Downhill all the way

Well, I take back what I said about the Winter Olympics not being exciting, although I am vindicated too in a sense. I'm watching the Snowboard Cross competition and it is certainly something to watch. It has, strangely, a look of a computer game; mainly because the course is marked out in blue paint and the competitors are filmed from above. They also wear helmets and bulky clothes so they have no discernable identity. But it's not often that you see Olympic competitors actually trying to slide each other out of a race and the skill is amazing. And nice comfortable names like Ruby and Doris, sounds like one's granny or baby (since these names have skipped a couple of generations) are taking part.

Just read a bit in The Times by Simon Barnes, who is not going to watch Brokeback Mountain before the Games are over - 'who needs to watch cowboys performing buggery when you have the luge doubles?' I see what he means, but he has not taken into account the sheer pleasure of watching Jake Gyllenhaal, whether being buggered or not.

So Shakespeare is again to be Bowdlerized, by Welsh school productions being forbidden to let the pupil actors to kiss, even when it's called for in the text. Idiots. And how patronising. If teenagers can't identify with Romeo and Juliet, whilst at the same time learning where they went wrong, what's the point of drama. Presumably Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood can't even be produced in a Welsh school, far too suggestive... Polly Garter with all her children, each by a different father, and even the name of the village, Llareggub, which is easier to remember backwards.