Wednesday, July 06, 2005

It's official - 2012 will be the year of the pants

Lego Camp
Artists impression of London 2012 Olympic Village


Perusing the feedback section of the BBC website it was interesting to see readers’ comments on London Winning the 2012 bid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4655235.stm

Readers from all over the World are congratulating London on winning the Olympics. The majority of people who actually live in London are pissed off …

Congratulations to our friends in the UK on winning the 2012 Olympic Bid. I could not be happier with the result! Best wishes to all!
John Rafanello, Philadelphia, USA

Fantastic news. Ignore the moaners. Let's all have a party.
Jeremy, Trinidad

versus

This is a disaster for the citizens of London. We can now look forward to thirty years of extra taxes to pay off a one-month jamboree whose events most of us won't be able to pay to get into. The promised infrastructure improvements should have been done anyway - and are far too late in the day. If London's record of infrastructure project management is anything to go by, the Olympics will end up late and over budget (e.g. Millennium Dome and Jubilee Line extension)
Vernon Marriott, London, UK

Most of the people in Trafalgar Square don't live in London, no wonder they are so happy! Why should Londoners have to pay for it? I never watch the Olympics, never have never will, yet I am expected to give my hard earned money to pay for it. Hope the Olympic athletes enjoy their Olympic village, which I understand is to be situated in one of the roughest areas of the East End of London, perhaps I should bid for the security contract, that's going to be worth a few million!
Jennifer Purcell, London

No doubt the Prime Minister’s Office will be calling the BBC to get their impartial feedback forum 100% back ‘on message’ before the day is done.

A few Londoners do appear to be happy with the result though, including:

It's fantastic news, I'm still in shock! I wonder how much I can rent my East London home out for during the Games......!
Jane, East London

Well done everyone, this is great news for London and the UK - I'm happy to pay more council tax for such an amazing privilege!
B, London, UK

Fantastic news. Now everyone should quit carping and unite behind the games to show the rest of the world why we are called Great Britain. Congratulations to the bid team and thanks for all your hard work.
G, London

Interesting that so many of the ‘happy’ ‘Londoners’ chose to give only a single initial. If someone tried to do a parody of people paid to boost the bid under assumed names they couldn't do better than that stuff.

If it wasn’t so serious it would almost be funny.

Excuse me now whilst I go outside and join in with the enormous celebratory street carnival that's spontaneously erupted on the streets of South London. It's like Rio out there ...

(Francis, I told you we'd 'win' and that you should never underestimate Fate's sense of humour. You ill-informed French toe-rag)

4 comments:

Patricia said...

The first thing I though when I read that London won was, "I wonder what Stef thinks about it." Now I know. About the same as I thought about NYC getting it, and I don't actually live in NYC. Just close enough to hate the idea.

Truthfully, I don't know what any country that's already a world capital wants with this event. I can understand smaller cities wanting to boost tourism and get on the map and the like. They build stuff and become convention centers or something. It would seem to me that London, Paris and New York are already overflowing with humanity and any more tourism would be extraneous at best. Awareness of those cities isn't really a problem either.

Stef said...

How very eloquently put. In fairness, New York was never going to win the bid. Partly because there were some doubts about one of the proposed venues but mostly because of your Neocon infestation problems. For me, one of the few bright points of yesterday's news was reading the messages of congratuations from so many people in the US. I doubt if people in this country could remember how to be so pleasant. If ever we knew in the first place.

Sparkling said...

Like the LEGO camp picture.

Stef said...

@sparkling: then you might find this link interesting or maybe just very. very disturbing ...

http://tinyurl.com/c9t2o