Five-ring circus.

In 2014, the last time the Winter Olympics were starting, my wife and I had just taken a huge puppy named Tralfaz into our home. So, as much as we like the Games -- and we actually do -- we hardly got to see a moment of them. Because we were either getting the puppy outside to evacuate  his little bowels (and it was cold as hell that month) or we were training him or we were trying to keep him from hurting himself or anything valuable. By strange coincidence, we got our second dog, Nipper, right before the Summer Olympics in Rio began. So ditto all of the above.

I do have some memories of the Sochi Olympics. Okay, not really. I pretty much saw nothing beyond the opening ceremony. But what an opening ceremony it was! 

Well, I don't remember much of that either, and I was sacked out by the time of the famous ring failure:

But I do remember two things quite clearly, probably because I blogged about them on the old, defunct blog shortly thereafter. The first was the prison garb worn by the Irish team -- I even saved this shot:

Take away the flag and they'd look like a handful of army prisoners, wouldn't they? Happy army prisoners, maybe because they're getting time in the yard. I suspect they decided on those uniforms because the Irish had never won a medal in the Winter Games, and sure enough, they didn't in Russia, either.

The other thing I kept a picture of was an example of what someone thought would look great as the escort's uniforms during the opening ceremony:

Apparently they thought that the Games were being held on a planet in the Power Rangers universe.

I have hopes for better things at today's opener in PyeongChang. Seoul has become a very important fashion and cosmetics center, so we can hope that everyone will look a little better this time. The Norks are participating, so there's a slightly better chance that no horrible acts of warfare will take place.

And I don't have a new dog hanging around today. So we got a shot at seeing something. Maybe some of that cool curling action.