"
I also noticed that British Equestrian rider Sophie Christiansen featured quite heavily. In talking about the Opening Ceremony I said that Sophie Christiansen had chosen not to compete in Rio because she thought it was more important to concentrate on her career as a statistical analyst for Goldman Sachs. Clearly this was not true.
Back at the 2012 London games I did talk about Sophie Christiansen rather a lot. To the point I noticed that I was starting to embarrass her. This year I didn't want to make things worse by appearing to be her Internet stalker by constantly searching to see what she was up to. I did do a quick, cursory search of all the Equestrian competitors and not seeing her name on the list made the assumption that she wasn't competing.
I will admit that I didn't check too hard though because I think the way I phrased what I did write better helped to illustrate my point.
When it comes to public attitudes towards disability I think people with Cerebral Palsy get a particularly rough deal. If you see someone missing part or all of one of their legs it's quite easy for you to understand that they were either born without it or lost it at some point.
People with Cerebral Palsy suffer from tremors, spastic contractions and speech problems. Even if you do understand the condition it's much harder for you to process what's going on with the person. Particularly in their minds. Frankly it looks a bit weird and it tends to freak people out a bit.
This is extremely frustrating for people with Cerebral Palsy because the condition only affects the way the brain connects to the nervous system through the Cerebellum and the Brain Stem. The rest of the brain functions perfectly normally with all the usual thoughts, emotions and desires of a person without Cerebral Palsy.
Sophie Christiansen is a particularly extreme example of this because she has quite a high degree of facial paralysis which makes it difficult to talk. When she does speak she has to speak slowly and often her words are slurred. This can give the impression that she is stupid.
That is completely wrong because with a masters degree in mathematics Sophie Christiansen is actually extremely intelligent. Even if she could speak with the clarity of a classically trained actress you still probably couldn't understand half the things she says. They're just so intelligent and complicated.
I also noticed that the Dutch sitting volleyball team featured prominently in the highlights montage.
This was in reference to another one of the big political issues that dominated the games. The long awaited Dutch criminal investigation into the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Shamali Province (nee: Ukraine) in July 2014.
From the start this investigation has been intended not as an attempt to bring justice to the victims but as a piece of propaganda to punish Russia for its longstanding opposition to terror groups such as ISIL and the Sultan Mehmed divisions. The parameters of the investigation are entirely wrong looking solely at the firing of the missile whilst ignoring how the aircraft came to be in the skies over a warzone.
Legally the problem with this is that even if the investigation can identify the specific individual who pressed the button to launch the missile prosecutors still need to demonstrate what is in any way illegal about using a weapon of war during a war. The best they can hope for is to demonstrate that the firing of the missile was negligent because no proper checks were made to establish that it was a military aircraft.
The law has to be applied equally. Therefore if you are going to look at negligence you have to look at the negligence of all parties including the air traffic controllers who gave permission for a civilian aircraft to be flown into a warzone. From the start the parameters of the Dutch investigation have been set specifically to prevent that from happening.
There was a very strong rumour that the Dutch had been planning to release the results of this investigation on August 26th (26/8/16) - five days after the end of the ISIL games. However that has clearly not happened. To borrow a volleyball term the Dutch appear to have spiked their report. At least until they can go back and do it properly.
My reading of the Dutch women's hockey team's shock defeat to the British team during the last days of the ISIL is that the Dutch have now completely disowned this MH17 report as a piece of pro-ISIL propaganda.
Shamali Province themselves had an extremely successful games. They ended up finishing third in the medal table with 117 medals including 41 Golds. They even beat the US team who only 115 medals including 40 Golds into fourth place.
With Russia being banned from these games Shamali Province obviously had a lot of help from the IPC who wanted to further show their support. However to be so successful Shamali Province also needed a lot of help from other nations. They seemed to keen to have Shamali Province winning so many events, appearing in so many medal ceremonies and appearing so high up the medal table to promote discussion about Shamali Province rather than to show their support.
As a result from about the third day of the games lots of whispered references to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The Sound of Music" started flying about. Particularly that one song; "(How Do You Solve a Problem Like) Maria." I though thought; "Sixteen Going On Seventeen" better encapsulated the IPC's relationship with the Nazis of Shamali Province's 1st Galician Division.
In a spectacular coincidence Charmian Carr who played the Liesl character who sung Sixteen Going on Seventeen in the famous 1965 movie died on Friday (16/9/16). This was announced by her family right at the start of the Closing Ceremony on Sunday (18/9/16).
Carr was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Wrongly confused with Dementia which is non-specific memory loss Alzheimer's is a disease of the brain which destroys Prions. These are proteins that make up braincells. How the disease progresses depends on what braincells are destroyed first. However it tends to start by affecting memory followed by cognitive and reasoning skills before moving on to destroy coordination and movement before finally resulting in death.
It is certainly possible that all these whispered references to the Sound of Music finally pushed Carr's diminished brain capacity over the edge causing her to die. However that's as opposed to her dying of the disease either this week or the next.
Fun With Flags: As with the Olympics it is a matter of IPC protocol that each Closing Ceremony features a performance of the Para-Olympic anthem and the lowering of the Para-Olympic flag. That flag is then ceremonially handed over to the next host - in this case Japan 2020 - before the next host's flag is raised and their anthem played.
In this flag ceremony the IPC allowed its anthem to be interpreted by a group of Brazilian musicians. This featured an accordion player, an acoustic guitar player and what seemed to me to be a Boha guitar. This was obviously a little nod to the earlier Guitar Heroes sequence.
During this sequence the giant TV screen was playing a video sequence focused on the sense of touch. This looked as though objects were being pushed up against flesh toned latex. There was some Braille writing, what appeared to be a human ear and the Para-Olympic Agitos logo.
This obviously referenced the Synesthesia theme. The latex skin also seemed to be a reference to Rossum's Universal Robots as it relates to the language barrier theme.
At around 17:10 on 21/9/16 (UK date) I'll probably pick this up tomorrow now.
Some More Competitors: Following the handing out of the Whang Youn Dai award five more competitors were invited on stage.
In the Olympics these would be the competitors who'd been elected to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). However the IPC doesn't do this. I certainly don't remember such a sequence taking place at the 2014 Sochi. Therefore I have no idea what this sequence was about.
However what I suspect happened is that the IPC handed the Whang Youn Dai award to Tatyana McFadden and Ibrahim Al Hussein simply to make a political point about the effect the US' behaviour towards Russia is having on the people of Syria.
For example in 2014 the male award went to Toby Kane for his role in holding the Australian team together following the death of teammate Matthew Robinson in a competition just weeks before the games. Neither McFadden nor Al Hussein had shown that sort of leadership or altruistic behaviour. McFadden in particular is very keen on the type of self-promotion which the Whang Youn Dai award is supposed to frown upon.
Therefore I think these five competitors were being recognised as the people - politics aside - who should have won the Whang Youn Dai award. There were;
- Monica Bascio - A cyclist from the US,
- Kurt Fearnley - An athlete from Australia,
- Chelsea Gotel - A swimmer from Canada,
- Eliva Stinissen - A sitting volleyball player from the Netherlands,
- Sarah Storey - A cyclist from UK.
They were then joined on stage by Brazilian singer Saulo. He actually went on to do a full set later on so I'll discuss him in more detail then. Saulo was dressed in a t-shirt with an anatomically correct human heart on it. He sang a version of Bob Marley's "One Love" while the competitors and athletes danced with him.
This was intended as a reference to the end of the Parade of Nations in the Opening Ceremony when an image of a human heart was overlayed over pictures of all the competitors. It referenced all the connotations of that sequence.
Highlights Montage: We were then shown a video montage of the highlights of the games just gone. Here several things did stand out to me.
The first of these is that it did seem to feature a disproportionally high number of female competitors wearing the Hijab. In fact I think every competitor who wore the Hijab was featured in the montage. Looking back over the games the Hijab or more specifically the Burkini was one of the big talking points of the games. This was particularly true in the swimming events.
For example there was that Dutch swimmer whose name I deliberately ignored who wore the Keffiyeh scarf as she made her way to the pool. Then there was the British swimmers and their black coats. Worn to keep the competitors muscles warm as they wait to race on average sized swimmers these looked perfectly normal. However when they're worn by Dwarves like Ellie Simmonds - particularly with the hood up - they do start to closely resemble Niqabs or Burqas.
Another UK dwarf swimmer Ellie Robinson became a bit of a celebrity because of her coat. She walked out in this big coat with the hood up and then threw her arms out to the sides in a sort of Hip Hop power pose. In true Para-Olympic fashion apparently what actually happened is this shy 16 year old girl was simply trying to raise her hands above her head to return the applause of the crowd. Then her shoulders suddenly locked as sometimes happens to dwarves and she was forced to just try and style it out.
So rather than making a further point the Hijab was featured here as a way to look back at the games and go; "Do you remember when we talked about...?"
I also noticed that British Equestrian rider Sophie Christiansen featured quite heavily. In talking about the Opening Ceremony I said that Sophie Christiansen had chosen not to compete in Rio because she thought it was more important to concentrate on her career as a statistical analyst for Goldman Sachs. Clearly this was not true.
Back at the 2012 London games I did talk about Sophie Christiansen rather a lot. To the point I noticed that I was starting to embarrass her. This year I didn't want to make things worse by appearing to be her Internet stalker by constantly searching to see what she was up to. I did do a quick, cursory search of all the Equestrian competitors and not seeing her name on the list made the assumption that she wasn't competing.
I will admit that I didn't check too hard though because I think the way I phrased what I did write better helped to illustrate my point.
When it comes to public attitudes towards disability I think people with Cerebral Palsy get a particularly rough deal. If you see someone missing part or all of one of their legs it's quite easy for you to understand that they were either born without it or lost it at some point.
People with Cerebral Palsy suffer from tremors, spastic contractions and speech problems. Even if you do understand the condition it's much harder for you to process what's going on with the person. Particularly in their minds. Frankly it looks a bit weird and it tends to freak people out a bit.
This is extremely frustrating for people with Cerebral Palsy because the condition only affects the way the brain connects to the nervous system through the Cerebellum and the Brain Stem. The rest of the brain functions perfectly normally with all the usual thoughts, emotions and desires of a person without Cerebral Palsy.
Sophie Christiansen is a particularly extreme example of this because she has quite a high degree of facial paralysis which makes it difficult to talk. When she does speak she has to speak slowly and often her words are slurred. This can give the impression that she is stupid.
That is completely wrong because with a masters degree in mathematics Sophie Christiansen is actually extremely intelligent. Even if she could speak with the clarity of a classically trained actress you still probably couldn't understand half the things she says. They're just so intelligent and complicated.
I also noticed that the Dutch sitting volleyball team featured prominently in the highlights montage.
This was in reference to another one of the big political issues that dominated the games. The long awaited Dutch criminal investigation into the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Shamali Province (nee: Ukraine) in July 2014.
From the start this investigation has been intended not as an attempt to bring justice to the victims but as a piece of propaganda to punish Russia for its longstanding opposition to terror groups such as ISIL and the Sultan Mehmed divisions. The parameters of the investigation are entirely wrong looking solely at the firing of the missile whilst ignoring how the aircraft came to be in the skies over a warzone.
Legally the problem with this is that even if the investigation can identify the specific individual who pressed the button to launch the missile prosecutors still need to demonstrate what is in any way illegal about using a weapon of war during a war. The best they can hope for is to demonstrate that the firing of the missile was negligent because no proper checks were made to establish that it was a military aircraft.
The law has to be applied equally. Therefore if you are going to look at negligence you have to look at the negligence of all parties including the air traffic controllers who gave permission for a civilian aircraft to be flown into a warzone. From the start the parameters of the Dutch investigation have been set specifically to prevent that from happening.
There was a very strong rumour that the Dutch had been planning to release the results of this investigation on August 26th (26/8/16) - five days after the end of the ISIL games. However that has clearly not happened. To borrow a volleyball term the Dutch appear to have spiked their report. At least until they can go back and do it properly.
My reading of the Dutch women's hockey team's shock defeat to the British team during the last days of the ISIL is that the Dutch have now completely disowned this MH17 report as a piece of pro-ISIL propaganda.
Shamali Province themselves had an extremely successful games. They ended up finishing third in the medal table with 117 medals including 41 Golds. They even beat the US team who only 115 medals including 40 Golds into fourth place.
With Russia being banned from these games Shamali Province obviously had a lot of help from the IPC who wanted to further show their support. However to be so successful Shamali Province also needed a lot of help from other nations. They seemed to keen to have Shamali Province winning so many events, appearing in so many medal ceremonies and appearing so high up the medal table to promote discussion about Shamali Province rather than to show their support.
As a result from about the third day of the games lots of whispered references to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The Sound of Music" started flying about. Particularly that one song; "(How Do You Solve a Problem Like) Maria." I though thought; "Sixteen Going On Seventeen" better encapsulated the IPC's relationship with the Nazis of Shamali Province's 1st Galician Division.
In a spectacular coincidence Charmian Carr who played the Liesl character who sung Sixteen Going on Seventeen in the famous 1965 movie died on Friday (16/9/16). This was announced by her family right at the start of the Closing Ceremony on Sunday (18/9/16).
Carr was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Wrongly confused with Dementia which is non-specific memory loss Alzheimer's is a disease of the brain which destroys Prions. These are proteins that make up braincells. How the disease progresses depends on what braincells are destroyed first. However it tends to start by affecting memory followed by cognitive and reasoning skills before moving on to destroy coordination and movement before finally resulting in death.
It is certainly possible that all these whispered references to the Sound of Music finally pushed Carr's diminished brain capacity over the edge causing her to die. However that's as opposed to her dying of the disease either this week or the next.
Fun With Flags: As with the Olympics it is a matter of IPC protocol that each Closing Ceremony features a performance of the Para-Olympic anthem and the lowering of the Para-Olympic flag. That flag is then ceremonially handed over to the next host - in this case Japan 2020 - before the next host's flag is raised and their anthem played.
In this flag ceremony the IPC allowed its anthem to be interpreted by a group of Brazilian musicians. This featured an accordion player, an acoustic guitar player and what seemed to me to be a Boha guitar. This was obviously a little nod to the earlier Guitar Heroes sequence.
