answer:I love the Olympics and really wanted to like the opening ceremony. I loved the bit with the queen, and it was nice to see her play along, what I really look forward to is the cultural pieces though. To me some were really odd, I’m not sure if maybe that’s due to missed references, but I don’t think so. Maybe you can explain. It seemed like the gist of one of the central pieces was “everything used to be green and simple, then we made smoke stacks, which put out a lot of smoke, and we were pretty proud about that really.”... I kept expecting something after that to represent more modern times. I’m not down on the industrial revolution and think London and England should be proud of their part in it, but with the modern connotation (at least here in the US) of smoke stacks and pollution, I thought it was odd that they didn’t break through that gray, industrial, set with something that represented moving past that. An American equivalent might be if we acknowledged slavery, the seizing of Indian lands and manifest destiny but then ended when the settlers reached the Pacific coast. Kind of a lot has happened since then and I think a lot of it has been good. What did I miss? Is there a cultural difference in how industrial era progress is perceived today? Were the “modern parts” more subtle? I saw the Sgt. Pepper outfits, and military folks, but that seemed to be sprinkled in compared to the industrial setting. Am I just being cynical?