sweasel.com

They put it in a van and drive it between cities, which is totally cheating.

Also, the individual runners are allowed (encouraged?) to buy the torches they run with, so there are squitillions out there. And, of course, they’re already turning up on eBay.

Uncle B also consider the Olympics to be a corrupt sham, a disgusting waste of public money and an imposition on everyone else (do you know we have bloody Zil lanes in London right now?!).

If a bunch of sweaty adrenalin junkies want to see who is best at whatever torture produces their particular high, let them. If another bunch wants to watch them, also fine.

I don’t see why anyone else should be expected to care or pay for it.

I’m staying in my sett until the whole farce is long forgotten (five minutes after the closing ceremony).

Wondered if you were dragging yourself out to go see it tomorrow. I have to say that when the Olympics were in LA I did go watch them run the torch through our town. I also went to opening ceremonies and tons of horsie events and rowing. I loved it, but the politics of it will kill it eventually. The fact no moment of silence for the Israeli athletes chaps my hide. Effing mohamandans.

Isn’t there a Pride Lion or something too?

WTF are those things? Of course I shouldn’t have expected better from the intellectual empire that gave us Teletubbies, but I did…

Yeeeeshhhh!!!

Those “objects” are either pointlessly insane or insanely pointless, or quite possibly both, with butt-end fugly thrown into the mix – pray, tell us that that they’re not seriously expecting that anyone with even marginal eyesight and taste-judgment greater than that of a pregnant slug will consider actually possessing something like that?!?

I see a copyright-bug on each – good move; one would not want to chance that some deeply-retarded, legally-(and mentally-)blind whacko might be tempted to make more of…whatever they actually are.

Spooky, that –

And we thought that Chinese hooraw’s-nest stadium was a genuine lead quarter…

That’s what they went with: chromed turds with legs. Imagine the proposals that didn’t make the cut.

Oh, the 2012 logo is the best. It’s been described as “Lisa Simpson giving head.”

You will never be able to look at it again without seeing that.

You’re welcome.

driving on the M25 yesterday I got to see the 2012 olympics cars that were around london… saw a green one and a pink one… very… shall we say, gay and not in a good way either.

the idiots who came up with the mascots and the logo should be shot, I bet the local school children could come up with better mascots and logo.

And yes, there is a mascot of a lion and that’s a rather tame white lion with a red and blue mane for team GB (who, oddly enough, I won’t be supporting). I’m not a huge fan of the olympics but if I am gonna support a team it’s gonna be team USA (for some strange reason).

Once the Olympics stopped being a way to fight Nazis or Commies without bullets it lost its entire point.

Now if the Democrats had a team….

Lisa Simpson giving head and chromed turds…perfect 🙂

From Montreal here…we only recently finished paying off the ’76 Olympic stadium which has been crumbling and has had pieces falling off for years…good investment, that. Montreal has been in decline ever since.

I feel not the slightest bit of envy towards any place that has the Olympics.

I like the Olympics ok, but I feel a bit bad for the athletes of the “non-premiere” sports (aka not track & field, gymnastics or swimming). They get practically no coverage, just a blip of the winning event and / or medal presentation squeezed in between the big ones here and there, if that. People will still be talking about Nadia Comaneci 50 years from now – but the guy who blew everybody away in epee fencing you’ll never hear his name mentioned.

For coverage, BBC radio (on the net at least) is promising 17 days of event coverage. Also saw that twitter (and the net in general) has finally forced NBC ( the American TV network which holds US broadcast rights ) to FINALLY change away from their old practice of delaying broadcasts of major events till primetime and then stuffing them full of ’emo’ background stories about atheletes’ grandmas’ anal cyst problems which inspired the atheletes to run faster… Now there will be real time event broadcasts for those of us with DVRs and there will be even more coverage available streamed through the net.

Of course for those who LIKE the grandma stories… those will be rebroadcast during primetime.

Personally, I’m going for the radio. I listened to the Wimbleton finals on the BBC and listening to them do play by play of a tennis match was fascinating. A little more difficult than the much slower games of football or baseball.

Winkin’ and Blinkin’ have a camera to record everything. Great…

Fans of semiotics (and future historians of same) will have a volumes to write about the PC ‘values’ (sic) implicit in those two icons.

One of the UK’s biggest supermarkets has been showering customers with ’till spits’ warning us that we are in ‘danger of missing tickets for the ‘paralympic games’.

I appreciate why crippled (let’s not be PC – we all have our problems, me included) might wish to compete at sports. Why not? But to gawp at them and to be encouraged to do so as if one were blind seems bizarre.

We are programmed by Nature to do a double-take when we confront disfigurement. It confers a major survival advantage on us to do so. To be exhorted to pretend that no such instinct exists is deeply worrying.

We’re in Gramsci territory here.

So which is it? Patronising, to watch what we used to call ‘handicapped ‘people do what they are ill-equipped to do? Or is it plain old voyeurism? The modern day equivalent of a cheap thrill at seeing the ‘dog-headed boy’ barking for our acceptance?

There is something rotten at work here.

SEX TOYS!!!

They are Sex Toys! Insertion Cyclops and Mandy Tickler!

“Now don’t you like them better?”

The names weren’t the problem. They look like something from a safety training film for a tool-and-die company – or possibly, mascots for Sears ™ Craftsman ™ tools. Mascots for living, breathing athletes? Not so much.

