Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • August 22, 2012 Olympic rules to stay on the piste (French for track) while the judges debated for an hour and then ruled against her. She had no choice but to sit there or concede defeat. The attempts to make her look like a “protester” -- the favorite British descriptive noun -- were inaccurate, deliberately or otherwise. Shin was robbed. Reuters, the most reputable of the British news agencies, described Shin as “a sobbing mess,” but spelled out the facts of the case. Fencing’s governing body issued an official statement explaining the sequence of events, including a timekeeper’s too-quick finger that resulted in a full second being added to the clock during the sudden-death minute of the epee semi-final. Shin was hit in the last two-tenths of a second, which means she won. “Frankly, in all my experience as a technical director, in general over 30 years, it never happened before and for me it is quite difficult to imagine such a situation,” said an international official. Translated from Brit Speak to American White Man Talk, the 15-year-old volunteer British kid working the clock screwed up and Shin A-Lam took the rap and lost when she should have won. The good news is that in a subsequent team event, she won both bouts and took a silver medal home anyway. Earlier in the games, fans booed the badminton eliminations because the Chinese, South Korean, and Indonesian women, having already qualified, were deemed to not be trying hard enough to please the audience. Eight Asian women were disqualified. “Goodbye, dear badminton,” one of the Chinese favorites said glumly. How do you gauge how hard somebody is trying in a game like badminton? Sounds like those other games, the ones they used to have at a Circus Maximus or the Coliseum. “You fought badly, Pugnax! Thumbs down!!” At least in London they got to live. The London Olympic Games are a curious anomaly: an international event that does not recognize that everybody in the world is not an Anglo-Saxon, when demographically, almost nobody is any more, even in the United States -- or London. I liked the opening ceremonies, but I have read a rather large amount of English literature and history, enjoyed large parts of it, and was prepared for what I saw. A castle was magically turned into farmland -- all with natural turf, be it noted -- then into factories, with hundreds of extras in ultra-authentic Victorian costumes culminating in a ceremony for all the victims of World War I. I loved it. Kenneth Branagh, one of my culture heroes, read a selection from “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare about “the island” -- an allusion, I suspect, to Britain that reached me at a level I had long forgotten. One of my first intellectual experiences was seeing the 1960 TV version of “The Tempest” with a cast that included Maurice Evans as Prospero, Lee Remick as Miranda, Roddy McDowall as Ariel, and Richard Burton as an unforgettable Caliban. I was knocked out. The fact that all four of them are now dead misted me up. In retrospect, I have to ask what this reading would have meant to somebody who did not know “The Tempest,” and did not understand 400-year-old Elizabethan English. The Presbyterians still read the King James Bible when I was a kid, so I had the edge on most of my high school peers. The next part of the show had real doctors and nurses dancing in Edwardian costumes while real children somersaulted on hospital beds, then drifted off to dream and saw all the creatures of enchantment and nightmare from British children’s literature. I liked that a lot -- but a recent survey showed that more children around the world knew Totoro than Winnie the Pooh. I’m a Winnie the Pooh backer myself -- as is my wife, who grew up before Totoro -- but what would people not familiar with British children’s literature make of this? Hayao Miyazaki, Totoro’s creator, is now recruiting illustrators for a cartoon on the designer of the Mitsubishi A-6. This may not fly at the VFW. Reflecting on that, I stumbled over the trailers for a new film that may reach fencing crybabies and badminton slackers at a place where they live. “My Way,” the most expensive South Korean film ever made ($26 million) features a major South Korean actor named Jang Dong-gun and a major Japanese actor named Joe Odagiri who spend half the film beating each other up and then become best friends while soldiering under compulsion for the Soviets and later somewhat voluntarily for the Germans. They encounter a Chinese sniper played by Fan BingBing, a big star in China, who starts out shooting Japanese officers to avenge her family, but switches to knocking out a Soviet fighter plane with one shot to the windscreen. This is what you would call a message movie. The message is that the Koreans, the Japanese, and the Chinese should all be friends; Russian communists were bad; serving with the Wehrmacht is Club Med after the Soviet Gulag; and Americans drop too many bombs on people because they don’t like to fight up close and personal. Guess which countries do. The New York Times called “My Way” a “corny globetrotting melodrama,” but most fans, including many Americans, gave it excellent reviews. “My Way” is a huge hit all over Asia, and the fact that the South Koreans would make a movie where half the dialogue is in Japanese, the female lead is Chinese, and the Germans come off better than the Americans -- and incomparably better than the Russians -- is, quite simply, the way most of industrial Asia looks at the outside world. No one in any of those countries was amused by what happened to Shin A-Lam or the badminton players. Lucky the timekeeper didn’t mess with their rifle teams. BingBing is a cute name for a sniper. The modern Olympics once had a Darwinian subtext: White male athletes were considered the pinnacle of Darwinian evolution. This summer, the United States topped the charts with 46 gold medals, 29 of which went to American women