Well, I guess sometimes a bad end can be justified.

On Friday I leapt out of bed and tuned my television set to the Olympic channel, and was confused for a moment because my sundial said it was eight-eight-oh-eight at eight oh-eight but all I saw was Matt, Ann and Meredith acting goofy on the Today Show, as usual. Correction: not exactly as usual. That morning, they were broadcasting not in the light of day but in darkness; they were outdoors somewhere in Beijing; and they were saying things like "sher la ma" and giggling. Then my father rang from Malaysia, shouting: "Wah. Fantastic!" and I realized, heart sinking, that American television will not be showing what the rest of the world was already in the process of watching. That on a Friday morning, viewership was bound to be low, and that I was going to have to wait until prime time to be a part of history. History!

So it was, that twelve hours later, at my eight o'clock, I finally got the chance to see for myself the Olympics opening ceremony, alongside Hooman and Scott. My two companions had agreed gamely to take dinner early (at five) so we could partake of the spectacle on Scott's giant television at its apportioned time. Because the Olympics is in China this quadriennial, and because they are my fellow third-world-citizens, I felt that I was in league with them to impress the rest of the world. The Olympics may be a worldwide affair, but that night I was rooting for China. Watching the opening was my duty.

It turned out to be so, so, so much fun. Two thousand and eight ferocious drummers drumming; twenty-nine fireball footprints thundering their way from old town to the Bird's Nest; people lined up and hiding in boxes, working in concert to create "wind" and "water ripples" and then popping out from underneath, waving and grinning with abandon; free-style dancers painting with their bodies on an LED screen a picture of mountains and a meadow, to be coloured in later by athletes' feet as they marched in the Parade of Nations; a nine-year-old class monitor missing a patch of hair on the side of his head, who saved two classmates in the earthquake, carrying his country's flag and being held aloft by an enormous Houston Rockets basketball player; Taiwan marching under a made-up flag. And many more outrageous things I couldn't even tell you.

But after all those wondrous displays of human ingenuity (made-up flag included), do you know how it ends? Some fat guy is hoisted in the air, legs arranged Superman style, pretends to run around the stadium for an excruciatingly long time, and lights the cauldron in "typical tasteless Beijing fashion," in Hooman's words. Here. Watch it again, if you can stand it.