When is the sports thing over?
Aug. 1st, 2012 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyAlmost everyone has some reason to care about the Olympics. Whether it's the one event that they watch or some record-breaking something or that picture of the Black Power salute in 1968 or they just think some famous athlete is hot. Or they think the opening ceremony was cool/awful/loltastic. Even I am contributing by making this post. I can't avoid it, even with my Olympic content blocker (for some reason it also blocks references to disco).
Non-sports people are frequently apologetic when I bring up the fact that I feel like an alien during times like this. "I'm not interested, except...” It's like the Scumsucking Parasite Wedding, except in that case I at least had the rest of the extreme left on my side. But not so here. Even those who object to the totalitarian measures required for the Olympics to happen get misty-eyed over its ideals.
Fuck that.
Things that make me care about the Olympics:
• The purging of the poor and mentally ill from London.
• Surveillance cameras everywhere.
• The godawful branding (seriously hilarious).
• Rocket launchers on the roofs of apartment buildings.
• Banksy doing Banksy things.
Of course, even if these things were not an issue, I would still be apathetic at best, as the Olympics involves two things I could not possibly give a less of a shit about: sports and nationalism. It's not that I hate sports—I would be loathe to fall into the nerd-vs-jock dichotomy–I just don't care. It's probably how some of my fandom friends feel when I start going on about politics, or vice versa. Or any of you when I talk about home decor. (Or how the people at work feel when I start spouting off about any of my interests.) You just skim over those posts, right? Which is cool. There's always something that someone is Just. Not. Interested. In. It's fine if you're into these things but it's about as interesting as someone reading a calculus textbook out loud.
Nationalism is a different matter. I resent the implication that I'm supposed to "support Team Canada." What, by praying to the Sports God? With my tax dollars? Is this how ordinary Tim Hortons-swilling hosers felt about $1.8 million to buy "Voice of Fire" for the National Art Gallery? Borders are arbitrary and demarcated by violence. I have an opinion on nationalism and it generally involves me making angry faces.
Anyway, it is irritating me profusely that I can no longer easily read the news, or even be in a public space and avoid this stuff. You can't even sit down in a pub these days and not have the TV blasting or people talking loudly about some 'roided out athlete. It's a low-level but persistant irritation that gets worse when I think about how ordinary people's lives are shat-upon to turn London into a playground for rich fucks.
So. How much longer am I going to have to be pissy about this?
Non-sports people are frequently apologetic when I bring up the fact that I feel like an alien during times like this. "I'm not interested, except...” It's like the Scumsucking Parasite Wedding, except in that case I at least had the rest of the extreme left on my side. But not so here. Even those who object to the totalitarian measures required for the Olympics to happen get misty-eyed over its ideals.
Fuck that.
Things that make me care about the Olympics:
• The purging of the poor and mentally ill from London.
• Surveillance cameras everywhere.
• The godawful branding (seriously hilarious).
• Rocket launchers on the roofs of apartment buildings.
• Banksy doing Banksy things.
Of course, even if these things were not an issue, I would still be apathetic at best, as the Olympics involves two things I could not possibly give a less of a shit about: sports and nationalism. It's not that I hate sports—I would be loathe to fall into the nerd-vs-jock dichotomy–I just don't care. It's probably how some of my fandom friends feel when I start going on about politics, or vice versa. Or any of you when I talk about home decor. (Or how the people at work feel when I start spouting off about any of my interests.) You just skim over those posts, right? Which is cool. There's always something that someone is Just. Not. Interested. In. It's fine if you're into these things but it's about as interesting as someone reading a calculus textbook out loud.
Nationalism is a different matter. I resent the implication that I'm supposed to "support Team Canada." What, by praying to the Sports God? With my tax dollars? Is this how ordinary Tim Hortons-swilling hosers felt about $1.8 million to buy "Voice of Fire" for the National Art Gallery? Borders are arbitrary and demarcated by violence. I have an opinion on nationalism and it generally involves me making angry faces.
Anyway, it is irritating me profusely that I can no longer easily read the news, or even be in a public space and avoid this stuff. You can't even sit down in a pub these days and not have the TV blasting or people talking loudly about some 'roided out athlete. It's a low-level but persistant irritation that gets worse when I think about how ordinary people's lives are shat-upon to turn London into a playground for rich fucks.
So. How much longer am I going to have to be pissy about this?
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 03:52 pm (UTC)Another thing to care about - the systemic discrimination against Muslim athletes/countries by putting the Olympics in the middle of Ramadan, when they're supposed to be fasting.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 06:18 pm (UTC)I'm trying to figure out how often the Olympics have overlapped Ramadan, and what the scheduling constraints on the Olympics are (i.e. whether shifting the Olympics a few weeks earlier or later to miss Ramadan is a big deal or a minor tweak[**]), but I'm going to have to expend more effort than I have time for this afternoon to get all the historical dates of Ramadan in the Gregorian calendar (or converting the Gregorian dates for past and future Olympics to Islamic dates).
Though off the top of my head I suppose one approach would be to make it a factor in site selection -- for years in which Ramadan falls during northern-hemisphere summer, hold the summer games in the southern hemisphere, and for years in which Ramadan falls during northern-hemisphere winter, hold the winter games in the southern hemisphere.
It looks like there'll be no such conflict for the 2016 games -- in that year Ramadan will end 5 July and the games won't start until 5 August.
Since 1932 the summer Olympics seem to have been consistently about-two-weeks long, so not that difficult to squeeze in before or after Ramadan unless there are scheduling constraints I'm not aware of, but it looks like before then the Olympics lasted anywhere from two to five months, which would have presented a different degree of scheduling challenge (but one of purely academic interest, since I don't see a return to months-long Olympics in the future).
[*] Yeah, I understand that "systemic" most likely refers to the System just not giving a $#%^ about whether there's a problem or not in any given year, rather than some pattern of always having this calendar overlap. I started wondering about the frequency of the problem and the magnitude of accommodation required to avoid it -- how much institutional inertia would need to be overcome to convince TPTB to want to do more than issue a press release about how unfortunate it is that the calendar just happened to work out that way this year.
[**] It's not like the timing of Ramadan in the Gregorian calendar isn't predictable to within a few days, years in advance, even for people using the moon-sighting rules for the Islamic calendar instead of the pre-calculated version, unless some volcanic event blots out the sky for weeks at a time (in which case I don't know how the calendar would be adjusted, and we'd all have bigger problems to worry about anyhow).
no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 07:45 pm (UTC)However, any given Olympics in any city which would reasonably be selected probably has at least a 3 month window when it could happen (approx June-September for summer and January-March for winter, in the Northern Hemisphere). Of that 3 months, no more than one month is Ramadan, and it's a big enough deal to enough of the world that they reasonably should consider it. (This could admittedly be a bit more difficult in the winter, around New Year's, Lunar New Year and Passover/Easter if they're early.)