antiperspirant

Alitalia has been a hot financial mess for decades. The Italian government has already announced their replacement airline ITA (Italia Trasporto Aereo), directly operated by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. ITA has also begun applying for a few international routes that Alitalia used to fly, so I'd expect them to be a pretty equivalent successor + airline partner since the government has an interest in holding a successful Olympics

Overall though, I think the Olympic planning committee was the reason of their own downfall. They have themselves too much emphasis and pressure to make the ceremony *perfect* for every narrative angle instead of focusing on perfecting one narrative angle and creating a cohesive story out of it.

You guys are too harsh. It was fun and spunky (and most importantly cohesive) event with a lot of thought put into the details of every moving part. All the costumes were colorful and memorable (in contrast to the quite frankly forgettable aesthetic of the Olympic ceremony). It worked really well in scenes where a lot of different dancing was happening because it made the stadium feel very full visually, whereas the Olympic ceremony felt like there was so much empty space between the activity. Not only that, the design, music, movements all felt so distinctly Japanese to me. When I heard the accordion in one of the pieces I had a euphoric flashback to playing Pokemon and hearing the chipper jingle on loop in one of the towns in the game. It was orgasmic. The rock part was got me super pumped and reminded me of a bunch of anime openings. The wind characters look like Mario characters, and their cartoonish movements (eg. one of the wind characters tripping and while running to the little girl, the synchronized pointing) felt like I was watching a quirky cut scene from a Nintendo game. I appreciate the traditional aspects of the Olympics opening, but I also really enjoyed how the Paralympic opening incorporated modern Japanese culture as well. It was solid.

All things considered, I feel like NBC did a pretty awesome job in their coverage in terms of options. I personally follow the Olympics by events rather than by country and I enjoyed being able to stream specific events live and see how every competing country did. Of course their primary broadcast was focused on Team USA, which makes sense that the flagship channel caters to the primary demographic, so I never really tuned into that (the few times I did, I swear to god it was an endless stream of tennis and I cannot understand for the life of me why). NBC Youtube clips are a different story. It seems like most of the comment section is complaining about lackluster coverage of events, so perhaps NBC doesn't do a super great job on advertising how to stream specific events for the non hardcore Olympic watcher. Not to mention NBC's Olympic website interface is pretty cluttered and I hated having to scroll very far to find specific day's events. There were also lots of comments complaining about awkward cuts and splices of footage but that's neither here nor there, I suppose.

I agree. Russia's was light, fun, and brought a smile to my face the entire time but I kept checking in at the time waiting for the routine to finish. My jaw dropped the entire routine for China. It felt like I was experiencing epic with emotions of happy and intense drama. The changing facial expressions on the swimmers' faces help set the mood very well, too.

I believe a 12 year old table tennis player competed for Syria

Definitely one of the major points of pride going around in Chinese media for the past year has been the effectiveness of the Chinese government's COVID response. I think generally, the general public trusts the gov to be able to balance hosting a large scale event with health measures. That being said, based on China's COVID response, they aren't afraid of imposing quarantines and other strict requirements very quickly so I do believe there is going to be something of sequestering going on. Perhaps they'll take a page out of Tokyo's book and take it a step further; have athletes and visitors contained in certain zones around the city, but have these zones also include hotels, shops, restaurants, etc. I know some Chinese cities barricaded neighborhoods for mass disinfecting and testing every now and then, so this might not be too implausible of an idea.

Agreed, hope they do it with every final. My jaw dropped when everything went dark.