During this sequence the giant TV screen was playing a video sequence focused on the sense of touch. This looked as though objects were being pushed up against flesh toned latex. There was some Braille writing, what appeared to be a human ear and the Para-Olympic Agitos logo.
This obviously referenced the Synesthesia theme. The latex skin also seemed to be a reference to Rossum's Universal Robots as it relates to the language barrier theme.
At around 17:10 on 21/9/16 (UK date) I'll probably pick this up tomorrow now.
Tuesday 20 September 2016
The 2016 Sultan Mehmed Games: Closing Ceremony Pt.2
This should be read as a direct continuation of Part 1; http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-2016-sultan-mehmed-games-closing.html
With the protocol of the flag ceremony and the Parade of Nations out of the way the concert started getting into full swing giving us something of a musical tour of Brazil.
Nação Zumbi: The next act to appear were the Brazilian band Nação Zumbi. Formed in 1994 they were one of the pioneers of a type of Brazilian music called "Mangue Bit."
Hailing from the of Recife in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco on the Atlantic coast this type of music began as a counter-culture movement protesting against the political stagnation and environmental damage of the time. It blends traditional Brazilian musical styles such as Maracatu, Frevo, Coco and Forró with more western styles of music such as Rock, Hip Hop, Funk and Electronic.
The Mangue of the title refers to Recife's Mangrove forests. These are much talked about in Climate Change circles acting both to absorb Green House Gases (ghg) and protect coastal areas from flooding. In keeping with this environmental theme the stage setting and the video shown on the screen behind displayed all the rich types of flora and fauna native to that northeastern region of Brazil.
In their heavier moments Nação Zumbi made me think of US/Venezuelan/Jewish Punk Rap band "Downset." Particularly their environmental protest song; "Chemical Strangle."
Touching on the language barrier theme while searching for this on Youtube I discovered a video where a fan had put together a montage inspired by the lyrics. Unfortunately they'd got the lyrics almost completely wrong. I found it hilarious, if loud; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT2HqZcYbkQ
At more then one moment Nação Zumbi's guitarist lifted his instrument up to reveal the message "Fora Temer (Temer Out!)" written on the underside. Funnily enough Brazil's recently installed President Michel Temer did not make an appearance during this ceremony.
Due to the language barrier theme I personally would have gone with; "Va Temer" which translates as; "Go Temer." However you would have had to understand the nuance of the language to tell whether this was a call for Temer to leave or a sign of support. In the way that supporters have been shouting; ""Go Brazil!" throughout the games.
I suppose it might have worked for Italian speakers though.
Vanessa da Mata: Next to perform was Vanessa da Mata. However rather than taking to the stage she appeared at the opposite end of the arena and sung her way through the crowd in a light-up Smart Fabric dress before taking to the mini-stage in the centre of the arena.
Vanessa da Mata is from Brazil's central western state of Mato Grosso which borders Bolivia. According to Wikipedia on her maternal grandmother's side Vanessa da Mata is descended from the Xavante tribe of indigenous Brazilian Indians. However while acknowledging that she has indigenous ancestry she has denied a direct link to the Xavante tribe.
Having released seven albums and being extremely successful in both Brazil and Portugal she is probably most famous in the US for the 2007 duet "Boa Sorte/Good Luck" she did with US singer Ben Harper. That was included on the album; "Sim" which won a Latin Grammy for Best Brazilian Album. In this I think we got into the real reason why this ceremony was so focused on the issue of language.
If you follow any of the big US award shows - the Emmy's were aggressively scheduled against the ceremony - on social media such as Twitter you'll notice that most of the comments are in Spanish. These come from viewers in Spanish speaking Latin American nations.
In music there is the Latin Grammys to go alongside the Grammys specifically for this audience. However even there they need to make special categories from Brazilian acts who of course speak Portuguese. Not Spanish.
However I do remember being told by a Portuguese person in Portugal that most Portuguese people also speak Spanish because; "It's like a dumbed down version of Portuguese."
At around 17:35 on 20/9/16 (UK date) I'll try and pick this up after dinner.
Edited at around 19:35 on 20/9/16 (UK date) to add;
Throughout her performance Vanessa da Mata kept urging people to get up and dance. This was obviously aimed at the Brazilians in the arena's cheap seats. However it did slightly give the impression that she didn't understand that for wheelchair users refusing to get up and dance isn't a sign of disdain. It's a somewhat irritating reality of everyday life.
This could well have been a little nod to the 2012 London Closing Ceremony where Coldplay performed. As part of their set they performed their song; "Paradise" which features the chorus; "Para. Para. Paradise."
At the Para-Olympic games that did look a little bit like they were going up to a crowd of disabled people and just shouting; "Cripple! Cripple! Cripple!" right in their faces.
Céu: Next to perform - on the main stage - was Céu. As with seemingly all Brazilians she actually has about 17 names so it is perhaps unsurprising that she has shortened her full name - Maria do Céu Whitaker Poças to the simply stage name Céu.
Céu is originally for the city of São Paulo which is the capital of São Paulo state. This is just to the south-west of Rio de Janerio state where the games have been held. Strangely although São Paulo City is the state capital São Paulo state is also home to Brazil's capital city Brasilia. São Paulo City however continues to be Brazil's economic capital.
In terms of a political analysis there's not really much else I can say about Céu's performance. It sounded good though.
The Whang Youn Dai Award: The concert then took a break for a section of International Para-Olympic Committee (IPC) protocol. Starting with the presentation of the Whang Youn Dai Achievement Award.
Whang Youn Dai was a South Korean (Republic of Korea/RoK) woman who contracted Polio at the age of three. Despite being partially paralysed - particularly on one side of her body - she went on to qualify as a medical doctor and dedicated much of her life and career to the promotion of disability sport and the Para-Olympic movement.
At the 1988 Para-Olympic games held in Seoul - capital of her native RoK - the IPC introduced an award in her name for the male and female athletes who each; "best exemplify the spirit of the Games and inspire and excite the world" by being; "Someone who is fair, honest and is uncompromising in his or her values and prioritises the promotion of the Paralympic Movement above personal recognition." A shortlist of 6 (3 male, 3 female) is nominated by competitors with the winners being chosen by the IPC.
This year the award went to Tatyana McFadden of the USA and Ibrahim Al Hussein of - well it's complicated.
Ibrahim Al Hussein is originally from Syria. However after becoming a single, below knee amputee in a 2013 in a bomb blast he fled as an irregular migrant first to Turkey and then to Greece where he was granted refugee status. Unlike the ISIL games these games had no special refugee team. Instead Al Hussein competed under the banner of "Independent Athletes" as refugees have always done.
Particularly within the US Tatyana McFadden is probably one of the most famous disabled athletes currently competing and her story is equally famous.
Born with Spina Bifida in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) in what in 1989 was the Soviet Union McFadden was placed in an orphanage. Due to the collapsing Soviet Union having no resources to buy things like wheelchairs McFadden was forced to learn to walk on her hands before she was adopted by a US Diplomat who took her to live in Baltimore, Maryland, US.
McFadden now competes in both the Summer and Winter Para-Olympics.
During the most recent 2014 Winter games held in Sochi, Russia the way that McFadden's story was presented - particularly by the US team - was particularly obnoxious. She was very much presented as the poor little girl who'd been rescued from the evil and uncaring Russia by the the heroic and noble USA.
At the Sochi games McFadden was cheered on by both her birth mother and her adoptive mother. The way that they were referred to as; "Her two mothers" did seem to imply that they were some sort of lesbian couple. Rather missing the point of why the games had been awarded to Russia's gay capital in the first place gay-rights-for-gays was the stick the US seemed to very much enjoy beating Russia with during those games.
Seeing McFadden on stage alongside yet another mutilated refugee the now nearly six year long war against Syria all that bad attitude suddenly didn't seem quite so clever.
20:45 on 20/9/16 (UK date)
With the protocol of the flag ceremony and the Parade of Nations out of the way the concert started getting into full swing giving us something of a musical tour of Brazil.
Nação Zumbi: The next act to appear were the Brazilian band Nação Zumbi. Formed in 1994 they were one of the pioneers of a type of Brazilian music called "Mangue Bit."
Hailing from the of Recife in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco on the Atlantic coast this type of music began as a counter-culture movement protesting against the political stagnation and environmental damage of the time. It blends traditional Brazilian musical styles such as Maracatu, Frevo, Coco and Forró with more western styles of music such as Rock, Hip Hop, Funk and Electronic.
The Mangue of the title refers to Recife's Mangrove forests. These are much talked about in Climate Change circles acting both to absorb Green House Gases (ghg) and protect coastal areas from flooding. In keeping with this environmental theme the stage setting and the video shown on the screen behind displayed all the rich types of flora and fauna native to that northeastern region of Brazil.
In their heavier moments Nação Zumbi made me think of US/Venezuelan/Jewish Punk Rap band "Downset." Particularly their environmental protest song; "Chemical Strangle."
Touching on the language barrier theme while searching for this on Youtube I discovered a video where a fan had put together a montage inspired by the lyrics. Unfortunately they'd got the lyrics almost completely wrong. I found it hilarious, if loud; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT2HqZcYbkQ
At more then one moment Nação Zumbi's guitarist lifted his instrument up to reveal the message "Fora Temer (Temer Out!)" written on the underside. Funnily enough Brazil's recently installed President Michel Temer did not make an appearance during this ceremony.
Due to the language barrier theme I personally would have gone with; "Va Temer" which translates as; "Go Temer." However you would have had to understand the nuance of the language to tell whether this was a call for Temer to leave or a sign of support. In the way that supporters have been shouting; ""Go Brazil!" throughout the games.
I suppose it might have worked for Italian speakers though.
Vanessa da Mata: Next to perform was Vanessa da Mata. However rather than taking to the stage she appeared at the opposite end of the arena and sung her way through the crowd in a light-up Smart Fabric dress before taking to the mini-stage in the centre of the arena.
Vanessa da Mata is from Brazil's central western state of Mato Grosso which borders Bolivia. According to Wikipedia on her maternal grandmother's side Vanessa da Mata is descended from the Xavante tribe of indigenous Brazilian Indians. However while acknowledging that she has indigenous ancestry she has denied a direct link to the Xavante tribe.
Having released seven albums and being extremely successful in both Brazil and Portugal she is probably most famous in the US for the 2007 duet "Boa Sorte/Good Luck" she did with US singer Ben Harper. That was included on the album; "Sim" which won a Latin Grammy for Best Brazilian Album. In this I think we got into the real reason why this ceremony was so focused on the issue of language.
If you follow any of the big US award shows - the Emmy's were aggressively scheduled against the ceremony - on social media such as Twitter you'll notice that most of the comments are in Spanish. These come from viewers in Spanish speaking Latin American nations.
In music there is the Latin Grammys to go alongside the Grammys specifically for this audience. However even there they need to make special categories from Brazilian acts who of course speak Portuguese. Not Spanish.
However I do remember being told by a Portuguese person in Portugal that most Portuguese people also speak Spanish because; "It's like a dumbed down version of Portuguese."
At around 17:35 on 20/9/16 (UK date) I'll try and pick this up after dinner.
Edited at around 19:35 on 20/9/16 (UK date) to add;
Throughout her performance Vanessa da Mata kept urging people to get up and dance. This was obviously aimed at the Brazilians in the arena's cheap seats. However it did slightly give the impression that she didn't understand that for wheelchair users refusing to get up and dance isn't a sign of disdain. It's a somewhat irritating reality of everyday life.
This could well have been a little nod to the 2012 London Closing Ceremony where Coldplay performed. As part of their set they performed their song; "Paradise" which features the chorus; "Para. Para. Paradise."
At the Para-Olympic games that did look a little bit like they were going up to a crowd of disabled people and just shouting; "Cripple! Cripple! Cripple!" right in their faces.
Céu: Next to perform - on the main stage - was Céu. As with seemingly all Brazilians she actually has about 17 names so it is perhaps unsurprising that she has shortened her full name - Maria do Céu Whitaker Poças to the simply stage name Céu.
Céu is originally for the city of São Paulo which is the capital of São Paulo state. This is just to the south-west of Rio de Janerio state where the games have been held. Strangely although São Paulo City is the state capital São Paulo state is also home to Brazil's capital city Brasilia. São Paulo City however continues to be Brazil's economic capital.
In terms of a political analysis there's not really much else I can say about Céu's performance. It sounded good though.
The Whang Youn Dai Award: The concert then took a break for a section of International Para-Olympic Committee (IPC) protocol. Starting with the presentation of the Whang Youn Dai Achievement Award.
Whang Youn Dai was a South Korean (Republic of Korea/RoK) woman who contracted Polio at the age of three. Despite being partially paralysed - particularly on one side of her body - she went on to qualify as a medical doctor and dedicated much of her life and career to the promotion of disability sport and the Para-Olympic movement.
At the 1988 Para-Olympic games held in Seoul - capital of her native RoK - the IPC introduced an award in her name for the male and female athletes who each; "best exemplify the spirit of the Games and inspire and excite the world" by being; "Someone who is fair, honest and is uncompromising in his or her values and prioritises the promotion of the Paralympic Movement above personal recognition." A shortlist of 6 (3 male, 3 female) is nominated by competitors with the winners being chosen by the IPC.
This year the award went to Tatyana McFadden of the USA and Ibrahim Al Hussein of - well it's complicated.
Ibrahim Al Hussein is originally from Syria. However after becoming a single, below knee amputee in a 2013 in a bomb blast he fled as an irregular migrant first to Turkey and then to Greece where he was granted refugee status. Unlike the ISIL games these games had no special refugee team. Instead Al Hussein competed under the banner of "Independent Athletes" as refugees have always done.
Particularly within the US Tatyana McFadden is probably one of the most famous disabled athletes currently competing and her story is equally famous.
Born with Spina Bifida in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) in what in 1989 was the Soviet Union McFadden was placed in an orphanage. Due to the collapsing Soviet Union having no resources to buy things like wheelchairs McFadden was forced to learn to walk on her hands before she was adopted by a US Diplomat who took her to live in Baltimore, Maryland, US.
McFadden now competes in both the Summer and Winter Para-Olympics.
