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| Events | Ads | Fluff |
* And we're off! The first seven minutes of the first day of NBC's Olympic broadcast belong to the editors, who have pieced together a montage of clips set to some poetry-like prose extolling the virtues of Russia. Well, except maybe for this line. "The revolution that birthed one of modern history's pivotal experiments." That would be communism. 100 million dead people. It's an experiment! One would think that once your "n" reaches one million dead that you would know to stop the pivotal experiment.
* Anyway, Welcome to Sochi. Welcome to the 22nd Olympic Games! Yeeee-haaa!
* Off to Fisht Olympic Stadium, site of the Opening Ceremonies (OC). Meredith Viera and Matt Lauer will be calling them instead of Bob Costas. This is already not off to a good start. Meredith says she's freezing. Maybe that's because she's not wearing a jacket. But then, why would you need one? It's just the WINTER games.
* Bob is talking to President Barack Obama from Washington, D.C.! No high ranking U.S. politician is going to Sochi as a protest for Putin's comments on gays. But Mr. Obama's administration put together a special delegation of openly-gay athletes to represent the U.S. in Russia. I'm sure Vladimir Putin is trembling wondering what would Brian Boitano do?
* Bob asks the obligatory terrorism question and then follows up with some questions about Edward Snowden. Okay, I understand why gays and terrorism are Olympic related, but Snowden clearly isn't, other than generally referring to Russian relations. This interview is rapidly drifting into fluff.
* The president closes by wishing all of the U.S. athletes good luck. It's the least controversial thing he's said all year.
* Maria Sharapova and Mary Carillo share some fluff with the sights and sounds of Sochi, where Maria grew up. They go to the Russian circus where Maria shares that as a child she loved clowns. If you're not scared already, they then head off to a restaurant to eat some traditional Russian food. Judging by what they're eating, Sochi is probably famous for clogged arteries.
* Underneath the stadium, Mary Carillo interviews American figure skater Gracie Gold. What a name! I can't help but think she'd be disappointed with anything but.
* Oh, no, it's Ohno! What would a Winter Olympics be without him? This year instead of competing, Apolo is the sideline reporter for NBC. Unlike on the short track, where everything he did was amazing, here he is completely forgettable.
* Finally, 45 minutes into the broadcast, the OC starts! A short video is going to teach us all about the Russians, with all the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet representing something famous from their history. I assume we'll be skipping the letters representing Lenin and Stalin.
* Down on the stadium floor, a small girl is about to fly a kite. Or is the kite about to fly her? She's wearing wires, so I'm guessing it's the latter. Ding! Once again, everything I write now will probably make it sound like I'm on drugs, but I'm not. Describing the events of the OC makes you sound like you're doing drugs or crazy.
* The little girl flies into the air and will tell us about Russia through a series of dreams, because Russians are dreamers. They're not the only ones. I hope someday they'll join us and the world will be as one.
* She files over a white horse and a volcano, then over a small Russian village, all of which are floating through the air as their own little islands, because why not?
* Five giant snowflakes turn into the Olympic rings above the floor. Whoops! Except for one of them. So there are only four Olympic rings in Russian. Vladimir Putin curses Brian Boitano!
* Speaking of Vladimir, there he is in the VIP box. Unlike Meredith Viera, he remembered his jacket. If a tiny American television personality can take the cold better than Putin can maybe he's not such a tough guy after all.
* Down on the floor, a choir belts out the Russian national anthem. This is my favorite part of The Hunt For Red October! I don't remember seeing that in the Cyrillic alphabet segment, either. A bunch of dancers come out on the floor wearing glowing red, white, and blue jackets. Which one of them represents the USS Dallas?
* Here come the athletes! A giant globe is projected on the floor and as the athletes enter, the globe rotates to show the map of the entering team's county. Very cool!
* Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, and Brazil all enter. None of these teams have a chance of winning anything. Why are they here? All-expense-paid vacation!
* Germany enters Russia. Finally, they made it past Moscow! What? Too soon?
* Georgia enters. Vladimir Putin informs them that their seating area is actually smaller than they'd previously been told.
* Kazahkstan will pay $250,000 to any of its athletes that wins a gold medal. And where can the winning athlete safeguard such a prize? Next country up: Cayman Islands!
* New Zealand! One does not simply walk into a Russian Olympic stadium.
* NBC claims that they've got a camera embedded within the US team for the first time ever during an OC. Yes, because there were never enough cameras available to cover them before.
* Carrying the flag in for the South Koreans, speed skater Lee Kyou-Hyuk. He'll be looking for a big dish of beef chow mien. And a gold medal.
* I have to say here that Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera are a big step down from Bob Costas. Bob made all of the countries' trivia sound fresh and entertaining. Matt and Meredith sound like they're reading the sidebars out of a high school textbook.
