Pomp and Circumstance… and Pencils – PPC

Pencils and Pop-Culture: Pomp and Circumstance… and Pencils

All right readers, hands up – who’s been watching the Olympics this summer? For my part, I know I’ve been glued to the screen, soaking in all of the pomp and circumstance and rooting for every athlete regardless of the sport. This is the only time in my life that I care about, say, competitive rowing. Or volleyball. Or any sport that isn’t baseball. And since my beloved Giants got their collective tuchus handed to them by the Mets (the METS!) last week, I’ve pretty much forsaken baseball.

(Kinda. Not really. But why the heck did you guys trade Schierholtz?! As my father would say, to be a Giants fan is to suffer.)

One of the things that I love most about the Olympics is the pageantry and over-the-top spectacle that is the Opening Ceremonies. I missed watching them during their original broadcast this year, as I was in tech for “Beauty and the Beast” with the youth theatre group that I run (coincidentally, four years ago I missed the Opening Ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics because I was…in tech for “Beauty and the Beast” with the youth theatre group that I run. Go figure), but I did catch it at home on my DVR.

Nothing will ever top the awe-inducing, slightly chilling spectacle of the Beijing Opening Ceremonies, but it would appear that Danny Boyle, film director extraordinaire and visionary behind the London Opening Ceremonies, bottled all the heart that Beijing lacked, and then some. The Opening Ceremonies were a whimsical, fun-fueled homage to the best of Britain, complete with sheep grazing on bucolic meadows, Kenneth Brannagh, suffrage marchers, Sargent Pepper, Lord Voldemort, Mary Poppins, the National Health Service, corgis, James Bond and the Industrial Revolution.

But Danny, if you’re going to give a shout-out to Britain’s role in the industrial revolution, I have to ask: whither the pencils?

In 1832, the first pencil factory in the United Kingdom opened in Cumberland, England. Graphite itself was first used in the 1500s by northern English farmers as a means for marking their sheep. Between the sheep traipsing through the stadium and the army of Industrial Revolution workers marching through the same, couldn’t we have had a wink to the pencil’s role in British history? The pencil serves as a link between England’s agrarian past and its industrial future, so why no graphite love?

Oh well. I’ll comfort myself with the thought that some things probably got cut due to time constraints. And after all, there are the closing ceremonies. When I was watching the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics festivities, I was disappointed by the lack of moose in the Opening Ceremonies, only to find that the closing ceremonies featured Michael Buble swinging “Oh Canada,” while a kickline of Mounties surrounded a bevy of inflatable hockey players and fifty-feet tall moose. Maybe will get lucky and see an inflatable pencil or two before the Summer Olympics see their last hurrah.