During the most recent 2014 Winter games held in Sochi, Russia the way that McFadden's story was presented - particularly by the US team - was particularly obnoxious. She was very much presented as the poor little girl who'd been rescued from the evil and uncaring Russia by the the heroic and noble USA.
At the Sochi games McFadden was cheered on by both her birth mother and her adoptive mother. The way that they were referred to as; "Her two mothers" did seem to imply that they were some sort of lesbian couple. Rather missing the point of why the games had been awarded to Russia's gay capital in the first place gay-rights-for-gays was the stick the US seemed to very much enjoy beating Russia with during those games.
Seeing McFadden on stage alongside yet another mutilated refugee the now nearly six year long war against Syria all that bad attitude suddenly didn't seem quite so clever.
20:45 on 20/9/16 (UK date)
Monday 19 September 2016
The 2016 Sultan Mehmed Games: Closing Ceremony.
As I've said the purpose of an Opening Ceremony is to introduce the host nation and the competitors to the World while trying to set the agenda for what is to come. A Closing Ceremony is much more about celebrating what has taken place and the people that made it happen.
Last night Brazil really took that idea and ran with it.
Obviously at the Para-Olympics many of the competitors have mobility problems. Not only that they have quite a wide variety of mobility problems. Coordinating several thousand people with differing levels on mobility into one place in a narrow window of time is an absolute nightmare. Therefore it is something of a tradition that for the Para-Olympic Closing Ceremony the competitors are brought into the arena beforehand.
This Closing Ceremony was no exception with the competitors all seated in the arena before the show started. Specifically they were seated in rows and blocks all across the arena floor in a layout similar to that you would get in a theatre or cinema. At one end of the arena there was a comparatively small stage where the action would take place.
That action was just a series of singers and bands turning the ceremony into a large concert with the competitors given front row seats. There was a smaller stage in the centre of the arena and some of the performers walked through the crowd as they sang. This made the competitors almost participants in what for them would have been a very visceral experience.
With the exception of one all of the acts were popular Brazilian singers and bands many of whom I sadly did not recognise. That is not to say that they're not famous - Irele Sangala who closed the show is extremely famous. However they're only really famous within Brazil and other Portuguese speaking nations rather than being World famous.
By contrast the 2012 London Closing Ceremony which Brazil picked the baton up from featured Coldplay, Jay Z and of course Rihanna. All three of these acts are so World famous that even if you don't like their music I think it is fair to assume that most people in the World will at least have heard of them.
This contrast gave the ceremony its main political/social theme. The language barrier as really the last barrier to globalisation.
The World now is an almost infinitely more globalised place than it was even as recently as the 1996 Atlanta games. A key driver of this has been the Internet. For example I can sit here writing this on a computer in the UK and as soon as I press the publish button it can be instantly read by people in Brazil, China, South Africa or anywhere else just as easily as if they were sitting in the next room to me. Likewise if there's a major news story in somewhere like New York City, US or anywhere else I can instantly be talking to the eyewitnesses on the ground.
The only barrier though is language. Although I can instantly speak to eyewitnesses in places like Russia, China, Israel or Brazil I can't understand a word they're saying to me and they can't understand a word I'm saying to them.
The Opening Ceremony touched on a play called "Rossum's Universal Robots." In part of that play some of the characters lament teaching the Robots a single global language rather than nationally specific languages. In the context of the play that's intended as an allegory for the way that nationalism is used to oppress the poor and the weak. Invented for the play the term "Robot" derives from the Czech word "Robotnik" which means "Slave." The word Slave derives from the word "Slav" or "Slavic" but I think I'm going off on a bit of a tangent there.
A large part of the reason why acts like Coldplay, Jay Z and Rihanna are globally famous is because they speak and perform in English. This has rather emerged as the dominant global language.
There are a number of reasons why the English language has become so popular. A significant one of these is the dominance of the British Empire which has really been carried on by Britain's former colony America. As a result English has become the language of business and politics.
I think another significant reason is that at a basic level English is actually a very simple language. For example if you wanted to thank a Brazilian person in their native Portuguese the word you'd use would depend on whether they were male (Obrigado) or female (Obrigada). Although it does have gender pronouns like he or she English doesn't have gender specific words making it much easier to learn.
Despite being easy to learn at a basic level English also manages to be quite a rich language that particularly lends itself to things like nuance and metaphor that are really useful in song lyrics and poetry. English also strongly encourages the people speaking it to add to it by making up new words. For example every year the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words that people have simply made up over the previous year. Some of this year's examples include; "Clickbait" and "Slacktivist."
This dominance of the English language is particularly on display at the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Up until, I think, 2005 nations had to perform in their own language. Then they changed the rules so nations could compete in any language they liked. This has pretty much meant that everybody now performs in English.
A nation that is extremely protective over its language is France. Not only do they defiantly insist on singing in French and insist that everything at Eurovision must be done in English and then again in French the French Ministry of Culture actually sets quotas of the number of songs played on the radio and movies shown in cinemas that must be in the French language.
At the 2016 Song Contest France broke with this tradition and performed a song that was largely in English. This was intended to signal that France might be reconsidering its aggressively secular laws that force immigrants to adapt to French culture in favour of the more flexible approach of Multiculturalism. This issue has been a big one over the summer with the Burkini issue.
Also I should probably point out that I've finally found out why the Eurovision Song Contest has got so much attention at these games. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) that stages the Song Contest has for the first time partnered with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). As a result the games have been available to broadcast in all of the EBU's 50+ member nations.
Video Sequence and Countdown: It is a longstanding tradition that both Olympic and Para-Olympic ceremonies begin with a short video sequence featuring a prominent 10 to 1 countdown. This is to allow all the broadcasters who are carrying the official feed live to calibrate their coverage to make sure they don't miss the start of the ceremony.
At these games Brazil has broken with and played about with this tradition. This was done to promote discussion about whether advances in broadcasting technology mean that this tradition is no longer relevant. In turn that leads into a discussion of whether the Olympic movement is no longer relevant as a political spectacle.
This ceremony continued that theme. Just before the ceremony began a 10 to 1 countdown was featured on big screens inside the stadium. This was visible on the wide, aerial shot of the stadium the official feed was showing at the time. The ceremony itself then began with a video sequence that didn't feature a countdown.
This video sequence featured a man who I presume to be deaf speaking both in Portuguese and in sign language. To further aid deaf or hearing impaired viewers and non-Portugese speakers this video sequence was also subtitled in English.
Despite disability being a major feature of both disabled sport and the Para-Olympic movement hearing impairment or deafness is one major disability that tends to get overlooked. That's because hearing impairment doesn't have any real impact on sporting ability so there are no hearing impaired classifications at the Para-Olympics.
However a degree of hearing impairment is a somewhat common element of other impairments - particularly neurological conditions such as Cerebral Palsy. For example the head injury that impaired UK soccer captain Jack Rutter's mobility also left him fully hearing impaired in one of his ears. That though has no impact on his ability to play football.
Ironically it was at this point my father who has been hearing impaired since a childhood case of Measles and now due to age is just deaf decided to wake up and start engaging me in conversation. As if I wasn't already trying to do several other things at that point.
However I've since gone back and checked the recording and discovered that the man in this video was Armaund Marcel. He was talking about what inspired him to set up his "Silent Drummers" project.
This is a project to teach deaf and hearing impaired people to drum. Being unable to hear they instead use vibration and a system of lights to see and feel what others hear. So for example a loud drum beat would be represented by a white light while a soft drum beat would be represented by a green light.
This picks up on the discussion of how human senses work - particularly in conditions like Synesthesia - that featured in the Opening Ceremony. It also touches on the issue of the language barrier because generally pictures unlike words are understood by people regardless of what language they speak. I would point out though that different cultures have different visual styles that almost constitute a language. Those differences are much more subtle though.
Marcel and group of his hearing impaired drummers known as Mestre Batman then performed on the stage in the arena. They were joined by famous Brazilian popstar Gabby Amarantos who lead the crowd in a 10 to 1 countdown that was shown on a giant video screen behind the stage.
This screen was particularly important throughout the ceremony because it was used to show anything the stadium announcer said in written form to aid the hearing impaired. The style of the graphic used for this subtitling seemed very much intended to resemble a computer. For example it had the little microphone symbol on the screen. This obviously picked up on the theme of technological solutions to the limitations of disability that featured so heavily in the Opening Ceremony.
As it has with other aspects of our lives advances in computer technology have really improved the range of technological solutions to disability. For example voice recognition software has made it much easier and therefore cheaper to subtitle TV programs. As such many more TV programs are now subtitled. It also works in the reverse with software that can recognise written words and convert them into speech for visually impaired people. People with extremely limited mobility including to their speech like Stephen Hawking can now use computers to allow them to talk.
I think the specific type of computer these graphics were trying to mimic was Apple's "Siri" system. This is actually a rudimentary from of Artificial Intelligence so it brings in all the discussions about Artificial Intelligence that is sort of a hot topic in science and technology generally at the moment.
However Artificial Intelligence does have specific applications for people living with disability. For example in the Opening Ceremony I mentioned an Israeli start-up "UPnRIDE" who are developing a type of vertical wheelchair that allows the user to stand up on an platform. In order to maintain balance this relies heavily on Artificial Intelligence.
This reference to Siri was particularly unfortunate because one of the Para-Olympics main sponsors is Samsung. The recent launch of their iPhone rivalling S7 smartphone has not gone well.
At around 16:50 on 19/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up after dinner although I have probably already covered about 80-85% of the politics of the ceremony.
Edited at around 19:00 on 19/9/16 (UK date) to add above and below;
Guitar Heroes: Rather than featuring a single Brazilian band this next sequence featured a one off performance of several Brazilian guitar heroes.
This was begun by Armandiho. He's famous for playing a special Brazilian type of guitar known as a Boha. This is essentially a small, electric guitar. Armandiho was joined by Andreas Kisser who is part of the Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura. Although I wouldn't say that I was a fan this is one Brazilian band I have most certainly heard off. I'm a bit surprised they didn't feature in some of the earlier ceremonies because they are World famous although in the admittedly small world of heavy metal.
Armandiho and Kisser were then joined by Jonathan Bastos. This extremely talented Brazilian musician was born without arms. So very much in keeping with the spirit of the Para-Olympics he taught himself to play a number of musical instruments with his feet. Here he was obviously playing the guitar but in the "Yes I Can" Para-Olympic trailer he played the piano.
As the three thrashed away on their guitars they were joined on stage by a number of dancers with mobility problems. Primarily these were wheelchair users but others were able to dance on their arms and balance on each other's shoulders in a very acrobatic performance.
Brazilian Flag & Anthem: The concert then took a break while IPC President Phillip Craven was quickly introduced and the Brazilian flag was raised while the Brazilian anthem was performed as per IPC protocol.
The flag was brought in by the same Firefighter flag detail that featured in the Opening Ceremony. As the flag was being raised the anthem was performed live by Brazilian singer Saulo Laucus (I will need to check that spelling) who was accompanied by a Harp.
Laucus is both severely visually impaired and suffers from Autism. I think only indentified in the 1940's Autism has been one of the more fashionable developmental disorders in recent years as more research is done and more is learnt about it. Despite all that research the Anti-Vaxxer movement still claim that vaccines - particularly the combined Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine - cause Autism.
However as with hearing impairment Autism doesn't really affect athletic performance so there is no Para-Olympic class for people with Autism. However in some severe cases Autism can affect balance and coordination so you do occasionally get Autistic athletes competing in the neurological impairment class although no-one immediately springs to mind.
Obviously having spent the previous 10 days talking about the disorders and impairments that are included in the Para-Olympics it's quite nice to have an opportunity to discuss one that isn't. However this ceremony didn't really do anything more that shout; "Autism. Discuss."
On the giant video screen an animation inspired by astrophysics showing things like star constellations and the atom structures was being played. This was a reference to China's Quantum communication satellite QUESS that featured heavily in the initial Closing Ceremony. Dotted around the arena amid the crowd were what I assume were performers wearing smart fabrics that light up in white light. That too was a major feature of the initial Closing Ceremony.
However the fact that I can't be sure about any of this really highlights what was so different about this Closing Ceremony.
Normally these type of ceremonies are designed from the perspective of the TV viewer at home. As a result if you're actually in the arena it can be quite difficult to follow what's going on. This ceremony was very much designed from the perspective of the competitors sitting in the arena. So they actually had the best view and by the looks of things really enjoyed themselves while I as a TV viewer felt a bit left out.
Parade of Nations: Although the competitors had made their way into the arena before the ceremony began the flags of the competing nations were still paraded into the arena. They were largely carried by a competitor from that nation accompanied by a guide. They made their way in from the opposite end of the arena to the stage and made their way down the central gangway before being ushered off to the sides.
The British flag was carried by Kadeena Cox. She was selected as a reference to a topic that's sort of being floating around in the background of these games. Euthanasia or assisted suicide.
This was touched upon in the September 2nd (2/9/16) Heritage flame lighting ceremony were Kelly Gallagher appeared dressed up to resemble the Emilia Clarke character from Game of Thrones. As I mentioned at the time Emilia Clarke has gone on to do a movie called "Me Without You." This centres around a man who decides that his life is not living and he must commit suicide because he was paralysed in a motorcycle accident.
Just on Saturday (17/9/16) it was announced that Canadian author of "Shoeless Joe" which became the movie "Field of Dreams" W.P Kinsella had been euthanised the previous day although no further details were given. Also on Saturday Belgium announced that the first child under the age of 18 had been euthanised under a law that was passed in 2014. Again though no further details were given.
The Para-Olympic movement was born out of the Second World War. Its purpose was to convince these big strong soldiers who'd be paralysed that there was no need to kill themselves simply because they could no longer walk. Instead they can still live a long an fulfilling life doing things like archery. They just need to get up out of their beds and stop feeling sorry for themselves.
As such euthanasia is very much against the spirit of the Para-Olympic movement.
However there is a small group of competitors with degenerative disorders which get progressively worse who may consider it. Kadeena Cox is one such athlete.
In these games Cox competed in both track events and cycling events winning two Gold, one Silver and a Bronze medal in the process. The reason she is competing in so many events is she knows that by the 2020 Tokyo games her condition - Multiple Sclerosis - may have deteriorated to the point that she's not able to compete in any event. Eventually euthanasia might be a dignified alternative to a painful and inevitable death.