and, had it not been for America’s black athletes in track and field, basketball, and gymnastics, we would have scored far behind the Chinese. Thump your chest, Tarzan. Then scratch your head. Whenever I need a refresher course in reality, I tap into the mainstream and find out that a lot of people who are not professional writers agree with me on a number of subjects. One of those subjects is the Olympics. Everybody I talk to says they love the beach volleyball event. My wife and I love it, too. That is the one event I stay up for, no matter how tired I am. Kerri Walsh Jennings, the tall blonde beach volleyball player, looks like someone we both used to know, amazingly so, and Misty May-Treanor is about three-sixteenths native Hawaiian, which makes things really neat. Who ever thought that people like us would look forward to watching women play volleyball? These two are national treasures. Everybody was thrilled by the story of Oscar Pistorius, the South African runner who competed with two prosthetic shanks. Pistorius was born with feet that looked fetal even when he was an otherwise healthy would-be toddler. His mother had his non-functional feet amputated and had him fitted with prosthetic legs when he was learning to walk. Pistorius became such a great runner that some of his critics actually got him banned from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing because they said his “cheater hooks” gave him an unfair advantage. The steel prosthetics were so much springier than human calf muscles that his envious critics claimed the prosthetics gave Pistorius an unfair advantage. The Olympic Committee let Pistorius take part this time. While Pistorius did not win, he ran a really fast race. If there were a gold medal for courage and determination, Pistorius would have won. Maybe I missed the cute mascot creature this year, but a human stand-in appeared: Mister Chen. Wu Chen is a 57year-old Chinese farmer who wanted to “spread the Olympic spirit.” So two years ago he climbed into a cyclopousse -- a three-wheeled rickshaw with pedals -- and pedaled all the way from his farm outside Beijing with all his belongings. He could not get a passport through Myamar, so he skirted around the Himalayas in Tibet. Chen displayed passports from every country on the route so people knew he was telling the truth. His only concession was the English Channel. He took a boat instead of the Chunnel. Chen became a celebrity and had his photo taken cheekto-cheek with a number of beauties from Limehouse, London’s Chinatown. Chen said his next goal is to pedal to Rio for the 2016 Olympics. He did not mention pedaling home in the meantime. I hope he comes through northwest Bergen County so my wife and I can personally wave encouragement. Chen is an original, and a truly great mascot. The negative mascot for the 2012 Olympics was unofficially designed as Shin A-Lam, a South Korean fencer who was taking on Britta Heidemann of Germany. The official story was that Shin A-Lam, 25, had already won the tight silver medal match on a priority when a timekeeper reset the clock. Shin then took a hit from Heidemann and lost the match for silver. Some of the spectators booed the reset and the South Korean team filed an appeal. Shin sat and cried. Much of the British press tried to turn Shin into a ridiculous eccentric crybaby and exotic spoilsport totally lacking in a stiff upper lip. But Shin was technically obliged by the The very last Darwinian Olympics Area Coast Guard requests fee discount by John Koster The Wyckoff Township Committee agreed to have the Finance Committee convene to discuss a Larkin House fee schedule with members of Flotilla 10-13 of the United States Coast Guard Reserve. Former Flotilla Commander Marjorie Korteweg pointed out that the $25 per meeting fee might not sound like much, but that the fee comes to $1,600 a year because the highlyrated Flotilla 10-13 teaches a number of boating safety courses at the Larkin House. The flotilla, which covers northern New Jersey, the lower Hudson River, and Greenwood Lake, also offers instruction at Greenwood Lake, which is federal water under U.S. Coast Guard supervision. The USCG Reserve flotilla, Past Commander Ken Hall told the township committee, maintains three vessels at Greenwood Lake at the members’ own expense and just recently helped extinguish a fire on a pleasure boat. The federal government covers the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve unit for their insurance while on the job, pays for their gasoline, and allows them an outmoded $2.67 meal allowance -- based on the food costs of 40 years ago, Hall said. The U.S. Coast Guard Reserve Flotilla 10-13 is one of several groups impacted when the Wyckoff Township Com- mittee voted to charge fees to all groups not covered by the original deed that gave the Larkin House to Wyckoff. The $25 Larkin House fee is intended to pay for air conditioning, heating, and the eventual replacement of the carpets at the house. The building includes a large group meeting room, small meeting rooms, a kitchen, and restrooms, and is available for municipal government and senior citizen functions at no cost. Three of the members of Flotilla 10-13 from outside Wyckoff who attended the meeting -- Flotilla Commander Michele Rollino, Vice Commander Bruce Pugh, and Past Commander Ken Hall -- wore uniforms with several rows of service ribbons. Hall said the flotilla had been activated during the early days of the war in Iraq to patrol the waterfronts along the Hudson River on the alert for possible saboteurs. “We are non-profit, and are available and have training for emergencies,” said Korteweg, who is a Wyckoff resident. “We would respectfully ask to be considered for a waiver of fees for use of the Larkin House.” Wyckoff Township Committeeman Kevin Rooney questioned the four flotilla members to make sure the unit had no major sources of revenue and then said he would be happy to meet with them to discuss possible arrangements.