One recurring theme I keep reading about when I read about the Olympics being held in China: China is taking this for serious. They banned cars to try to cut pollution. They hired 10,000 people (and are installing a fence) to fight an algae bloom. It's pretty awesome that an event like this can unite a country (although it breeds that nationalism I detest so much). I guess I never really cared about the Olympics, since we always ended up dominating them (my only memory of the Atlanta Olympics was checking out the newspaper and gleefully noting that we took more medals than any other country by a pretty large margin - oh, how young and foolish I was).