Last night I made a regrettable life decision and watched the Vancouver Winter Olympics opening ceremonies. Mistake. Given the high entertainment value of the Beijing 2008 opener, I thought watching last night’s Canadian gala would be a solid choice for my Friday evening. No.

I think it was right after Nelly Furtado and Bryan Adams finished their duet – 1993 and 2003, together at last! – that I realized that the True North wasn’t doing it anywhere near as big as the People’s Republic. The slam poet with the neck beard and the extended Sarah McLachlan performance only confirmed my suspicions.

And by the time k.d. lang came on (remember that? she spells her name in lower case?) everything was pretty far gone. Ol’ k.d. covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” – a song that will forever remind me of the Watchmen movie and one of film’s worst sex scenes – and someone pointed out that she looked like Fat Elvis. Suddenly I wanted my Friday night back, but it was too late.

I should note here that I love Canada. I grew up about 3 minutes from the Canadian border. I got CBC on my television as a kid, so I watched hours of it. Kids in the Hall, Degrassi, all that. Maybe that was the problem with last night. The whole thing reminded me of a 1991 CBC prime time variety show – like, exactly. The “punk rock fiddlers” from Newfoundland, the flying snowboarders, the light-bulbed rollerbladers, the Joni Mitchell ballad with a kid hoisted above the crowd on wires, Peter Pan style. I guess if you were a boring mom, you might call the proceedings “neat,” but even that tepid praise would be kinda generous. This big ghost bear was pretty all right, though.

But Vancouver saved the worst for last, and the torch fuck-up that closed the night out was the most excruciating part by far. So after all the other bullshit and two endless speeches by old white guys, it was finally time to light the damn torch. By this point – 3+ hours of Olympic coverage deep – I had made a pretty visble dent in the beer left over from the Super Bowl and I was about ready to torch my couch out of boredom. But all of a sudden Bobby Orr and Donald Sutherland and some other famous Canucks rolled out, so I calmed down. Then Gretzky showed up, along with Steve Nash (seriously) and a couple other torchbearers, and the crowd went wild.

This was it: everyone was all smiles, the music reached a crashing crescendo, and then… and then… nothing happened. For a good three minutes or so, Gretzky, Nash and the two other torchbearers just stood there in supreme discomfort: holding huge, heavy torches aloft on live international television, alone on the middle of an empty stage, waiting for something to happen that clearly wasn’t happening. On NBC, Bob Costas quickly ascertained the problem: the four-legged torch structure that was supposed to rise out of the stage had failed. Finally the ceremony had delivered compelling drama and spectacle: how the fuck were they gonna get out of this?

Gretzky started to sweat pretty bad; he couldn’t hold a weak smile and generally looked like he had defecated in his tracksuit. Nash looked like a fish, per usual. They even had to wheel back the music, which ended and then restarted.

You could see the holes in the stage from which the structure was supposed to emerge, but it just sat there immobile. Finally, after a grueling couple minutes that must have seemed like a billion years to the Vancouver Olympic Committee, three of the torch’s legs rose, and three visibly relieved torchbearers lit their XXL crack stems. The fourth one – gold-medal speedskater Catriona Le May Doan – just kinda stood there awkwardly, waving.

I spent half this morning trying to find the video of the scene, but NBC et al. seem to have it locked up pretty tight, which is impressive.

You know, now that I’ve written all this, I feel kinda bad. I played records in Vancouver a couple times and really loved the city – it’s beautiful and everyone was super friendly. And of course I wasn’t expecting the opening ceremonies of the Olympics to be some kind of aesthetic revelation or transcendent, defining cultural moment. Hell, I shudder to think of what kind of saccharine corporate fluff us Americans would have cooked up. And for all the boring-ass programming choices, the organizers of last night’s ceremony should be commended for the overarching inclusion of Canada’s First Nations. That was cool – as was the parade of countries into the arena, which is always weirdly engrossing as a visual display of the particular self-conception each nation holds of itself. Plus the Germans’ gear was hilarious.

Not to mention that everyone in the arena was undoubtedly laboring under the emotional weight of the tragic death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili on the track in a training run early yesterday. I was sorta shocked that NBC led off their coverage by playing the video of his final, fatal run repeatedly. It’s not particularly graphic; you don’t see any blood and his impact into the steel pole that took his life is obscured from view. But still, it was chilling to see footage of the dude just minutes before a mistake on the course killed him. There was a moment of silence near the end, and the somber, shocked Goergian team wore block armbands and carried a flag adorned with a long black ribbon. The obvious difficulty in transitioning between mourning and celebration was understandably problematic for athletes, performers and spectators alike, and it carried through the broadcast.

At any rate, the opening ceremony is kinda beside the point; the Winter Olympics are less about spoken word and fireworks and more about zoning out to curling in HD. Ever since EPYX, I’ve liked the Winter Games more than the Summer Games. (Speaking of – yo when are we gonna get a real-life World Games, with caber-tossing and log-rolling and cliff-diving?) I remember forcing my parents and little sister to deal with my obsessive viewing of the ’88 Calgary games, with Dan Jansen and Eddie the Eagle, etc.

I like speed skating, slalom, ski jump, bobsledding, snowboarding, all that. I even enjoy the fussiness of figure skating. I like watching an hour or two of some fairly obscure sport and turning into an instant expert. Soaking in the Olympics on TV encourages dilletantism. Plus – of course – the hockey tournament, which should be thrilling. Side note: Gary Bettman, what the fuck? You couldn’t have tweaked the schedule so that the NHL’s Olympians coulda marched in with their home countries? You don’t think that having Costas and Collinsworth spotlighting Ovechkin with the Russian team, Crosby with the Canadians, and Miller with the Americans would have increased your league’s visibility? Just another missed opportunity, I guess.

Anyways, let the Games begin.