* Here comes the US team and their embedded camera. I have to admit, that is a pretty cool angle. I wonder how it will compare to the hundreds of YouTube videos posted from the 230 US athletes' iPhones.
* Matt tells us the skier from Timor has trouble describing what he does because Timorese has no word for "ski." If that's true, wouldn't the word be "ski"? I mean, what word is there in English for "ski" other than "ski"?
* Matt also points out the dancing ushers, and how they've been getting jiggy with it for over 20 minutes now. Impressive, but not as impressive as the women ushering in each individual country. They appear to be wearing a fireplace grate on their heads. I'd choose dancing any day.
* The Jamaican bobsled team arrives. Lolo Jones made the US bobsled team because she was a sprinter. How is it that Usain Bolt is not on the Jamaican bobsled team?
* Finally, the Russian Federation team follows their fireplace-grate girl into the stadium. Vladimir Putin... well, I wouldn't call that a smile... sternly grins?
* Matt Lauer introduces a video that he says shows us "a thousand years of history in three minutes." The video starts with the Greeks. Does Matt realize that that was over TWO thousand years ago? Well... one thousand, two thousand... 100 percent off is close enough for NBC.
* I must have dozed off in the middle of that video. Somewhere between the barn raising and the stadium raising, I missed the gulags and assassinations.
* Back to my drug-induced hallucinations. Three giant, white-neon horses pull a orange-neon sun across the sky. The polar ice caps break up beneath them, and inflatable onion-dome towers in the shape of a whale swim into the now-open sea. I swear, officer, I haven't been drinking!
* Matt made a special emphasis about pointing out the projector technology forming the patterns on the floor. Score one for Matt, here. It really is amazing.
* Ha! The photos from the US athletes' iPhones are being used going to break. That didn't even take an hour! Well, I guess it did if you consider the OC is waaaay tape-delayed. But try not to think about that.
* Giant columns rise up out of the floor and hundreds of ballet dancers perform a ballroom scene from War and Peace. Careful, Russia! You might class up the Olympics!
* Here's the only problem with the ballet sequence of the OC: it's so good that it makes you wonder how much better everything would have been if Russia would have ditched the neon horses and instead written a two-hour Opening Ceremony ballet.
* Coming up, says Matt: the Russian Revolution and this commercial break! Oh, the irony!
* Whaddya know... here come the Commies! Now we know why they failed. The only dance they know well is "the robot." Everything is all so red. It's giving me flashbacks to Pink Floyd's "The Wall." But suddenly, everyone is bathed in the white light of freedom! Ha ha ha! Just kidding. First we must build the glorious industrial state. An oppressive hammer and sickle fly over the stadium floor, just so Putin can remind everyone who's really in charge. Then the cast of "Grease" shows how colorful everything was in '50s Russia. And if you believe that, thrill at the sight of clean-cut Russian athletes, completely untainted by steroids! Really, can't we go back to the ballet?
* The little girl is back, floating into the sky holding a red balloon. I guess the other 98 flew away.
* Whatzisname says the only thing this musical party skipped was collapse of the Soviet Union. What about that whole communism thing? Well, we were too busy watching the "Grease" dancers, I guess.
* Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee addresses the crowd. The Olympics just aren't the same since Jacques Rogge and his greased palms left the IOC. Bach doesn't have the slimy look of someone who takes money under the table. Well, I suppose he can grow into it.
* Vladimir Putin will now officially open the games. Thank goodness he's keeping his shirt on.
* Yay! More ballet! Although this one has ballet dancers covered with neon tubes dancing to "Swan Lake." I guess I can compromise with that.
* The Olympic flag arrives. That means we're on the countdown to lighting the torch. Who is the lucky Russian celebrity who gets to light it? I'm hoping for Ivan Drago.
* Here we go. Neon-clad roller skaters circle the middle of the floor while abstract, wire-frame, Olympic constellations hover over their heads. I know that NBC's showing us a wide shot of the stadium so we can see it all, but I really think a low shot looking up would be more interesting because you'd be able to see how huge these things are. As it is right now, it sort of makes my TV look glitchy.
* The flame arrives at last, and it's Maria Sharapova who gets the honor of bringing it into the stadium. Also carrying it, Aleksandr Karelin, whose loss to Rulon Gardner is one of my favorite Olympic moments. Next in line, Alina Kabaeva, the 2004 rhythmic gymnastics gold medalist and also... heh... Vladimir Putin's girlfriend. See? Connections pay off! And now the torch gets carried out of the building, so everyone inside can watch it on TV. How would you like to pay a thousand bucks for an OC ticket and watch the big moment on a jumbotron? What are you complaining about? At least you got to see Putin's main squeeze!
* The cauldron lights. Fireworks explode. The Games have begun!
And so it begins! One day down, 16 to go. See you tomorrow!
