Olympics Opening Ceremony July 30, 2012

Here at Uncle Smiley’s house, we are HUGE Olympics fans. But, *sigh* we live on the West Coast, which meant that while the rest of the United States got stuck waiting three and a half hours to watch the Opening Ceremony (and in the meantime had to sit on their hands to avoid checking Facebook, Twitter, or anything else Internet-related lest they catch spoilers of the festivities), we were stuck waiting an EXTRA three hours after that! It was enough to almost make us frown.

But then I got a message from my sister, who lives in the Central Time Zone and was watching the ceremony two hours ahead of us. She asked simply, “Did you see the smiley face in the Opening Ceremony?”

So now I had something else to look forward to! 🙂

The smiley face in question is this one, aired during a `70s and `80s musical number:

At least, that’s how it looked on our screen at home. (And thanks to Jennifer, aka Aunt Smiley, for catching a photo of it while I was feeding the cats!)

But strangely, though I scoured the Internet today looking for a clearer shot of the smiley face, no one else seems to have noticed it. The closest thing I can find, even when searching for “olympics opening ceremony smiley face,” is this one:

And to be fair, it is a kind of smiley. (The photo above is also mine. You can see a clearer version on the Vanity Fair website.) But it’s not the iconic one we caught almost two hours into the ceremony.

Strange.

But wait — it gets cooler! While searching for the classic smiley during the ceremony, I also came across an image early on of the spectators in the arena passing around a giant beach ball. And guess what was printed on the ball!

Score!
(Click the image for the article I found it on.)