Woke up this morning to headlines about the Olympics closing ceremony.  Last night I watched the Men's marathon, by tradition the "last event" in the Olympics, and also the 4x400 relays, which also traditionally come at the end (on "tape", kind of silly since the whole thing was delayed, but somehow the marathon was "live" and the relays were not...).  We'll watch the closing ceremony later today, I can imagine that it will match the opening ceremony for grandeur and spectacle.  

I am absolutely uninterested in watching the basketball final (yay, the U.S. won the gold medal, so what) or the volleyball final (yay, the U.S. won the gold medal, so what).  Just now I'm thinking about all the sports I didn't get to see - weight lifting, for example, or the high jump, or [my favorite] the javelin throw.  Archery is an Olympic sport?  Who knew?  The only Taekwondo coverage was some guy who lost his temper and kicked a referee.  In all these sports I guess U.S. athletes weren't among the top performers so NBC didn't include them in their coverage.  We need a new rule; for sports where each match takes a long time, we only show the last ten minutes.  This would include especially volleyball and basketball in all their forms, which took inordinate amounts of time out of the coverage.

So the Olympics are over, and I'm sad.  It was great fun, a once-in-four-years amazing cool thing, and now we'll have to wait until 2012 (which seems impossibly far away) for the next one.  I'm sure that one will be great fun too.  (Remember Athens?  I can - barely - but it is a distant memory...  the summer of 2004 was my first big gap in blogging so I didn't blog about it.)  You kind of wish the Olympics could go on forever, but of course if it wasn't so brief and so rare it wouldn't be what it is.

Coupled with my kids going back to school, this really is the end of summer, 2008.  So be it, onward!  Goodbye, Beijing, it was amazing.