A message from Suzette: My posts, no matter what simple thought they start out with, seem to be turning into TL;DR type of things. So just to spare you the pain of reading through this whole thing, I’ll give you the key words* so you can skim to the part that interest you. If any.
Key words:
- Olympics opening ceremony
- gin
- corgis
- eBay
- bone china
*What ho, Bertie? As has become obvious to everyone – even me – that except for the Olympics, these things are pretty much the subject of every post I make.
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I just heard someone on 
call the Olympic opening ceremony “eccentric”. (5) Strongly Agree I tried to live tweet it but I grew bored and drifted away. Here are some selected excerpts:
All I can say is that I fully understand why Emma Thompson divorced Kenneth Branagh. I could never take looking at that smug mug every morning. Even without the beaver fur hat. Love that the Queen was as disinterested as the rest of us. I bet she was thinking about gin, too.
The Queen’s “usual” is gin and dubonnet. Here she is in a happier setting on vacation at Balmoral.
ADDENDUM:
I must say that I was vastly amused, not with the heavy-handed NHS love-fest overall, but with the message that was delivered when the monkey monsters showed up and scared the wards of the state in their back-lit beds. The next characters were a cloudburst full of NANNIES fer cripes sake spiraling over them with their LED umbrellas come to save them from the things they were worried about. Thanks because the hit over the head with the NHS theme wasn’t hard enough until that point.
Also – and this is where I am now writing to a very limited audience. We use two bone china cups from England via eBay to drink coffee out of every morning. We both love them because they are deliciously thin and have a fine but not sharp edge that feels fabulous on on the lip. They also are the best for retaining the heat in hot drink. So I’ve been trolling eBay for more mugs – maybe something with a splash of red to get the mornings off to a swift start. Poppies seemed like a good be and lo the same company does offer a poppy pattern. But it’s all messed up with wheat stalks and so I could never tolerate the untended feild-y-ness of it.
Did you see the poppies in wheat as an image of Britain that made the cut for a signifyer in the opening ceremony? Same thing. I get that the flowers were a reference to the battlefields of WWI but wheat didn’t pop up from the soldiers’ graves on the Somme, did it? If it did, I’m pretty sure it would have been mentioned in that poem. Maybe that’s how poppies grow over in England. Maybe that’s how they grow everywhere. Maybe I’m one of those ingnernt murricans that doesn’t know anything about other countries. Where do American poppies grow – California, right? Do they pop up all willy-nilly in the wheat fields of Fresno, too?
Finally, Daniel Craig is my enemy forever for that nasty look he threw to the corgis as he helicoptered away from them.
Cripes Suzette 
Neal Edelstein had a classic tweet.
“Communist Manifesto meets Stomp.”
I confess I am an Olympics junkie and have been known to watch every single second of the opening and closing ceremonies. However last night I turned it off after the paean to national healthcare. So disappointed. Why must politics infuse every. single. thing?
Besides that, it was ugly.
The poppy field confused me, too. the hospital beds with jumping children was just creepy.
Even though I recorded the whole event, I only watched two hours when I got tired of FF through the million commercials. I switched to live TV to watch the parade of nations that should have been the whole point of the opening ceremony. Zillion more commercials. ugh.
Sir Paul looks more like an old woman every day and can’t sing anymore.
Hang it up, Sir Paul.
Just wondering how many of the Pakistani, Ugandan or some of the rest actually know the song “Hey, Jude”?
Whenever Craig Ferguson mentions him on The Late Late Show, he always asks for a picture of Paul to be shown and this is the picture they use:
Probably even fewer know that the original working title of “Get Back” was “No Pakistanis”. 🙂
My sum total of exposure was a tweet that said, “Some guy named Paul McCartney is doing an awful Paul McCartney imitation.”
Sorry I missed the Communist Manifesto part.
I was following your tweets and retweeting them. The shock and awe of the awfulness of that ceremony drove me to the vodka bottle early on and again later when “Sir Paul” appeared to (dare I say it?) sing. Poor thing looks like a little old lady who forgot to put in her dentures. He has droopier jowls than UGA, the Georgia bulldog mascot. Maybe they can get Elton for the closing ceremonies. Fingers crossed.
I didn’t watch it. The possibility of seeing Memememichelle was more than I could stand. I have enjoyed reading lots of comments today. Most are negative.
The cups sound very nice. I have two small thin mugs a friend got for me while she was in England, but they aren’t china. They have 3 blackberries on them. I just love them.
I used to like Britain. That opening was a socialist in your face, Yanks production. Up yours, Brits.
I didn’t watch. I did see the Rowan Adkins bit on You Tube. That was pretty standard.