Another example is Belgian wheelchair racer Marieke Vervoort who suffers from a degenerative spinal condition that is so rare it doesn't appear to have a name. In an interview at the games Vervoort announced that she had applied for and been granted permission to be euthanised and was planning to do so very soon.
Needless to say this kind of bummed everyone out. After all even at the Para-Olympics; "So are you planning to kill yourself?" is not considered a polite greeting.
Of course not all of the national flags were carried by competitors from that nation. Some nations opted to allow their flags to be carried by the local Brazilian volunteers or games makers. One such nation was Saudi Arabia.
I noticed the particular volunteer the Brazilians chose to carry the Saudi flag very closely resembled that possibly Jewish, possibly disabled volunteer who featured so prominently in the initial Closing Ceremony. With Saudi Arabia being one of the nations that would definitely fail that kind of anti-Semitism test that could well have been intended as an insult.
One of the things the Saudis may have done to annoy the hosts is that during the initial Opening Ceremony one of their delegation kept trying to muscle his way past the stewards onto the runway during the Parade of Nations. This was done to boost Saudi Arabia's screentime and very nearly led to an Egyptian athlete being expelled for waving a Saudi flag and nearly started a punch-up with the Iranian delegation.
It seems that Saudi Arabia had not learnt its lesson and again during this Parade of Nations one of their delegation was trying to muscle his way past the stewards. This time to take photographs. Well I assume he was Saudi he was wearing traditional white Saudi robes and headdress and spent most of his time with his back to the camera. So he could have been one of Saudis Gulf neighbours making a point about Saudi Arabia's poor behaviour. Then again he may have been French, Dutch, Belgian or from any other non-Gulf State nation.
What I found amusing was that on either side of the gangway there were two groups of people who were clearly friends. So they started playing this game where they threw paper aeroplanes and balled up scraps of paper across the aisle. As the game went on these paper projectiles were getting progressively closer to this photographers head. Eventually he got the message and backed off.
The Parade of Nations ended with a short firework display.
This wasn't as spectacular as the sequence in the initial Closing Ceremony that I've still not got around to covering. However rather than being just a simple firework display this used different colours and patterns in an attempt to convey a message. That message was simply; "RIO 2016."
This obviously again touched on the Synesthesia theme. Also using light to convey a message is a rudimentary example of quantum communication which uses sub-atomic particles like photons to transmit data rather like fibre optics just without the cabling.
21:00 on 19/9/16 (UK date).
Edited at around 16:25 on 20/9/16 (UK date) to add: I wasn't even close on that guy's name was I.
Last night Brazil really took that idea and ran with it.
Obviously at the Para-Olympics many of the competitors have mobility problems. Not only that they have quite a wide variety of mobility problems. Coordinating several thousand people with differing levels on mobility into one place in a narrow window of time is an absolute nightmare. Therefore it is something of a tradition that for the Para-Olympic Closing Ceremony the competitors are brought into the arena beforehand.
This Closing Ceremony was no exception with the competitors all seated in the arena before the show started. Specifically they were seated in rows and blocks all across the arena floor in a layout similar to that you would get in a theatre or cinema. At one end of the arena there was a comparatively small stage where the action would take place.
That action was just a series of singers and bands turning the ceremony into a large concert with the competitors given front row seats. There was a smaller stage in the centre of the arena and some of the performers walked through the crowd as they sang. This made the competitors almost participants in what for them would have been a very visceral experience.
With the exception of one all of the acts were popular Brazilian singers and bands many of whom I sadly did not recognise. That is not to say that they're not famous - Irele Sangala who closed the show is extremely famous. However they're only really famous within Brazil and other Portuguese speaking nations rather than being World famous.
By contrast the 2012 London Closing Ceremony which Brazil picked the baton up from featured Coldplay, Jay Z and of course Rihanna. All three of these acts are so World famous that even if you don't like their music I think it is fair to assume that most people in the World will at least have heard of them.
This contrast gave the ceremony its main political/social theme. The language barrier as really the last barrier to globalisation.
The World now is an almost infinitely more globalised place than it was even as recently as the 1996 Atlanta games. A key driver of this has been the Internet. For example I can sit here writing this on a computer in the UK and as soon as I press the publish button it can be instantly read by people in Brazil, China, South Africa or anywhere else just as easily as if they were sitting in the next room to me. Likewise if there's a major news story in somewhere like New York City, US or anywhere else I can instantly be talking to the eyewitnesses on the ground.
The only barrier though is language. Although I can instantly speak to eyewitnesses in places like Russia, China, Israel or Brazil I can't understand a word they're saying to me and they can't understand a word I'm saying to them.
The Opening Ceremony touched on a play called "Rossum's Universal Robots." In part of that play some of the characters lament teaching the Robots a single global language rather than nationally specific languages. In the context of the play that's intended as an allegory for the way that nationalism is used to oppress the poor and the weak. Invented for the play the term "Robot" derives from the Czech word "Robotnik" which means "Slave." The word Slave derives from the word "Slav" or "Slavic" but I think I'm going off on a bit of a tangent there.
A large part of the reason why acts like Coldplay, Jay Z and Rihanna are globally famous is because they speak and perform in English. This has rather emerged as the dominant global language.
There are a number of reasons why the English language has become so popular. A significant one of these is the dominance of the British Empire which has really been carried on by Britain's former colony America. As a result English has become the language of business and politics.
I think another significant reason is that at a basic level English is actually a very simple language. For example if you wanted to thank a Brazilian person in their native Portuguese the word you'd use would depend on whether they were male (Obrigado) or female (Obrigada). Although it does have gender pronouns like he or she English doesn't have gender specific words making it much easier to learn.
Despite being easy to learn at a basic level English also manages to be quite a rich language that particularly lends itself to things like nuance and metaphor that are really useful in song lyrics and poetry. English also strongly encourages the people speaking it to add to it by making up new words. For example every year the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words that people have simply made up over the previous year. Some of this year's examples include; "Clickbait" and "Slacktivist."
This dominance of the English language is particularly on display at the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Up until, I think, 2005 nations had to perform in their own language. Then they changed the rules so nations could compete in any language they liked. This has pretty much meant that everybody now performs in English.
A nation that is extremely protective over its language is France. Not only do they defiantly insist on singing in French and insist that everything at Eurovision must be done in English and then again in French the French Ministry of Culture actually sets quotas of the number of songs played on the radio and movies shown in cinemas that must be in the French language.
At the 2016 Song Contest France broke with this tradition and performed a song that was largely in English. This was intended to signal that France might be reconsidering its aggressively secular laws that force immigrants to adapt to French culture in favour of the more flexible approach of Multiculturalism. This issue has been a big one over the summer with the Burkini issue.
Also I should probably point out that I've finally found out why the Eurovision Song Contest has got so much attention at these games. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) that stages the Song Contest has for the first time partnered with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). As a result the games have been available to broadcast in all of the EBU's 50+ member nations.
Video Sequence and Countdown: It is a longstanding tradition that both Olympic and Para-Olympic ceremonies begin with a short video sequence featuring a prominent 10 to 1 countdown. This is to allow all the broadcasters who are carrying the official feed live to calibrate their coverage to make sure they don't miss the start of the ceremony.
At these games Brazil has broken with and played about with this tradition. This was done to promote discussion about whether advances in broadcasting technology mean that this tradition is no longer relevant. In turn that leads into a discussion of whether the Olympic movement is no longer relevant as a political spectacle.
This ceremony continued that theme. Just before the ceremony began a 10 to 1 countdown was featured on big screens inside the stadium. This was visible on the wide, aerial shot of the stadium the official feed was showing at the time. The ceremony itself then began with a video sequence that didn't feature a countdown.
This video sequence featured a man who I presume to be deaf speaking both in Portuguese and in sign language. To further aid deaf or hearing impaired viewers and non-Portugese speakers this video sequence was also subtitled in English.
Despite disability being a major feature of both disabled sport and the Para-Olympic movement hearing impairment or deafness is one major disability that tends to get overlooked. That's because hearing impairment doesn't have any real impact on sporting ability so there are no hearing impaired classifications at the Para-Olympics.
However a degree of hearing impairment is a somewhat common element of other impairments - particularly neurological conditions such as Cerebral Palsy. For example the head injury that impaired UK soccer captain Jack Rutter's mobility also left him fully hearing impaired in one of his ears. That though has no impact on his ability to play football.
Ironically it was at this point my father who has been hearing impaired since a childhood case of Measles and now due to age is just deaf decided to wake up and start engaging me in conversation. As if I wasn't already trying to do several other things at that point.
However I've since gone back and checked the recording and discovered that the man in this video was Armaund Marcel. He was talking about what inspired him to set up his "Silent Drummers" project.
This is a project to teach deaf and hearing impaired people to drum. Being unable to hear they instead use vibration and a system of lights to see and feel what others hear. So for example a loud drum beat would be represented by a white light while a soft drum beat would be represented by a green light.
This picks up on the discussion of how human senses work - particularly in conditions like Synesthesia - that featured in the Opening Ceremony. It also touches on the issue of the language barrier because generally pictures unlike words are understood by people regardless of what language they speak. I would point out though that different cultures have different visual styles that almost constitute a language. Those differences are much more subtle though.
Marcel and group of his hearing impaired drummers known as Mestre Batman then performed on the stage in the arena. They were joined by famous Brazilian popstar Gabby Amarantos who lead the crowd in a 10 to 1 countdown that was shown on a giant video screen behind the stage.
This screen was particularly important throughout the ceremony because it was used to show anything the stadium announcer said in written form to aid the hearing impaired. The style of the graphic used for this subtitling seemed very much intended to resemble a computer. For example it had the little microphone symbol on the screen. This obviously picked up on the theme of technological solutions to the limitations of disability that featured so heavily in the Opening Ceremony.
As it has with other aspects of our lives advances in computer technology have really improved the range of technological solutions to disability. For example voice recognition software has made it much easier and therefore cheaper to subtitle TV programs. As such many more TV programs are now subtitled. It also works in the reverse with software that can recognise written words and convert them into speech for visually impaired people. People with extremely limited mobility including to their speech like Stephen Hawking can now use computers to allow them to talk.
I think the specific type of computer these graphics were trying to mimic was Apple's "Siri" system. This is actually a rudimentary from of Artificial Intelligence so it brings in all the discussions about Artificial Intelligence that is sort of a hot topic in science and technology generally at the moment.
However Artificial Intelligence does have specific applications for people living with disability. For example in the Opening Ceremony I mentioned an Israeli start-up "UPnRIDE" who are developing a type of vertical wheelchair that allows the user to stand up on an platform. In order to maintain balance this relies heavily on Artificial Intelligence.
This reference to Siri was particularly unfortunate because one of the Para-Olympics main sponsors is Samsung. The recent launch of their iPhone rivalling S7 smartphone has not gone well.
At around 16:50 on 19/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up after dinner although I have probably already covered about 80-85% of the politics of the ceremony.
Edited at around 19:00 on 19/9/16 (UK date) to add above and below;
Guitar Heroes: Rather than featuring a single Brazilian band this next sequence featured a one off performance of several Brazilian guitar heroes.
This was begun by Armandiho. He's famous for playing a special Brazilian type of guitar known as a Boha. This is essentially a small, electric guitar. Armandiho was joined by Andreas Kisser who is part of the Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura. Although I wouldn't say that I was a fan this is one Brazilian band I have most certainly heard off. I'm a bit surprised they didn't feature in some of the earlier ceremonies because they are World famous although in the admittedly small world of heavy metal.
Armandiho and Kisser were then joined by Jonathan Bastos. This extremely talented Brazilian musician was born without arms. So very much in keeping with the spirit of the Para-Olympics he taught himself to play a number of musical instruments with his feet. Here he was obviously playing the guitar but in the "Yes I Can" Para-Olympic trailer he played the piano.
As the three thrashed away on their guitars they were joined on stage by a number of dancers with mobility problems. Primarily these were wheelchair users but others were able to dance on their arms and balance on each other's shoulders in a very acrobatic performance.
Brazilian Flag & Anthem: The concert then took a break while IPC President Phillip Craven was quickly introduced and the Brazilian flag was raised while the Brazilian anthem was performed as per IPC protocol.
The flag was brought in by the same Firefighter flag detail that featured in the Opening Ceremony. As the flag was being raised the anthem was performed live by Brazilian singer Saulo Laucus (I will need to check that spelling) who was accompanied by a Harp.
Laucus is both severely visually impaired and suffers from Autism. I think only indentified in the 1940's Autism has been one of the more fashionable developmental disorders in recent years as more research is done and more is learnt about it. Despite all that research the Anti-Vaxxer movement still claim that vaccines - particularly the combined Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine - cause Autism.
However as with hearing impairment Autism doesn't really affect athletic performance so there is no Para-Olympic class for people with Autism. However in some severe cases Autism can affect balance and coordination so you do occasionally get Autistic athletes competing in the neurological impairment class although no-one immediately springs to mind.
Obviously having spent the previous 10 days talking about the disorders and impairments that are included in the Para-Olympics it's quite nice to have an opportunity to discuss one that isn't. However this ceremony didn't really do anything more that shout; "Autism. Discuss."
On the giant video screen an animation inspired by astrophysics showing things like star constellations and the atom structures was being played. This was a reference to China's Quantum communication satellite QUESS that featured heavily in the initial Closing Ceremony. Dotted around the arena amid the crowd were what I assume were performers wearing smart fabrics that light up in white light. That too was a major feature of the initial Closing Ceremony.
However the fact that I can't be sure about any of this really highlights what was so different about this Closing Ceremony.
Normally these type of ceremonies are designed from the perspective of the TV viewer at home. As a result if you're actually in the arena it can be quite difficult to follow what's going on. This ceremony was very much designed from the perspective of the competitors sitting in the arena. So they actually had the best view and by the looks of things really enjoyed themselves while I as a TV viewer felt a bit left out.
Parade of Nations: Although the competitors had made their way into the arena before the ceremony began the flags of the competing nations were still paraded into the arena. They were largely carried by a competitor from that nation accompanied by a guide. They made their way in from the opposite end of the arena to the stage and made their way down the central gangway before being ushered off to the sides.
