The world did not end

Despite it being 06/06/06 today, it looks like we made it through the day. Maybe in 3006?

Happy 01:02:03 04/05/06!

Tomorrow morning at 1:02 a.m. and three seconds it will be

• 01:02:03 04/05/06

This won’t happen again for another hundred years and by then we will probably all be dead. So Celebrate!

See photos of yesterday’s solar eclipse

I found a nice gallery here: http://www.spaceweather.com/eclipses/gallery_29mar06.htm

Former member of Jamaican Bobsled team gets Silver

Lascelles Brown, former member of the Jamaican Bobsled team, won a Silver Medal in the two-man bobsled race on Sunday; he is now competing for Canada. We’re watching Cool Runnings and when I was looking up information on the Jamaican Bobsled team,  it was a pleasant surprise to hear about his success!

I like SBX!

There is a new event in this year’s Winter Olympics: Snowboard Cross (SBX). Four snowboarders race each other down a course that is full of tight banking curves and steep jumps. It is fun to see a downhill event where more than one person is competing at the same time. It has some of the same excitement as the short track skating — the competitors avoid crashing into each other while at the same time trying to pass and get the best position (but without potentially slicing each other with skate blades). And the coolest part is that USA’s Seth Wescott got the first gold medal ever in the event!

The Salt Lake Deseret News has an excellent graphic that details the snowboard cross course in Turin.

The XX Winter Olympics Open

We are watching the opening ceremonies to the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. They did some way cool formations to make a ski jumper out of people. Having been in marching band I can appreciate how confusing it can be to try and make formations. You have to memorize where to walk in relation to everyone else, and it takes a lot of practice. You eventually learn it, but are never quite sure how you managed to learn it.

Wow, it was breathtaking the way they brought in the Olympic rings. These huge rings, made of metal framework, were facing down, hanging from cables. When I say facing down, I mean that if you were standing below one, and looked up, you would be looking through the hole. I think the three top rings were suspended high up in the air, and the two lower ones were on the ground. Then these acrobats danced around the top three rings and eventually jumped off, pulling cables so that it looked like they were pulling up the two lower rings.

Then the rings were slowly rotated 90 degrees so that they formed the olympic rings. Then, after a burst of fireworks from all of the rings, each ring took on its characteristic color. The NBC announcer pointed out that the colors chosen for the rings represent at least one color in every flag of the world.

Now on to the Parade of Nations. Wow, Ethiopia has an athlete at the Winter Games. So does Bermuda. Here come the athletes from Denmark. You gotta feel for them carrying their flag in and keeping a smile on with half the world mad at them for cartoons.

Here is my goal for the Winter Olympics. By the end of it I want to understand curling.