Uncle B, I must buy you a drink some day. I cheered every word you wrote. My gorge is barely contained because of the insistence being crammed down our throats that we WILL enjoy the Olympics. I won’t. We’re currently making London commuting plans that involve inconvenient train lines and 05.30 departure times to avoid the congestion. Our local butcher plans to drive in from Herts and receive deliveries at 03.00 because he doesn’t want to chance the usual morning delivery. It’s madness, and it’s a long time until it’s finished. You’re lucky you’re out in the country.

Also, what are those “things” you have pictured? Yes, I realise that they’re the mascots, but what is that actual product? Are they cameras? Fetishes? I don’t understand . . . . I know I never want to see one in the flesh. They remind me of a British equivalent of Hello Kitty.

Why do the Olympics need mascots? I used to love watching the gymnastics when I was a girl, but it seems like we aren’t actually allowed to be patriotic about it all, so WTF is the point?

I wanna go back to the Rocky v. USSR type competition.

I can’t believe the London Olympic 2012 committee passed up the chance to use a walking Stonehenge stone—like a gray Gumby—for a mascot. Or a Lion, for crying out loud.

…or one of the creatures from Harry Potter!

The could have at least had a Stoat … or a Honey Badger

Staying as far away from that cluster as possible strikes me as the wisest course. Leaving aside the chance of encountering the disturbed souls who conceived of those things above; from what I can gather they have basically destroyed any possibility of anyone not in the Nomenklatura getting around for the duration, and … oh,yes…the company in charge of security for the whole thing has gone TANGO UNIFORM with only a small fraction of the security personnel hired, those not all able to speak English, and untrained.

If the Brit papers I read are correct, they are desperately pulling in police and the military from all over Britain on an ad hoc basis to run the thing. And the supercomputer complex that is supposed to track terrorist threats to the Olympics might be ready for the 2016 Olympics.

I am expecting a surplus of exothermic events, and I don’t mean the fireworks at the opening and closing ceremonies.

Stay safe.

Subotai Bahadur

I believe they’re sentient blobs of metal from foundries. So… they’re slags. Heh heh heh.

Also, I love the delicious irony of the London mascots being the ones to feature camera eyes. As if the jack booted thugs aren’t already recording everything under the sun, now they’ve got walking cameras to make sure you never go off the grid.

They look like targets to me. I wonder if they would go splat or bong when you hit one…..

Quite the contrast, teletubby inspired Scion hood ornaments as a mascot, and koran thumping vigilantes waiting for a chance to blow their own innards all over a chippy shop wall.

Since turning into a hugely over-hyped marketing orgy and international money teat, the Olympics have been an economic kiss of death to every city they’ve blighted. Huge venue-building sprees for essentially single-use parks – as, yes, in Montreal.

Oceania made two on-topic, sensible comments in a row. The End is nigh…

Not only sensible but spot on. They DO look like sex toys (from what I’ve read about sex toys, having personally never seen such a thing).

Still, there’s an argument to be made for Uncle Badger’s point that they resemble Thalidimide babies dressed up as atheletes.

Pansexual nonthreatening spokesthings.

I think they are supposed to be animated cell phones. the eye is the screen, for example. They just look idiotic in the end.

Some Veg,

That would explain the vestigial tail. Actually either explanation would work. If it’s the former, it’ll be selling like hotcakes!

I’m grinning at the irony of a country that is notorious for being a “record everything” surveillance state designing characters with built in cameras so that they can “record everything” as if that is a good and desirable idea.

Look! They have built in cameras so that they can record your every mood! Huzzah!

*MOVE*

Not “mood”. Friggin autocorrect.

You’d think that Great Britain, with a camera on every corner, would want to avoid this particular imagery.

The trouble is, Noelegy, that the miserable scum behind these images almost certainly thinks surveillance is a ‘A Good Thing’ 🙁

As for the uniqueness of these two mongbots, today I found this on the excellent blog The Raft Journal http://womanonaraft.blogspot.co.uk/ the ‘reviews; are hilarious, for all the story’s sinister edge.

Dang, I’m gonna miss it. Booooo!

That was sarcasm, in case I wasn’t clear. 🙂

Uncle B, I’ve felt the same way for years. Haven’t watched a single event of the last several Olympics and I see no reason to change that.

They look like some kind of semi metallic gumby action figures with one great friggin eye each.

Ludicrous.

Subotai – Staying away from large crowds of people is always good advice, no matter where you are. Even if all you avoid is the frustration of walking while surrounded by thousands of people who have their own agenda and care little for yours, you’ve gained by staying away.

It seems that in recent Olympic celebrations, just within my short living memory, that staying away would be even better advice, because you’ll be LUCKY if all you have to deal with are oblivious people in your way. i remember clearly the Atlanta olympic bombing. Glad it didn’t go off, but if it did, we’d have had a bad time of it.

Wease – glad you came out alright, but I’m with Subotai – you aren’t gaining anything by being there, won’t lose anything by staying away, and could possibly avoid an ugly scene when the crowds of people get all sheeply the first time they hear a loud noise.

QuasiModo: I feel not the slightest bit of envy towards any place that has the Olympics.

Well, you can envy Chicago, because we won’t have the Olympics! (In spite of The One’s helping the mayor try to stick us with them. Thank heaven he is such a SCOAMF.)

If we had gotten the Olympics, though, we could have had the greatest Olympic mascot ever: Chalkie!

Every time I see those names, I think of this:

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble,
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
‘Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

@Rich Rostrom: Yeah, you guys definitely dodged a bullet there. That was quite a teachable moment for the SCOAMF as well; first time crybaby didn’t get handed something he wanted (insert SWeasel pic of crybaby Obama here)…the slap in the face heard ’round the world 🙂

Is Much Wenlock anywhere near Some Wenlock? No? How ’bout Insignificant Quantity of Wenlock?