The British flag was carried by Kadeena Cox. She was selected as a reference to a topic that's sort of being floating around in the background of these games. Euthanasia or assisted suicide.
This was touched upon in the September 2nd (2/9/16) Heritage flame lighting ceremony were Kelly Gallagher appeared dressed up to resemble the Emilia Clarke character from Game of Thrones. As I mentioned at the time Emilia Clarke has gone on to do a movie called "Me Without You." This centres around a man who decides that his life is not living and he must commit suicide because he was paralysed in a motorcycle accident.
Just on Saturday (17/9/16) it was announced that Canadian author of "Shoeless Joe" which became the movie "Field of Dreams" W.P Kinsella had been euthanised the previous day although no further details were given. Also on Saturday Belgium announced that the first child under the age of 18 had been euthanised under a law that was passed in 2014. Again though no further details were given.
The Para-Olympic movement was born out of the Second World War. Its purpose was to convince these big strong soldiers who'd be paralysed that there was no need to kill themselves simply because they could no longer walk. Instead they can still live a long an fulfilling life doing things like archery. They just need to get up out of their beds and stop feeling sorry for themselves.
As such euthanasia is very much against the spirit of the Para-Olympic movement.
However there is a small group of competitors with degenerative disorders which get progressively worse who may consider it. Kadeena Cox is one such athlete.
In these games Cox competed in both track events and cycling events winning two Gold, one Silver and a Bronze medal in the process. The reason she is competing in so many events is she knows that by the 2020 Tokyo games her condition - Multiple Sclerosis - may have deteriorated to the point that she's not able to compete in any event. Eventually euthanasia might be a dignified alternative to a painful and inevitable death.
Another example is Belgian wheelchair racer Marieke Vervoort who suffers from a degenerative spinal condition that is so rare it doesn't appear to have a name. In an interview at the games Vervoort announced that she had applied for and been granted permission to be euthanised and was planning to do so very soon.
Needless to say this kind of bummed everyone out. After all even at the Para-Olympics; "So are you planning to kill yourself?" is not considered a polite greeting.
Of course not all of the national flags were carried by competitors from that nation. Some nations opted to allow their flags to be carried by the local Brazilian volunteers or games makers. One such nation was Saudi Arabia.
I noticed the particular volunteer the Brazilians chose to carry the Saudi flag very closely resembled that possibly Jewish, possibly disabled volunteer who featured so prominently in the initial Closing Ceremony. With Saudi Arabia being one of the nations that would definitely fail that kind of anti-Semitism test that could well have been intended as an insult.
One of the things the Saudis may have done to annoy the hosts is that during the initial Opening Ceremony one of their delegation kept trying to muscle his way past the stewards onto the runway during the Parade of Nations. This was done to boost Saudi Arabia's screentime and very nearly led to an Egyptian athlete being expelled for waving a Saudi flag and nearly started a punch-up with the Iranian delegation.
It seems that Saudi Arabia had not learnt its lesson and again during this Parade of Nations one of their delegation was trying to muscle his way past the stewards. This time to take photographs. Well I assume he was Saudi he was wearing traditional white Saudi robes and headdress and spent most of his time with his back to the camera. So he could have been one of Saudis Gulf neighbours making a point about Saudi Arabia's poor behaviour. Then again he may have been French, Dutch, Belgian or from any other non-Gulf State nation.
What I found amusing was that on either side of the gangway there were two groups of people who were clearly friends. So they started playing this game where they threw paper aeroplanes and balled up scraps of paper across the aisle. As the game went on these paper projectiles were getting progressively closer to this photographers head. Eventually he got the message and backed off.
The Parade of Nations ended with a short firework display.
This wasn't as spectacular as the sequence in the initial Closing Ceremony that I've still not got around to covering. However rather than being just a simple firework display this used different colours and patterns in an attempt to convey a message. That message was simply; "RIO 2016."
This obviously again touched on the Synesthesia theme. Also using light to convey a message is a rudimentary example of quantum communication which uses sub-atomic particles like photons to transmit data rather like fibre optics just without the cabling.
21:00 on 19/9/16 (UK date).
Edited at around 16:25 on 20/9/16 (UK date) to add: I wasn't even close on that guy's name was I.
Tuesday 13 September 2016
The 2016 Sultan Mehmed Games: Opening Ceremony Pt.6
This should be read as a direct continuation of Part 5; http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-2016-sultan-mehmed-games-opening_19.html
Torch Relay & Cauldron Lighting: The highlight of any Opening Ceremony is of course the end of the torch relay and the lighting of the Para-Olympic cauldron.
This sequence began with a video montage showing the "Heritage Flame" as it is now known making its way from the September 2nd (2/9/16) lighting ceremony in Stoke Mandeville hospital, UK to Rio. Due to the constraints of time and budget this did not begin as a physical torch relay but a virtual one. From the lighting ceremony it was passed via social media across the globe to Brazil where it became a physical relay.
I did notice that this video montage showed the closing song from the lighting ceremony. This is the bit that Channel 4 News didn't bother cover because they thought it was more important to cut to a panel discussion and a weather report. They were though the only broadcaster to cover any of the ceremony live.
The flame was brought into the arena by Brazilian sprinter Antonio Souza.
As a single below the elbow amputee Souza competed in the T46 class indicating that he is a Track athlete who an impairment to his upper limbs (4) and that impairment is moderate-to-light (6). Being rather good in this discipline Souza won silver in the men's 400m in the 2000 Sydney games and gold in the 2004 Athens games in both the 400m & 200m.
Souza then handed the torch to Marcia Malsar. She is the one that you've all heard of because she fell over.
Despite falling over in an Opening Ceremony Marcia Malsar is also reasonably famous as a Brazilian sprinter who has won four Para-Olympic medals. Most notably Sliver in the women's 1000m and Gold in the women's 200m in the 1984 games. Although the 1984 Olympics were held in Los Angeles that year's Para-Olympics were held all the way across the US in Long Island, New York.
Malsar used to compete in the C6 class. This indicates that she has an impairment of the Cerebellum and that impairment is moderate-to-light (6) in severity. But closer to the moderate (5).
Traditionally the C class only applied to people with Cerebral Palsy. This is a congenital condition (birth defect) in which the brain does not properly communicate with the nervous system as it connects to the Spinal Column via the Cerebellum and Brain Stem. With these areas of the brain being particularly responsible for automatic processes such as balance and movement this can cause those with the condition or twitch or fall over as their muscles experience what are know as; "Spastic contractions."
More recently though the C class has grow to include competitors with neurological symptoms causing impairment similar to Cerebral Palsy. This definition can include any one or a combination of literally thousands of medical conditions including being punched in the head really hard (Concussion). Apparently it takes at least 7 years to qualify as an actual, proper doctor.
However as the developed world in particular has become increasingly interested in the type of disability associated with ageing bodies the oft talked about type of neurological impairment are those associated with Stroke.
The not strictly speaking medical term "Stroke" refers to any failure of blood flow to the brain resulting brain cell death. The two main types are "Ischemic" when blood vessels get blocked or "Hemorrhagic" when the blood vessels burst and all the blood leaks out into places it shouldn't be rather than the places it should be.
What neurological damage is done by a stroke really depends on two things. How long it lasts for and what area of the brain it effects.
Hemorrhagic strokes tend to be catastrophic. They can last for as long as it takes for someone to cut into the brain and surgically patch up the burst blood vessel. Untreated Hemorrhagic strokes are often fatal.
Ischemic strokes can be every bit as catastrophic as Hemorrhagic strokes. However they tend to effect smaller blood vessels such as capillaries rather than arteries and can often clear themselves. This is known as a Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) or mini-stroke. These often pass after a couple of hours without the need for medical intervention.
Whatever the type of stroke cutting off the supply of blood and therefore oxygen to any brain cells causes them to die. What level of neurological impairment this causes depends on where in the brain those cells are located. Despite all the advances of science we're still not exactly sure what each brain cell does. Not least because brain cells not only seem able to do more than one job they also seem able to change their purpose to compensate for any cells that have been lost.
Apart from death a common consequence of catastrophic strokes is paralysis of part or all of the body. Curiously the side of the body affected is opposite to the hemisphere of the brain affected. So if someone has a stroke in the left side of their brain it will be the right side of their body affected. The paralysis of the facial muscles - particularly around the mouth - are a big clue that someone has suffered a stroke.
More minor consequences - particularly of TIA's - can include minor loss of co-ordination, memory loss and loss of cognitive function and reasoning skills. On a day-to-day basis the progression of this impairment may be imperceptible to the naked eye in much the same way you can't really notice someones hair growing millimetre by millimetre.
The exact nature of Marcia Malsar's medical condition would be extremely helpful in determining why she fell. After all the important thing to remember about people with Cerebral Palsy is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with their brains.
For example in 2012 Britain was represented in the Equestrian events by Sophie Christiansen who has Cerebral Palsy. She is not competing in Rio because she felt it was more important to put her Masters degree in Mathematics to work as a statistical analyst for Goldman Sachs.
Therefore it is entirely possible that Marcia Malsar fell over on purpose to provide us with a talking point.
However that is not to say that she faked her fall. Merely that she agreed to participate in the relay knowing that her impairment meant that it was more likely than not that she would fall over.
At around 21:40 on 13/9/16 (UK date) the exact nature of that talking point will have to wait until tomorrow. Because as the second glass of wine goes down I've got a feeling this isn't going to get more coherent.
Edited at around 14:25 on 14/9/16 (UK date) to add;
The talking point Marcia Malsar's fall provided us with is how do you react when a disabled person does something embarrassing like falling over?
Answering this is quite difficult because asking what the disabled think is about as much use as asking what the Muslims think or what the Blacks think. It turns out that they're all individuals each with their own opinion.
Generally what a lot of disabled people complain about though is people fussing over them. That is to say when they fall over everyone rushes towards them with tears in their eyes and tries wrapping them in a cotton wool blanket before urgently calling an ambulance to take them to hospital.
After all if you've got an impairment that causes balance problems you may well fall over a couple of times a day. Therefore you get very good at landing without injuring yourself and getting yourself back up again.
A somewhat interesting example is UK powerlifter Ali Jawad. Apart from having a big Persian nose and big, pointy Persian ears he is also a double above the knee amputee. However rather than using prosthetics or a wheelchair he just charges about on his stumps. If he wants to get on or off a chair he'll simply swing on his arms like some sort of angry monkey. As a powerlifter he clearly doesn't need you to pick him up. Plus you probably couldn't even if you tried.
Of course the fact that Ali Jawad has also grown a beard like the Genie from Disney's "Aladdin" suggests we're dealing with a bit of a character.
However if someone - disabled or not - does fall over right next to you it is only polite to ask if they would like your help getting back up.
So when Marcia Malsar fell no-one came rushing over to help her. Two people did rush over but that was only to pick up the torch to stop the flame going out. Nor did the next person in the relay rush on to pick up the torch and cut short Malsar's section of the relay.
Instead everyone just waited until she'd picked herself up, dusted herself down and carried on with her section of the relay as normal.
During this time the crowd in the arena all rose to their feet to cheer and applaud. I personally found that a little condescending as if Malsar as an accomplished runner deserved applause simply for standing up. However it was certainly better than standing there in shocked silence or letting out a horrified gasp.
What I personally tend to do in this type of situation - particularly if I'm around friends rather than say work colleagues - is crack a little joke to break the tension and then just carry on. It was German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche who said that; "A joke is an epigram (epitaph) on the death of an emotion." That reflects the way that a joke can been used as a way to process and reject all those feelings of hurt or embarrassment.
I suspect the Brazilian hosts understood that the joke often made when someone falls over is that lumberjack's cry of; "TIMBER!!!!" That of course touches on that Climate Change issue of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+).
Malsar than passed the torch to Brazilian runner Adria Santos.
Born blind Adria Santos has won 12 Para-Olympic medals in total starting with Silver in the 100m at the 1996 Atlanta games. Most notably though she won Gold in the 100m in the 1992 Barcelona games, Gold in both the 100m and 200m at the 2000 Sydney games and Gold in the 100m at the 2004 Athens games.
In the 1996 Atlanta games up until the 2000 Sydney games Santos competed in the B2 class. This indicates that she is Blind and that impairment is medium to severe. However at the 2000 games the IPC changed the classification system and from then on Santos competed in either the T11 or T12 class.
This indicates that she is a Track athlete with an impairment affecting her vision (1) and that impairment is either severe (1) or medium to severe (2). However these days all visually impaired runners tend to wear blindfolds so they all compete in the T11 class regardless of whether they've got perfect eyesight.
Finally Santos passed the torch to Clodoaldo Silva.
Silva is something of a Brazilian swimming legend. At the time of the torch relay he had won 12 Para-Olympic medals beginning with three Silvers and a Bronze at the 2000 Sydney games in the 100m freestyle, 4x50m medley, 4x50m freestyle and 50m freestyle. He as also set five Para-Olympic and four World records.
So far in these games Silva has already won Silver in the mixed 4x50m freestyle. I'm a bit worried he might win more medals while I'm writing this.
Silva competes in the S5 class. This indicates that he is Swimmer and that he suffers from a moderate impairment of his mobility. Silva's specific impairment comes from Cerebral Palsy and primarily affects his lower body. As a result when Silva is not in the pool he uses a wheelchair.
This presented a huge problem when he came to the base of the protocol island which had the cauldron at its summit.
The design of the protocol island seemed based on the Inca temples and it was a giant rectangular monolith with steps all the way down its front. Although technically the Inca are from Brazil's neighbour Peru this seemed to be a little nod to Brazil's indigenous tribes. If they'd used something specifically Brazilian it's unlikely people would have recognised it and all the other tribes would have been offended.
The geometrically perfect steps at the front of the island were very reminiscent of the Modernist school of architecture founded by famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. It is this Niemeyer influence you can see in the Brutalist City Hall in Boston, Massachusetts.
No matter how fascinating these steps were to students of architecture they were most certainly not wheelchair accessible so Clodoaldo Silva was left looking dejected, unable to reach the cauldron he needed to light.
Then suddenly and mechanically sections of the steps pushed outwards to form a wheelchair ramp.
