{"id":31,"date":"2005-07-06T08:51:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-06T15:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2012\/"},"modified":"2005-07-06T08:51:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-06T15:51:00","slug":"2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/07\/06\/2012\/","title":{"rendered":"2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/sport2\/hi\/front_page\/4655555.stm\">London<\/a> will host the 2012 Olympic Games. All I can say is, thank goodness New York didn&#8217;t win. One of the things I noticed here in Paris this week was how much people really did care about hosting the Olympics &#8212; it was all people were talking about. I teased them by saying that Hillary Clinton was going to bring it to NYC, but they seemed (correctly, in retrospect) much more worried about that suspicious Tony Blair. Not that I have much actual data, but my feeling is that people on the street in New York weren&#8217;t really worked up about this, no? But in Paris this is their third serious bid in recent years (1992 and 2008), and they haven&#8217;t hosted since 1924, so this defeat means that it&#8217;ll be a long time before the French have any enthusiasm for trying again.<\/p>\n<p>One of the things in London&#8217;s favor was, paradoxically, that there would actually need to be a greater effort to get the city in shape for the Olympics. As a result, the Games would leave a greater legacy on the city itself &#8212; the East End would undergo a relatively substantial transformation. This might even be true, if my impression is correct about the improvements that Atlanta witnessed when they hosted the Games. But still, I&#8217;m surprised that people care so much about this. It&#8217;s not like it&#8217;s the World Cup or anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>London will host the 2012 Olympic Games. All I can say is, thank goodness New York didn&#8217;t win. One of the things I noticed here in Paris this week was how much people really did care about hosting the Olympics &#8212; it was all people were talking about. I teased them by saying that Hillary [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}