Olympics Update the Three - Mind the Spinning Blades!, on Dispatch from the Razor's Edge

Okay, first things freaking first:

USA Knots Up the Medal Table with China! (18 golds each – and 37 total medals to 34, our way!) YEAHHH!!! And Team GB edges out France – and that, really is all we ask, beating the French! – for 4th place!!! And 3rd is only one gold away! Oh, and way to go Korea, in 3rd! Awesome for them, too! (You wouldn't believe how many Korean friends I have in London…)

Okay, back to our local update. Awesome run today – cool, breezy, with intermittent sun and puffy white clouds. The following came to my attention:

More people in evidence wearing "Team GB" t-shirts. (Including me! I almost feel like it's my patriotic duty to flog the t-shirt around the park every day…)
There are now giant digital screens up in Kensington Gardens, which were showing the tennis when I went by.
I was almost decapitated by a remote-controlled helicopter. Seriously. There are a lot of things you look out for as you're blasting through the park: tree branches, roots, toddlers, errant dogs… in this case I saw a small boy with a box in his hand and a terrified look on his face at the same instant I saw the spinning blades looming at me exactly at face height. (I didn't hear the buzzing for the obvious reason of headphones.) Bobbed to the left (thanks, boxing training!) at the last possible second. As I said to the kid while running away, "I didn't see that coming!"
Even more London Ambassadors in evidence – the army of people in the blaze magenta fleeces running around helping everyone. They've even got a booth outside the V&A.
Passing the entrance to the BT London Live Olympic Viewing point, I turned my music off to check it out. They were playing "Eye of the Tiger". Goodness.
Passed a family draped in red/white/blue tricolore flags. Waved – and wanted to say either "Bienvenue" or "Welkom" – but I still can't tell the damned French and Dutch flags apart (certainly not when draped)! And don't even get me started on the Dutch orange – whence all the orange?!

Still trying to score tickets to something/anything – just to get into the Olympic Park for a day! (It's not like those carefree, security-unconscious days of ’96, when you could just wander into the Olympic Park…) Otherwise, or in any case, we'll be in front of the laptop, watching Phelps stretch out his record to 20-plus medals…

london 2012

Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very long walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .

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Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.


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