All I'm ready to do is have some fun

OK, so I'm a total Olympics junkie. I'm watching the opening ceremony, but quite honestly, it's so continuously big and amazing that the effect gets lost. It's serious sensory overload, like in movies where there are so many special effects, you just stop noticing how awesome they are anymore.

But now the Parade of Nations (March of the Penguins?) is on, and that's my very favorite part. It must be my geek nature, and my love of collections of things. I love seeing each country, their attire and flags, and of course the miscellaneous facts the commentators throw in. Like the fact that the order of countries is determined by the number of strokes in the Chinese characters used to write the name of the country. How freakin' amazingly awesome is that?

I *so* love the fact that Lopez Lomong is carrying the U.S. flag, as one of only three naturalized U.S. citizens on our Olympic team, and a former refugee of Sudan. I do not love the outfits Ralph Lauren has designed for our team, with the giant tacky-ass Polo logo on the blazer.

I might be a bit biased, though, since I just finished watching this week's Project Runway (hooray TiVo!) where the challenge was to design the womens' outfits for the U.S. Olympic team for a fictional Summer Games. Some of the top designs were very cool.

Ooh, I am so digging Greece's outfits. Very crisp and white. The sort of thing you are afraid to sit down in, move, or otherwise be touched. They look like they are fresh from the box, just unwrapped. Yay Greece!

We got an email at work this week, encouraging us to use the built-in service on our Vista Home Premium Media Center to record and watch Olympic events. The really awesome thing about this is that we just need an Internet connection and no TV Tuner in our PC. So we finally got that set up (it was a little challenging because we hadn't used our Media Center in months and consequently had a bunch of antivirus updates and Windows Updates to download). It looks totally awesome.

We selected Archery, Basketball, Swimming, Gymnastics, Track and Field and Trampoline to record. Mostly because I'm curious about trampoline. I had no idea it was an Olympic sport, did you??

Another interesting fact - 87 of the 204 nations in the Olympics have never had a medal winner at all, in any Olympics. Crazy!

Dude, Turkmenistan is wearing these awesome pea green suits. Rock on.

The world champion in Tae Kwon Do is from Mali. Did you know that? Woot.

I could do this all night, so I won't bore you. I'm going back to watching the march of the Penguins. Um, I mean Parade of Nations...