12.11.2008

The Five Ring Circus Goes On Without Me

This page, despite having put in an order for 2010 Olympic tickets in early October, and is an actual, real live resident of the Olympic Host City, was denied tickets for the Games in yesterday's Priority Ticket Allocation. On a few occasions this page has asserted that VANOC is nothing more than a criminal cabal bent on soaking local taxpayers, criminalizing homelessness, trespassing on traditional aboriginal territory and serving as a propaganda vehicle for Gordon Campbell's Public Private Partnershit-addicted B.C. Lieberal administration. It appears that we now have some insult to go with our injury.

Many of you are asking 'WTF would he order tickets for the Olympics?' Short answer: I like sports, I don't blame the athletes for the strum und drang surrounding these Games, and anything I spend now means other people won't be spending it on their tax bills later.

For those of you scoring at home, I used my other name (the one Charlie Smith at the Georgia Straight is still waiting on) to order tickets, so VANOC would have no idea what I really think of them. VANOC thinks that residents of the City of Vancouver, the ones who saw their property taxes creep up and have had to endure a multitude of disruptions as the city has become a perpetual construction site thanks to deluded condomaniacal speculation, didn't deserve any priority for getting tickets, so, I guess to entrench their sucking position on the federal teat, they just opened up ticket sales to "all Canadians".

After a quick glance of a number of American-based discussion boards related to the Olympics, and the bare-faced gloating about obtaining tickets this page can update VANOC's definition of 'Canadian' to anyone who has access to a Canadian credit card number, be it an aunt, uncle, second cousin, or Facebook frenemy. Did VANOC even think of blocking IP addresses from outside Canada so that foreigners couldn't get ticket information? How about insisting on Driver's License or ID card numbers for each person that would be using tickets to guarantee citizenship, a move which could have also served the purpose of shaving a little off security costs? On top of that, how can VANOC riff about reducing their 'carbon footprint' when no real effort was made to get tickets into the hands of people with the shortest distance to travel to the Games?

VANOC pissed off the people at the margins regarding these Olympics a long time ago. Now they've pissed off the people in the middle, something which organizers of the Olympics in Calgary in 1988 were careful not to do, if only because the Internet as we know it didn't exist yet (they went to the Calgary Stampede for volunteers, not workopolis.com, and locals had first priority for tickets). These are turning out to be a soulless, globalized games in which accommodating the needs and aspirations of those who actually live in the Host City simply doesn't matter. If anyone reading this post is visiting for the 2010 Olympics, you now understand why the welcome you receive 14 months from now won't be so warm.

No comments: