I have been watching the Olympics since feeling the excitement in America. We didn’t really feel the excitement in Taiwan during my childhood because all of the excitement was around whether Taiwan should declare independence from China for calling Taiwan “Chinese Taipei”. What is that? That’s like calling America “British USA”.

Every four years I am accustomed to sitting around the dinner table and watching well edited slow-motion panning John Woo shots of Olympics atheletes, their mums, their uncles, and their sick grandmothers in the hospitals speaking about the only dream they have ever had since being diagnosed with gonadian cancer. The thought of the agony of removing the cancer-laden testicles from such a bright star would inevitably bring tears to my eye (as is yours currently, I hope). It is great television from 8pm to 10pm every night. A great story told by Bob Costas.

This year, however, things are not the same. Instead of hearing about the Hamm brothers overcoming down syndrome to get gold in Olympic gymnastics, I am hearing about how excited the British are about getting Bronze in the Pommel Horse. Whoopty doo. First of all, the pommel horse is like the least exciting sport in gymnastics. And even if it’s exciting, I have not seen any sick uncles, hospital shots, or bawling scenes from the guy’s sick sick African half-sister. WTF.

We do get some mention of Phelps….thank God. Yes, very grateful that the Brits would mention the best Olympian ever. Thanks, BBC. I owe you one.

So… when things are too expensive, what do you do? Well, you hack it, of course. Apparently some Dutch security researchers have figured out how to hack Oyster cards and will be publishing it in October. I would assume that there will have been a patch applied to the system by then but once you get a compromise to one of these massively deployed systems, it will probably be pretty quick when hackers get around that patch. It’s like any of your gaming consoles, DirecTV or any other type of protection systems…you can only hold off the hackers for so long before chaos ensues.

The response was: “No jeans please. Rich and I are going chinos”. Fair enough. Who doesn’t love Chinos?

Cheerio

The real fun begins when I hit Scotland. Starting off at Edinburgh, we are going to do a 3 day tour around Scotland, including Loch Ness and Isle of Skye.

We then return to Edinburgh for a day and spend the evening in a real life castle, the Dalhousie. That will be our splurge night with the spa and nice meal…not just haggis.

Should be a fab time. Can’t wait for the scotch and finally capturing the Loch Ness Monster. Wish you were beer.

I swear to God there seems to be an “important” football match every other week. Well this week(month), we have the Euro2008.

The most glaring thing with this event, however, is that the UK is not present….and as such…Beckham is not present. And when I say Beckham, I mean Victoria…aka Posh. So sad.

Digging into this matter a bit further, I discovered that the reason being commonly cited by Britons is football manager Steve McClaren, who was sacked after the UK not qualifying. Personally I think it was because they did not offer the red carpet treatment to Victoria.

Everyone in London will be watching Manchester United playing Chelsea in the European Cup Finals tonight. It’s revolved around some regional sport where teams of grown men run up and down a patch of green for a long time, occasionally kicking that ball into a net. Yeah, it will be bloody exciting. Wish you were beer.

Catching my second show in London this weekend. The first one a couple of months ago was the quintessential West End London theatre experience…Les Miserables. Yes, Les Mis. Why not?…it started here in London, not Broadway.

For my second show in London I am attending happens to be one of my current favourite entertainment acts on TV with a Brit named Derren Brown. His Trick or Treat show is currently on the air.
There are some amazing tricks that Derren Brown does and I’ll see how it all plays out in the 3rd row on Friday night.

Who is Derren Brown?
If you are unfamiliar with Derren Brown, he practices magic and mentalism. Now I have been quite into magic and illusion since I was a child, watching David Copperfield perform tricks like walk through the Great Wall of China. There was something in the bad hair, slutty dancers, and mysticism that was very appealing to me as a small, fat Ninja-to-be with bad hair and no slutty dancers. There have been others that have come along that brought magic into the pop culture like David Blaine and Criss Angel but none in the same way as Derren Brown. I would say Derren Brown is around 60-70% jedimindtricks and the rest illusion/mentalism. I’m not talking paduan level jedi, Yoda level jedi I speak. Derren’s had a number of absolutely enthralling shows including using suggestion to get advertisers to create what he had advertised for them to do, fake a seance, hypnotise someone and put him in the middle of Morrocco as a “trick”, train a grandma to almost win a poker championship not having ever played poker, playing Russian Roulette, etc etc. It’s not just gimmicky magic tricks like magicians in Vegas, this is Jedi. We’ll see how he defends with my Ninja Mind Tricks Friday night.

The best thing about it all is how Derren describes his illusion and trickery:

“I am often dishonest in my techniques, but always honest about my dishonesty…”

Trudat. I’m also always sincere with my insincerity. See what I did there? I am always correct with my incorrectness.