Reality Is What We Say It Is, Russian Edition

Anyone who watched the opening ceremonies for the 2014 Olympic Games, being held in Sochi, Russia, noticed that the special-effect snowflakes that were supposed to expand into the Olympic rings had an 80 percent success rate -- that is, only four of the rings worked.

Unless, of course, you were a Russian watching them on your Russian state TV network, in which case you saw a break to rehearsal footage with a mostly empty stadium with five functioning rings.

The malfunction shows that the Russians should have learned a little from Chinese Olympic officials, who allowed only Beijing's televised feed of the ceremonies and thus had no other footage than their own to point out the CGI additions to their fireworks or the cute girl lip-synching the Chinese national anthem because the one who sang it had crooked teeth. By letting NBC have their own cameras, the embarrassing glitch was there for all to see.

There's a little irony in the two failures. Chinese culture pretty much invented fireworks, which means that the totalitarian thug regime which runs the place today couldn't even get right something with which its country has more experience than any other in history. And now at the Russian Winter Olympics, we've got the increasingly totalitarian thug regime of Vladimir Putin, messing up with...snow.

But on the up side, since President Putin seems to like bringing back symbols of the former Soviet Union, there's a good chance that whoever messed up on the snowflake rings will have a lot of time to study snow pretty soon.