This was intended to highlight the sort of problems that disabled people experience in everyday and how easy it is to solve them if only we were a little more thoughtful. Although this is a global issue it is one that is particularly relevant to Rio's favelas.
Built without planning on land no-one else wants favelas tend to be built on the side of hills meaning that they are essentially all stairs. Not only does this make them completely inaccessible to wheelchair users even fully able bodied people find living in favelas physically exhausting.
As part of the preparations for these games Rio built a Gondola or cable-car system linking the Alemao favela with the city centre to save people the effort of walking up and down all those stairs.
Having reached the summit of the protocol island Silva lit the cauldron. This was the same cauldron used in the previous games. However due to budgetary constraints the stadium where that cauldron is located is closed during the games. So we have to make do with a smaller copy placed outside the Candelaria Church in Rio itself.
The ceremony ended with a performance by Brazilian pop Samba singer Seu Jorge. During this song all the performers returned to the arena floor to dance and enjoy a party atmosphere.
There was then the traditional firework display.
16:15 on 14/9/16 (UK date).
Torch Relay & Cauldron Lighting: The highlight of any Opening Ceremony is of course the end of the torch relay and the lighting of the Para-Olympic cauldron.
This sequence began with a video montage showing the "Heritage Flame" as it is now known making its way from the September 2nd (2/9/16) lighting ceremony in Stoke Mandeville hospital, UK to Rio. Due to the constraints of time and budget this did not begin as a physical torch relay but a virtual one. From the lighting ceremony it was passed via social media across the globe to Brazil where it became a physical relay.
I did notice that this video montage showed the closing song from the lighting ceremony. This is the bit that Channel 4 News didn't bother cover because they thought it was more important to cut to a panel discussion and a weather report. They were though the only broadcaster to cover any of the ceremony live.
The flame was brought into the arena by Brazilian sprinter Antonio Souza.
As a single below the elbow amputee Souza competed in the T46 class indicating that he is a Track athlete who an impairment to his upper limbs (4) and that impairment is moderate-to-light (6). Being rather good in this discipline Souza won silver in the men's 400m in the 2000 Sydney games and gold in the 2004 Athens games in both the 400m & 200m.
Souza then handed the torch to Marcia Malsar. She is the one that you've all heard of because she fell over.
Despite falling over in an Opening Ceremony Marcia Malsar is also reasonably famous as a Brazilian sprinter who has won four Para-Olympic medals. Most notably Sliver in the women's 1000m and Gold in the women's 200m in the 1984 games. Although the 1984 Olympics were held in Los Angeles that year's Para-Olympics were held all the way across the US in Long Island, New York.
Malsar used to compete in the C6 class. This indicates that she has an impairment of the Cerebellum and that impairment is moderate-to-light (6) in severity. But closer to the moderate (5).
Traditionally the C class only applied to people with Cerebral Palsy. This is a congenital condition (birth defect) in which the brain does not properly communicate with the nervous system as it connects to the Spinal Column via the Cerebellum and Brain Stem. With these areas of the brain being particularly responsible for automatic processes such as balance and movement this can cause those with the condition or twitch or fall over as their muscles experience what are know as; "Spastic contractions."
More recently though the C class has grow to include competitors with neurological symptoms causing impairment similar to Cerebral Palsy. This definition can include any one or a combination of literally thousands of medical conditions including being punched in the head really hard (Concussion). Apparently it takes at least 7 years to qualify as an actual, proper doctor.
However as the developed world in particular has become increasingly interested in the type of disability associated with ageing bodies the oft talked about type of neurological impairment are those associated with Stroke.
The not strictly speaking medical term "Stroke" refers to any failure of blood flow to the brain resulting brain cell death. The two main types are "Ischemic" when blood vessels get blocked or "Hemorrhagic" when the blood vessels burst and all the blood leaks out into places it shouldn't be rather than the places it should be.
What neurological damage is done by a stroke really depends on two things. How long it lasts for and what area of the brain it effects.
Hemorrhagic strokes tend to be catastrophic. They can last for as long as it takes for someone to cut into the brain and surgically patch up the burst blood vessel. Untreated Hemorrhagic strokes are often fatal.
Ischemic strokes can be every bit as catastrophic as Hemorrhagic strokes. However they tend to effect smaller blood vessels such as capillaries rather than arteries and can often clear themselves. This is known as a Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) or mini-stroke. These often pass after a couple of hours without the need for medical intervention.
Whatever the type of stroke cutting off the supply of blood and therefore oxygen to any brain cells causes them to die. What level of neurological impairment this causes depends on where in the brain those cells are located. Despite all the advances of science we're still not exactly sure what each brain cell does. Not least because brain cells not only seem able to do more than one job they also seem able to change their purpose to compensate for any cells that have been lost.
Apart from death a common consequence of catastrophic strokes is paralysis of part or all of the body. Curiously the side of the body affected is opposite to the hemisphere of the brain affected. So if someone has a stroke in the left side of their brain it will be the right side of their body affected. The paralysis of the facial muscles - particularly around the mouth - are a big clue that someone has suffered a stroke.
More minor consequences - particularly of TIA's - can include minor loss of co-ordination, memory loss and loss of cognitive function and reasoning skills. On a day-to-day basis the progression of this impairment may be imperceptible to the naked eye in much the same way you can't really notice someones hair growing millimetre by millimetre.
The exact nature of Marcia Malsar's medical condition would be extremely helpful in determining why she fell. After all the important thing to remember about people with Cerebral Palsy is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with their brains.
For example in 2012 Britain was represented in the Equestrian events by Sophie Christiansen who has Cerebral Palsy. She is not competing in Rio because she felt it was more important to put her Masters degree in Mathematics to work as a statistical analyst for Goldman Sachs.
Therefore it is entirely possible that Marcia Malsar fell over on purpose to provide us with a talking point.
However that is not to say that she faked her fall. Merely that she agreed to participate in the relay knowing that her impairment meant that it was more likely than not that she would fall over.
At around 21:40 on 13/9/16 (UK date) the exact nature of that talking point will have to wait until tomorrow. Because as the second glass of wine goes down I've got a feeling this isn't going to get more coherent.
Edited at around 14:25 on 14/9/16 (UK date) to add;
The talking point Marcia Malsar's fall provided us with is how do you react when a disabled person does something embarrassing like falling over?
Answering this is quite difficult because asking what the disabled think is about as much use as asking what the Muslims think or what the Blacks think. It turns out that they're all individuals each with their own opinion.
Generally what a lot of disabled people complain about though is people fussing over them. That is to say when they fall over everyone rushes towards them with tears in their eyes and tries wrapping them in a cotton wool blanket before urgently calling an ambulance to take them to hospital.
After all if you've got an impairment that causes balance problems you may well fall over a couple of times a day. Therefore you get very good at landing without injuring yourself and getting yourself back up again.
A somewhat interesting example is UK powerlifter Ali Jawad. Apart from having a big Persian nose and big, pointy Persian ears he is also a double above the knee amputee. However rather than using prosthetics or a wheelchair he just charges about on his stumps. If he wants to get on or off a chair he'll simply swing on his arms like some sort of angry monkey. As a powerlifter he clearly doesn't need you to pick him up. Plus you probably couldn't even if you tried.
Of course the fact that Ali Jawad has also grown a beard like the Genie from Disney's "Aladdin" suggests we're dealing with a bit of a character.
However if someone - disabled or not - does fall over right next to you it is only polite to ask if they would like your help getting back up.
So when Marcia Malsar fell no-one came rushing over to help her. Two people did rush over but that was only to pick up the torch to stop the flame going out. Nor did the next person in the relay rush on to pick up the torch and cut short Malsar's section of the relay.
Instead everyone just waited until she'd picked herself up, dusted herself down and carried on with her section of the relay as normal.
During this time the crowd in the arena all rose to their feet to cheer and applaud. I personally found that a little condescending as if Malsar as an accomplished runner deserved applause simply for standing up. However it was certainly better than standing there in shocked silence or letting out a horrified gasp.
What I personally tend to do in this type of situation - particularly if I'm around friends rather than say work colleagues - is crack a little joke to break the tension and then just carry on. It was German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche who said that; "A joke is an epigram (epitaph) on the death of an emotion." That reflects the way that a joke can been used as a way to process and reject all those feelings of hurt or embarrassment.
I suspect the Brazilian hosts understood that the joke often made when someone falls over is that lumberjack's cry of; "TIMBER!!!!" That of course touches on that Climate Change issue of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+).
Malsar than passed the torch to Brazilian runner Adria Santos.
Born blind Adria Santos has won 12 Para-Olympic medals in total starting with Silver in the 100m at the 1996 Atlanta games. Most notably though she won Gold in the 100m in the 1992 Barcelona games, Gold in both the 100m and 200m at the 2000 Sydney games and Gold in the 100m at the 2004 Athens games.
In the 1996 Atlanta games up until the 2000 Sydney games Santos competed in the B2 class. This indicates that she is Blind and that impairment is medium to severe. However at the 2000 games the IPC changed the classification system and from then on Santos competed in either the T11 or T12 class.
This indicates that she is a Track athlete with an impairment affecting her vision (1) and that impairment is either severe (1) or medium to severe (2). However these days all visually impaired runners tend to wear blindfolds so they all compete in the T11 class regardless of whether they've got perfect eyesight.
Finally Santos passed the torch to Clodoaldo Silva.
Silva is something of a Brazilian swimming legend. At the time of the torch relay he had won 12 Para-Olympic medals beginning with three Silvers and a Bronze at the 2000 Sydney games in the 100m freestyle, 4x50m medley, 4x50m freestyle and 50m freestyle. He as also set five Para-Olympic and four World records.
So far in these games Silva has already won Silver in the mixed 4x50m freestyle. I'm a bit worried he might win more medals while I'm writing this.
Silva competes in the S5 class. This indicates that he is Swimmer and that he suffers from a moderate impairment of his mobility. Silva's specific impairment comes from Cerebral Palsy and primarily affects his lower body. As a result when Silva is not in the pool he uses a wheelchair.
This presented a huge problem when he came to the base of the protocol island which had the cauldron at its summit.
The design of the protocol island seemed based on the Inca temples and it was a giant rectangular monolith with steps all the way down its front. Although technically the Inca are from Brazil's neighbour Peru this seemed to be a little nod to Brazil's indigenous tribes. If they'd used something specifically Brazilian it's unlikely people would have recognised it and all the other tribes would have been offended.
The geometrically perfect steps at the front of the island were very reminiscent of the Modernist school of architecture founded by famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. It is this Niemeyer influence you can see in the Brutalist City Hall in Boston, Massachusetts.
No matter how fascinating these steps were to students of architecture they were most certainly not wheelchair accessible so Clodoaldo Silva was left looking dejected, unable to reach the cauldron he needed to light.
Then suddenly and mechanically sections of the steps pushed outwards to form a wheelchair ramp.
This was intended to highlight the sort of problems that disabled people experience in everyday and how easy it is to solve them if only we were a little more thoughtful. Although this is a global issue it is one that is particularly relevant to Rio's favelas.
Built without planning on land no-one else wants favelas tend to be built on the side of hills meaning that they are essentially all stairs. Not only does this make them completely inaccessible to wheelchair users even fully able bodied people find living in favelas physically exhausting.
As part of the preparations for these games Rio built a Gondola or cable-car system linking the Alemao favela with the city centre to save people the effort of walking up and down all those stairs.
Having reached the summit of the protocol island Silva lit the cauldron. This was the same cauldron used in the previous games. However due to budgetary constraints the stadium where that cauldron is located is closed during the games. So we have to make do with a smaller copy placed outside the Candelaria Church in Rio itself.
The ceremony ended with a performance by Brazilian pop Samba singer Seu Jorge. During this song all the performers returned to the arena floor to dance and enjoy a party atmosphere.
There was then the traditional firework display.
16:15 on 14/9/16 (UK date).
Monday 12 September 2016
The 2016 Sultan Mehmed Games: Opening Ceremony Pt.5
This should be read as a direct continuation of Part 4; http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-2016-sultan-mehmed-games-opening_12.html
Para-Olympic Flag & Anthem: As with the Olympics it is a matter of protocol that each Opening Ceremony features the raising of the Para-Olympic flag and a performance of the Para-Olympic anthem.
This sequence began with a short video introducing us to the work of Alexandria Falerios and his Projecto Buto No Mundo (Project Buto Worldwide).
This is a project dreamt up by the Brazilian fathers of children with severe disabilities affecting their mobility and balance. It sees the fathers strap their child into a special harness around their chests and tie the child's feet to their own feet. This allows the children to play football with their fathers acting as their legs and bodies.
It is an incredibly powerful thing to watch being a dramatic demonstration of that deep, unconditional love that a parent has for their children regardless of everything and anything. It is like the stereotypical image of a young daughter dancing on her father's feet at a wedding only on a much, much more intense emotional level.
It was these fathers and their children that carried the Para-Olympic flag into the arena.
As they made their way around the arena the stadium announcer introduced us to each child and told us a little bit about their disability.
With this being a project being set up parents with no previous medical experience rather than a therapy being devised by doctors there isn't any common theme to these disabilities. You can't even strictly speaking refer to them all as congenital or birth defects. Although certainly some of the children do suffer from disorders like Cerebral Palsy others were born prematurely or starved of oxygen at birth.
Collectively though they represented that shadow that has been hanging over these Brazilian games, particularly the Para-Olympics. The Zika virus and the birth defects it causes.
I should start by pointing out that for the vast majority of people Zika is in no way a serious medical condition. It might give you a bit of a rash and leave you feeling grotty for about a week but that is it. In some extremely rare cases it can trigger off other autoimmune diseases such as Encephalitis or Guilain-Barre syndrome. However that is true of all viral infections. Even the common cold.
The only group that Zika presents a significant risk to is pregnant women or more specifically their unborn children. However even within that very small sub-group of the population Zika only has serious consequences in less than 1% of cases.
Therefore I think there is a lot to be said for simply treating Zika as you would any host of childhood disease like Chicken Pox, Mumps or Rubella.
Catching any one of these diseases as an adult can have very serious consequences including death. As with Zika the risks are increased for pregnant women. As a result a lot of parents try and make sure their children catch these diseases before they reach puberty. That way they build up a natural immunity to the disease long before they're at risk of developing the more serious complications such as during pregnancy.
