Being a resident of Utah and for the record one who would have been thrilled if some other city had been blessed with the Winter Olympics. I'll say that I found the opening ceremonies quite delightful, and very tastefully done. It is what I would expect our country to provide. Of course our president was, at his best?. I thought it was a nice touch that he sat with the athletes. Of course the scowl on his face when members of the "axis of evil" were introduced was, I thought, in very poor taste. If you're going to have guests you should treat them civilly and a scowl is not civil. I also thought it in poor taste for an athlete to stick a cell phone in the president’s ear. I think cell phones and camera’s at the opening ceremonies detract from the experience. I think it would be difficult to be both a participant and a photographer. When I mentioned this to a fellow employee who had attended the women's snowboarding halfpipe competition. She told me how exciting it was to be there in person, she simply didn't have words for the experience. The weather was perfect, the commentators snowboarders who learned the sport before helmets were standard, were apparently quite fun, and it was a bonus that an American won the gold medal. She said that when the American Kelly Clark was making her final run that she wanted to get a picture of her doing one of her great tricks, so at the beginning of the run she started looking through the viewfinder of her camera in order to get a good shot. Unfortunately a camera's viewfinder is not the perfect way to view the halfpipe, and she found that she missed much of the action. Afraid of missing the "perfect shot" so not looking up she heard the crowd going crazy over something she couldn't clearly see. What a price to pay for a simple picture. Of course with today’s technology one could have the best of both worlds; the memory through a picture captured on your TV and transferred to your computer and the unfettered experience of seeing the scene through both eyes. I asked her about security and she said they got there early enough that it wasn’t much of a problem, but a little uneven some gates moved right a long while others were very slow. I suppose that’s the human element a measure of how paranoid the security personnel was. I'm not worried about the terrorist threat since I'll do my watching on TV although given the amount of money spent on security I think it extremely unlikely there will be any problems. I understand a number of our residents are not so confident and have left the area for the duration. It seems to me that spending 392 million on security at the Olympics not to mention the other freedoms we have lost are evidence that the terrorists have indeed won. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to examine some other approaches to the problems.