Olympia

Drinking game! Take a shot every time anything on British television mentions the olympics, either written or spoken! Rerun's don't count, as we want you to survive.

Back in 2004-ish, it was announced that Britain will be hosting the 2012 Olympic Games, and everyone was happy. People of my age were often told "you'll be old enough to compete in the Olympics" as a reason for us to be sporty. Cups were being designed, competitions were run, planning and all that.

But it's been 8 years of "hey, we're doing the olympics" and I am really looking forward to September.

If you couldn't guess, I am a massive geek and not over sport. I didn't watch the Beijing Olympics, I don't follow the athletes' stories, I don't swoon over the torch and have never been particularly won over by the hype of anything. If I celebrate the games at all, it'll be by playing a video game with a competition related theme or watching Grifball.

It especially doesn't help that most stories we hear about it give an indication that it won't be as amazing as everyone's telling themselves. The clock broke after 24 hours, the opening has a deleted scene, and the rest of it seems a little wacky, everyone's short staffed, there's a snake in Boris Johnson's boot, the tickets were managed horrendously...

Let me explain using an analogy. Imagine a concert was announced for Carly Rae Jepsen and everyone is excited about it. T-shirts are being designed through competitions, the venue is being renovated, and the whole world is expected to turn up for it.

But since there's a limited number of tickets, we'll use a wacky method of selling them! Instead of first come, first serve, we'll make it a lottery where it costs buckloads for a set of tickets, and you have to cross your fingers that you got the ones you wanted! If you got the wrong number of tickets, or they're for the wrong venue, then good luck trying to sell them without seeming immoral.

So, to increase your chances of getting the right tickets, you book more than you want! This works right until the moment where you get every ticket you booked. That's too many! How can you be expected to afford this? This went badly!

Oh no! Asbestos in the arena! We'll have to remodel! Assuming the venue is ready by the concert date, it will be expected to cost twice as much as initially thought! But hopefully, tourism will help to balance the chequebook, since Jepsen's such a big attraction.

Hey, it seems that every marketing department in the world realised this too! Why, it only makes sense to make a profit from this. So they have Call Me Maybe play over their ads, or even have Jepsen hersalf appear in the advert, and wrap it off by claiming to be sponsoring the concert. After all, people will love Jepsen enough to buy literally everything that sponsors it, right? Not just the decent stuff? Sturgeon's Law doesn't apply to us, does it?

Then the marketing departments of the non-sponsors realises they missed out, and their competitors are doing better because they're an official sponsor. Well then, they'll have to sponsor someone else popular! Taylor Swift's pretty popular, isn't she? Or maybe we'll get Rebecca Black!

And then you have to expect every company that has any ties to the concert to create some bit of merchandice for the concert, putting her concert logo or her face on anything that people might barely want. Cups, travel mugs, coasters, pillows, desks, dvds, ancient documents, books, bookmarks, socks, beddings and who else knows is adorned in either her or music to drum up sales of their hot water bottles. Because everyone will buy this blister pad so they can look back on the time Carly Rae Jepsen played in their countries concert hall.

And the news can't stop going on about the concert, mentioning their plans to either increase security, fix the toilets, shoot down die-hard Rhianna fans, run their opening act, sell drinks at the minibars in hotels for high prices or run a boombox across the M25.

But it will all be worth it when the concert begins and fans will have a good couple of weeks to enjoy everything the last campaign of media hype has been leading to.

...Unless you dislike her music and would much rather just watch doctor who, in which case you've been tormented by her face for the past I don't know how long and endured a stupid overplayed and unoriginal meme for something you honestly don't give a sh*t about.

Basically, what I'm saying is GO AWAY, CARLY RAE JEPSON!


Oh, and the Olympics is overplayed.

Words

This is a nitpick, but it's a word that just bugs me.

Threshold

You don't see it, do you? Nothing?

See, it's pronounced (from Dictionary.reference.com) thresh-hohld. Always spelt like that and always pronounced like that, but it just doesn't look like it should work like that.


With the spelling, it should be pronounced either thresh-old or thres-hold. The second is madness, while the first makes me feel like I'm using a white van man accent, and even then I slightly use the H. The letter h is pulling double duty as the h for 'hold' and the h in the 'sh' sound.


If it were spelt as it's pronounced, it would have two h-es back to back, which looks weird. Threshhold.


Just a nitpick, but it bugs me.