However in response to this Zika outbreak everyone seems to have completely lost any sense of perspective. US President Barack Obama in particular seems to view Zika as the next Ebola.
What Obama wants to do in response to the Zika outbreak is effectively carpet bomb the entire planet with an Organophosphate insecticide known as "Naled."
This is from the same family of chemicals as very serious Chemical Weapons such as Sarin and VX gas. Not only does it cause cancer in humans Naled also destroys the nervous system causing autoimmune diseases like Encephalitis and Guilain-Barre along with, well, death.
Naled also wipes out all insects including important pollinators such as honey bees and butterflies. In turn this causes a mass die-off of plants that require those pollinators to grow and animals that require those plants to live.
Obama also wants to rush through a Zika vaccine. There is a growing group of frankly conspiracy theorists who believe that vaccines cause other illnesses such as Autism who are known as "Anti-Vaxxers." I have absolutely no time for these people because before a vaccine hits the market it goes through years of extensive research and clinical trial to establish that it doesn't cause health problems.
However with the Zika vaccine Obama is talking about skipping many of these research and clinical trials in order to rush the vaccine onto the market. As far as I'm concerned the risk that presents is out of all proportion to the scale of the threat Zika itself poses.
Personally I consider the whole thing to be yet another example of Obama's extreme egomania. Like many of his arrogance he is absolutely terrified of anything that is bigger or more powerful than him. Such as nature.
Despite all these problems with Obama's Zika strategy back in June the US Congress authorised USD1.1bn to fund it. However Obama himself then vetoed that bill because he wanted an extra USD70m to abort babies whose mothers were infected with Zika. 99% of whom will have absolutely no health problems whatsoever.
Obama is now trying to claim that it was Congress that blocked Zika funding. Once again behaving like a petulant child.
Despite the extremely low risks - even to pregnant women - Zika has resulted in some 4000 babies being born in Brazil with a severe birth defect called "Microcephaly." It is worth pointing out though that is in a country of more than 200 million people.
Quite what the prognosis for those babies will be is hard to tell. Rather than being a disease or a disorder itself Microcephaly is merely a specific symptom. In Latin in literally means; "Small Headedness."
Microcephaly is defined by the skull failing to grow to its normal size. When this happens what tends to happen is that the brain - lacking space - also fails to develop. In some cases although shrunken the skull continues to grow as the rest of the body does. In other cases it does not grow at all.
Microcephaly is actually reasonably common in disorders such as Cerebral Palsy and Dwarfism. As a result at the Para-Olympics there are actually a number of competitors with mild forms of Microcephaly. For them it is not a serious problem and doesn't stop them from competing is sport at the international level.
However with Zika related Microcephaly the prognosis seems to be much worse. In the majority of those cases the stunted growth of the brain seems to primarily effect the Brain Stem and Cerebellum. These are the parts of the brain that deal with automatic biological processes such as breathing and regulating blood pressure and body temperature.
Unless these children's skulls do start growing again those parts of the brain will be crushed. This means that means that these children will probably die of natural causes such as respiratory failure either during or as they begin puberty at the age of around 10 years old.
With it being extremely unlikely that they will ever progress beyond the newborn stage of neurological development - essentially remaining giant babies all their lives - probably the most humane thing is just to let nature run its course and enjoy the time they have been given.
At around 17:35 on 12/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up after dinner.
Edited at around 20:05 on 12/9/16 (UK date) to add;
The children then handed the Para-Olympic flag to the same flag detail who raised the Brazilian flag. The flag detail then climbed all those stairs to the top of the protocol island and raised the flag.
As the flag was being raised a recording of the Para-Olympic anthem was played while we were shown a montage of the sporting highlights from the 2012 Para-Olympic games. If there was a significance to the people included in this montage it was lost on me.
The Para-Olympic oaths were then taken on behalf of all competitors, judges and coaches by the swimmer Philippe Andrews on behalf of the athletes. Boccia judge Racquel Daffre on behalf of the judges. And Amaurey Delissimon on behalf of the coaches.
Behold. Ironman: This sequence centred around American Para-Olympic snowboarder and double below the knee amputee Amy Purdy performing a dance routine. She was wearing a 3D printed dress by perhaps aptly named Israeli designer Danit Peleg. It was her dance partner that was the star of the show though - a giant robotic arm made by Kuka.
Kuka are actually a German robotics company. However they have a manufacturing subsidiary based in Brazil. If the fact that Brazil is home to the World's third largest aircraft manufacturer Embraer didn't dispel the notion that Brazil isn't a serious country this gave you an opportunity to check out their robotics industry.
This entire section was intended to promote discussion about the role of technology in overcoming the limitations of disability.
Although they're so simple and have been around for so long that we no longer think of them in that way even the humble wheelchair is an example of a technological solution to the limitations of disability. However the wheelchairs they use at the Para-Olympics - particularly in the Handcycling - are far from simple in their design.
Amy Purdy began her routine with wooden feet on the base of her prosthetics. In one dramatic moment in the dance she kicked off those wooden feet to reveal the type of carbon fibre blades used in the Para-Olympics - particularly by track & field athletes. The level of design and engineering that goes into these blades means that they are much, much more than simply carbon fibre peg-legs.
If you cast your mind back to the 2012 games you may remember that he who shall not be mentioned got into a massive argument with Brazil's Alan Oliveria. The complaint being that the design of Oliveria's running blades gave him an unfair advantage.
At this year's games we have single below the knee amputee Markus Rehm representing Germany in the long jump. He would very much have liked to compete in the Olympics themselves but the IOC refused on the grounds that for the specific task of long jump his blade is better than a human leg.
Outside disabled sport there seem to be every increasing technological solutions to the limitations of disability.
One that seems almost old fashioned these days is the Cochlear implant. This is an electronic device that is implanted into the skulls of deaf people. It simply bypasses the damaged ear feeding sound directly into the nervous system doing the job the ear should do.
For the visually impaired a system called "OrCam" has just reached the market. Being similar to the Cochlear implant this features cameras mounted on spectacles that feed electrical signals directly into the brain doing the job the eye should do.
Just yesterday (11/9/16) in the UK the first person to cross the finishing line of the Great North Run half-marathon in a staged photo-opportunity was a woman called Claire Lomas. Paraplegic since a horse riding accident in 2007 she can now walk on crutches with the aid of a bionic suit known as "ReWalk" which performs a similar function as the Project Buto fathers. However I suspect it will be a long time before the IPC start letting people race in motorised exoskeletons.
With this section of the Opening Ceremony starting off a bit of a bidding war the Israeli robotics start-up "UPnRIDE" would also really like you to know that they've developed a new type of wheelchair. Using similar robotic technology as ReWalk this allows people to stand up in a motorised wheelchair. The intention being to let them feel less alienated in everyday life. Getting things from the topshelf in a grocery store being a prime example.
Back in late 2015 the US military's mad science division - the Defence Advanced Research Projects (DAPRA) - who are also working on powered exoskeletons announced that they had developed a prosthetic limb that can be connected to the nervous system. That not only allows the prosthetic to have a sense of touch it also allows the wearer to control the movement of the prosthetic in the same way they would a limb.
At around 21:00 on 12/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up tomorrow.
Edited at around 13:50 on 13/9/16 (UK date) to add;
This section also gives me an opportunity to discuss some of the tension I've been having with UK Para-Olympic broadcaster Channel 4 during the games so far.
Back in 2012 Channel 4 went into the Para-Olympics in a big way. A large part of their coverage then focused on the type of impairments affecting the competitors, what methods they use to overcome them and how that affects the way they are classified for competition. The Last Leg show even used the hashtag #IsItOk to allow people to ask the questions about disability that they otherwise felt stupid or embarrassed to ask.
In the four years since then Channel 4 has nurtured a fanbase for disabled sport. These people are obviously well versed in disability issues. As a result at these games Channel 4's coverage is focused much more on the competitors achievements and the aspects of their lives that have absolutely nothing to do with their impairment. The intention being to get viewers to see the person rather than the disability.
So every time I focus on a competitors impairment or the technology they use to overcome it Channel 4 tend to go into full Social Justice Warrior mode and start getting all snippy with me.
I'm not saying that the editorial line Channel 4 have taken is wrong. In fact for them it is probably exactly the right thing to be doing.
It's just that I - like the games themselves - am taking a more global perspective. That means constantly behaving as if this was someones first introduction to disabled sport or disability issues. In no small part due to the effort that Channel 4 put in back in 2012 a lot more broadcasters globally are covering these games. That means that for many it is actually their first introduction to disabled sport and disability issues.
Also one of the main advantages of the Para-Olympics is that it provides nations with an opportunity to gather together to discuss disabled sport and disability issues. This allows them to brainstorm and share ideas of how best to help people living with disability. Therefore I think it would be an opportunity missed not to discuss disability at all at the Para-Olympics.
There is of course a whole other subtext to this sequence though.
For a very long time in fiction and art Robots have been used as an allegory for authoritarian governments or more commonly authoritarian capitalists who are trying to destroy humanity and take over the World. Skynet from the "Terminator" franchise being a particularly high profile example.
In fact Robots have been used in fiction in this way for longer than Robots have actually existed.
The first use of the term "Robot" was in a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Capek called; "Rossum's Universal Robots." This is about a greedy corporation that accidentally wipes out humanity by creating a race of out of control Robots. So when engineers invented Robots they actually took the name from science fiction.
If you've ever had the misfortune of discussing politics on the Internet with Hillary Clinton supporters eventually the term; "Hillbot" will come up. This reflects the way these seeming automatons will robotically recite the party line no matter how many facts are presented to contradict them.
The Kuka robot used in this sequence is simply a type of hydraulic arm. This is a common design used in a vast array of roles. For example on Friday (9/9/16) a group of British surgeons - perhaps taking things a little too literally - announced that they'd cured a blind man by using a much smaller version of this type of robot to operate on his eye.
However I think the use that most people at these games will be most familiar with is the hydraulic arm on the type of bomb disposal robot that is used to fight terrorism.
For example on the track Britain is being represented by David Henson. He served with a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan until - to quote his Twitter bio - he; "had and bad day at work."
Friday's (9/9/16) men's 100m final was slightly spoilt when part of the stadium had to be evacuated due to a bomb scare. A bomb scare that had accidentally been caused by The Last Leg presenter Johnny Vegas. The first couple of days of the previous games were marred by the Brazilian military having to use bomb disposal robots to carry out several controlled explosions.
Then of course there was the July 7th (7/7/16) terror attack in Dallas, Texas, US that was carried out by US President Obama's Black Lives Matter group. Although this was a shooting attack it was somewhat controversially brought to an end using a bomb disposal robot.
If you weren't paying full attention - perhaps because it was 2AM and you were a bit drunk - it would be very easy to mistake Amy Purdy for Aimee Mullins. Another famous American double below the knee amputee Aimee Mullins competed in the 1996 Atlanta games and was leader of the US team at all of the 2012 London games.
Aimee Mullins was probably the first Para-Olympian to cross over into the mainstream. First as a fashion model from 1999 and then as an actress from 2002. She currently features in the much talked about Netflix series "Stranger Things." Amy Purdy has - for want of a better term - tried following in Aimee Mullins' footsteps by appearing on "Dancing With the Stars" where she learnt to dance.
After being in a longterm relationship Aimee Mullins married (technically British) actor Rupert Friend earlier this year. Friend is probably most famous for his role in "Homeland." However prior to that he played a journalist in the movie "5 Days of War." The fourth season of Homeland had great fun making coded reference to his role in that movie.
Sometimes called "5 Days in August" 5 Days of War is set during the war Georgia started with its neighbour Russia during the 2008 Beijing games. It frequently complains that no-one was covering that war because they were distracted by the Olympics.
As a low budget war movie 5 Days of War is rather good. It's use of computer animated tanks, helicopters and soldiers rather than props and armies of extras is certainly worthy of a mention in any discussion of that topic.
However as an account of what happened during that war it is utterly appalling. For example it starts in the middle of the war. How the war started is never mentioned. We just have to hate the Russians without question.
It is so bad that in the final edit they decided to open it with famous; "The first casualty of war is truth" quote as if to say; "There is the truth of what happened in that war. But here's our film."
The moment when Amy Purdy kicks off her wooden feet to reveal her blades is accompanied by the dramatic opening bars of "Barrando" by Sergio Mendes. This seems to be a reference to another movie; "Kingsman: The Secret Service." Best described as a parody of James Bond-style spy movies this truly terrible film features an amputee assassin who uses actual blades on her prosthetics to kill people.
As such this sequence also seems to be a reference to the US & UK's seeming desire to destroy humanity in all its forms by supporting groups like ISIL and the Sultan Mehmed division. Russia's exclusion from these games is a key part of that support.
Last night (12/9/16) the new season of Dancing With the Stars opened with disgraced US Olympic swimmer and renowned liar Ryan Lochte being ambushed by protesters.
I'm guessing they're not happy about one of their alumni being tricked into participating into this sequence condemning the US war machine.
16:00 on 13/9/16 (UK date).
Para-Olympic Flag & Anthem: As with the Olympics it is a matter of protocol that each Opening Ceremony features the raising of the Para-Olympic flag and a performance of the Para-Olympic anthem.
This sequence began with a short video introducing us to the work of Alexandria Falerios and his Projecto Buto No Mundo (Project Buto Worldwide).
This is a project dreamt up by the Brazilian fathers of children with severe disabilities affecting their mobility and balance. It sees the fathers strap their child into a special harness around their chests and tie the child's feet to their own feet. This allows the children to play football with their fathers acting as their legs and bodies.
It is an incredibly powerful thing to watch being a dramatic demonstration of that deep, unconditional love that a parent has for their children regardless of everything and anything. It is like the stereotypical image of a young daughter dancing on her father's feet at a wedding only on a much, much more intense emotional level.
It was these fathers and their children that carried the Para-Olympic flag into the arena.
As they made their way around the arena the stadium announcer introduced us to each child and told us a little bit about their disability.
With this being a project being set up parents with no previous medical experience rather than a therapy being devised by doctors there isn't any common theme to these disabilities. You can't even strictly speaking refer to them all as congenital or birth defects. Although certainly some of the children do suffer from disorders like Cerebral Palsy others were born prematurely or starved of oxygen at birth.
