NYT nails the brilliant Olympics opening ceremony.

"With its hilariously quirky Olympic opening ceremony, a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful; the conventional and the eccentric; and the frankly off-the-wall, Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/sports/olympics/in-olympic-opening-ceremony-britain-asserts-its-eccentric-identity.html