Collectively though they represented that shadow that has been hanging over these Brazilian games, particularly the Para-Olympics. The Zika virus and the birth defects it causes.
I should start by pointing out that for the vast majority of people Zika is in no way a serious medical condition. It might give you a bit of a rash and leave you feeling grotty for about a week but that is it. In some extremely rare cases it can trigger off other autoimmune diseases such as Encephalitis or Guilain-Barre syndrome. However that is true of all viral infections. Even the common cold.
The only group that Zika presents a significant risk to is pregnant women or more specifically their unborn children. However even within that very small sub-group of the population Zika only has serious consequences in less than 1% of cases.
Therefore I think there is a lot to be said for simply treating Zika as you would any host of childhood disease like Chicken Pox, Mumps or Rubella.
Catching any one of these diseases as an adult can have very serious consequences including death. As with Zika the risks are increased for pregnant women. As a result a lot of parents try and make sure their children catch these diseases before they reach puberty. That way they build up a natural immunity to the disease long before they're at risk of developing the more serious complications such as during pregnancy.
However in response to this Zika outbreak everyone seems to have completely lost any sense of perspective. US President Barack Obama in particular seems to view Zika as the next Ebola.
What Obama wants to do in response to the Zika outbreak is effectively carpet bomb the entire planet with an Organophosphate insecticide known as "Naled."
This is from the same family of chemicals as very serious Chemical Weapons such as Sarin and VX gas. Not only does it cause cancer in humans Naled also destroys the nervous system causing autoimmune diseases like Encephalitis and Guilain-Barre along with, well, death.
Naled also wipes out all insects including important pollinators such as honey bees and butterflies. In turn this causes a mass die-off of plants that require those pollinators to grow and animals that require those plants to live.
Obama also wants to rush through a Zika vaccine. There is a growing group of frankly conspiracy theorists who believe that vaccines cause other illnesses such as Autism who are known as "Anti-Vaxxers." I have absolutely no time for these people because before a vaccine hits the market it goes through years of extensive research and clinical trial to establish that it doesn't cause health problems.
However with the Zika vaccine Obama is talking about skipping many of these research and clinical trials in order to rush the vaccine onto the market. As far as I'm concerned the risk that presents is out of all proportion to the scale of the threat Zika itself poses.
Personally I consider the whole thing to be yet another example of Obama's extreme egomania. Like many of his arrogance he is absolutely terrified of anything that is bigger or more powerful than him. Such as nature.
Despite all these problems with Obama's Zika strategy back in June the US Congress authorised USD1.1bn to fund it. However Obama himself then vetoed that bill because he wanted an extra USD70m to abort babies whose mothers were infected with Zika. 99% of whom will have absolutely no health problems whatsoever.
Obama is now trying to claim that it was Congress that blocked Zika funding. Once again behaving like a petulant child.
Despite the extremely low risks - even to pregnant women - Zika has resulted in some 4000 babies being born in Brazil with a severe birth defect called "Microcephaly." It is worth pointing out though that is in a country of more than 200 million people.
Quite what the prognosis for those babies will be is hard to tell. Rather than being a disease or a disorder itself Microcephaly is merely a specific symptom. In Latin in literally means; "Small Headedness."
Microcephaly is defined by the skull failing to grow to its normal size. When this happens what tends to happen is that the brain - lacking space - also fails to develop. In some cases although shrunken the skull continues to grow as the rest of the body does. In other cases it does not grow at all.
Microcephaly is actually reasonably common in disorders such as Cerebral Palsy and Dwarfism. As a result at the Para-Olympics there are actually a number of competitors with mild forms of Microcephaly. For them it is not a serious problem and doesn't stop them from competing is sport at the international level.
However with Zika related Microcephaly the prognosis seems to be much worse. In the majority of those cases the stunted growth of the brain seems to primarily effect the Brain Stem and Cerebellum. These are the parts of the brain that deal with automatic biological processes such as breathing and regulating blood pressure and body temperature.
Unless these children's skulls do start growing again those parts of the brain will be crushed. This means that means that these children will probably die of natural causes such as respiratory failure either during or as they begin puberty at the age of around 10 years old.
With it being extremely unlikely that they will ever progress beyond the newborn stage of neurological development - essentially remaining giant babies all their lives - probably the most humane thing is just to let nature run its course and enjoy the time they have been given.
At around 17:35 on 12/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up after dinner.
Edited at around 20:05 on 12/9/16 (UK date) to add;
The children then handed the Para-Olympic flag to the same flag detail who raised the Brazilian flag. The flag detail then climbed all those stairs to the top of the protocol island and raised the flag.
As the flag was being raised a recording of the Para-Olympic anthem was played while we were shown a montage of the sporting highlights from the 2012 Para-Olympic games. If there was a significance to the people included in this montage it was lost on me.
The Para-Olympic oaths were then taken on behalf of all competitors, judges and coaches by the swimmer Philippe Andrews on behalf of the athletes. Boccia judge Racquel Daffre on behalf of the judges. And Amaurey Delissimon on behalf of the coaches.
Behold. Ironman: This sequence centred around American Para-Olympic snowboarder and double below the knee amputee Amy Purdy performing a dance routine. She was wearing a 3D printed dress by perhaps aptly named Israeli designer Danit Peleg. It was her dance partner that was the star of the show though - a giant robotic arm made by Kuka.
Kuka are actually a German robotics company. However they have a manufacturing subsidiary based in Brazil. If the fact that Brazil is home to the World's third largest aircraft manufacturer Embraer didn't dispel the notion that Brazil isn't a serious country this gave you an opportunity to check out their robotics industry.
This entire section was intended to promote discussion about the role of technology in overcoming the limitations of disability.
Although they're so simple and have been around for so long that we no longer think of them in that way even the humble wheelchair is an example of a technological solution to the limitations of disability. However the wheelchairs they use at the Para-Olympics - particularly in the Handcycling - are far from simple in their design.
Amy Purdy began her routine with wooden feet on the base of her prosthetics. In one dramatic moment in the dance she kicked off those wooden feet to reveal the type of carbon fibre blades used in the Para-Olympics - particularly by track & field athletes. The level of design and engineering that goes into these blades means that they are much, much more than simply carbon fibre peg-legs.
If you cast your mind back to the 2012 games you may remember that he who shall not be mentioned got into a massive argument with Brazil's Alan Oliveria. The complaint being that the design of Oliveria's running blades gave him an unfair advantage.
At this year's games we have single below the knee amputee Markus Rehm representing Germany in the long jump. He would very much have liked to compete in the Olympics themselves but the IOC refused on the grounds that for the specific task of long jump his blade is better than a human leg.
Outside disabled sport there seem to be every increasing technological solutions to the limitations of disability.
One that seems almost old fashioned these days is the Cochlear implant. This is an electronic device that is implanted into the skulls of deaf people. It simply bypasses the damaged ear feeding sound directly into the nervous system doing the job the ear should do.
For the visually impaired a system called "OrCam" has just reached the market. Being similar to the Cochlear implant this features cameras mounted on spectacles that feed electrical signals directly into the brain doing the job the eye should do.
Just yesterday (11/9/16) in the UK the first person to cross the finishing line of the Great North Run half-marathon in a staged photo-opportunity was a woman called Claire Lomas. Paraplegic since a horse riding accident in 2007 she can now walk on crutches with the aid of a bionic suit known as "ReWalk" which performs a similar function as the Project Buto fathers. However I suspect it will be a long time before the IPC start letting people race in motorised exoskeletons.
With this section of the Opening Ceremony starting off a bit of a bidding war the Israeli robotics start-up "UPnRIDE" would also really like you to know that they've developed a new type of wheelchair. Using similar robotic technology as ReWalk this allows people to stand up in a motorised wheelchair. The intention being to let them feel less alienated in everyday life. Getting things from the topshelf in a grocery store being a prime example.
Back in late 2015 the US military's mad science division - the Defence Advanced Research Projects (DAPRA) - who are also working on powered exoskeletons announced that they had developed a prosthetic limb that can be connected to the nervous system. That not only allows the prosthetic to have a sense of touch it also allows the wearer to control the movement of the prosthetic in the same way they would a limb.
At around 21:00 on 12/9/16 (UK date) I'll pick this up tomorrow.
Edited at around 13:50 on 13/9/16 (UK date) to add;
This section also gives me an opportunity to discuss some of the tension I've been having with UK Para-Olympic broadcaster Channel 4 during the games so far.
Back in 2012 Channel 4 went into the Para-Olympics in a big way. A large part of their coverage then focused on the type of impairments affecting the competitors, what methods they use to overcome them and how that affects the way they are classified for competition. The Last Leg show even used the hashtag #IsItOk to allow people to ask the questions about disability that they otherwise felt stupid or embarrassed to ask.
In the four years since then Channel 4 has nurtured a fanbase for disabled sport. These people are obviously well versed in disability issues. As a result at these games Channel 4's coverage is focused much more on the competitors achievements and the aspects of their lives that have absolutely nothing to do with their impairment. The intention being to get viewers to see the person rather than the disability.
So every time I focus on a competitors impairment or the technology they use to overcome it Channel 4 tend to go into full Social Justice Warrior mode and start getting all snippy with me.
I'm not saying that the editorial line Channel 4 have taken is wrong. In fact for them it is probably exactly the right thing to be doing.
It's just that I - like the games themselves - am taking a more global perspective. That means constantly behaving as if this was someones first introduction to disabled sport or disability issues. In no small part due to the effort that Channel 4 put in back in 2012 a lot more broadcasters globally are covering these games. That means that for many it is actually their first introduction to disabled sport and disability issues.
Also one of the main advantages of the Para-Olympics is that it provides nations with an opportunity to gather together to discuss disabled sport and disability issues. This allows them to brainstorm and share ideas of how best to help people living with disability. Therefore I think it would be an opportunity missed not to discuss disability at all at the Para-Olympics.
There is of course a whole other subtext to this sequence though.
For a very long time in fiction and art Robots have been used as an allegory for authoritarian governments or more commonly authoritarian capitalists who are trying to destroy humanity and take over the World. Skynet from the "Terminator" franchise being a particularly high profile example.
In fact Robots have been used in fiction in this way for longer than Robots have actually existed.
The first use of the term "Robot" was in a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Capek called; "Rossum's Universal Robots." This is about a greedy corporation that accidentally wipes out humanity by creating a race of out of control Robots. So when engineers invented Robots they actually took the name from science fiction.
If you've ever had the misfortune of discussing politics on the Internet with Hillary Clinton supporters eventually the term; "Hillbot" will come up. This reflects the way these seeming automatons will robotically recite the party line no matter how many facts are presented to contradict them.
The Kuka robot used in this sequence is simply a type of hydraulic arm. This is a common design used in a vast array of roles. For example on Friday (9/9/16) a group of British surgeons - perhaps taking things a little too literally - announced that they'd cured a blind man by using a much smaller version of this type of robot to operate on his eye.
However I think the use that most people at these games will be most familiar with is the hydraulic arm on the type of bomb disposal robot that is used to fight terrorism.
For example on the track Britain is being represented by David Henson. He served with a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan until - to quote his Twitter bio - he; "had and bad day at work."
Friday's (9/9/16) men's 100m final was slightly spoilt when part of the stadium had to be evacuated due to a bomb scare. A bomb scare that had accidentally been caused by The Last Leg presenter Johnny Vegas. The first couple of days of the previous games were marred by the Brazilian military having to use bomb disposal robots to carry out several controlled explosions.
Then of course there was the July 7th (7/7/16) terror attack in Dallas, Texas, US that was carried out by US President Obama's Black Lives Matter group. Although this was a shooting attack it was somewhat controversially brought to an end using a bomb disposal robot.
If you weren't paying full attention - perhaps because it was 2AM and you were a bit drunk - it would be very easy to mistake Amy Purdy for Aimee Mullins. Another famous American double below the knee amputee Aimee Mullins competed in the 1996 Atlanta games and was leader of the US team at all of the 2012 London games.
Aimee Mullins was probably the first Para-Olympian to cross over into the mainstream. First as a fashion model from 1999 and then as an actress from 2002. She currently features in the much talked about Netflix series "Stranger Things." Amy Purdy has - for want of a better term - tried following in Aimee Mullins' footsteps by appearing on "Dancing With the Stars" where she learnt to dance.
After being in a longterm relationship Aimee Mullins married (technically British) actor Rupert Friend earlier this year. Friend is probably most famous for his role in "Homeland." However prior to that he played a journalist in the movie "5 Days of War." The fourth season of Homeland had great fun making coded reference to his role in that movie.
Sometimes called "5 Days in August" 5 Days of War is set during the war Georgia started with its neighbour Russia during the 2008 Beijing games. It frequently complains that no-one was covering that war because they were distracted by the Olympics.
As a low budget war movie 5 Days of War is rather good. It's use of computer animated tanks, helicopters and soldiers rather than props and armies of extras is certainly worthy of a mention in any discussion of that topic.
However as an account of what happened during that war it is utterly appalling. For example it starts in the middle of the war. How the war started is never mentioned. We just have to hate the Russians without question.
It is so bad that in the final edit they decided to open it with famous; "The first casualty of war is truth" quote as if to say; "There is the truth of what happened in that war. But here's our film."
The moment when Amy Purdy kicks off her wooden feet to reveal her blades is accompanied by the dramatic opening bars of "Barrando" by Sergio Mendes. This seems to be a reference to another movie; "Kingsman: The Secret Service." Best described as a parody of James Bond-style spy movies this truly terrible film features an amputee assassin who uses actual blades on her prosthetics to kill people.
As such this sequence also seems to be a reference to the US & UK's seeming desire to destroy humanity in all its forms by supporting groups like ISIL and the Sultan Mehmed division. Russia's exclusion from these games is a key part of that support.
Last night (12/9/16) the new season of Dancing With the Stars opened with disgraced US Olympic swimmer and renowned liar Ryan Lochte being ambushed by protesters.
I'm guessing they're not happy about one of their alumni being tricked into participating into this sequence condemning the US war machine.
16:00 on 13/9/16 (UK date).
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