Friday, March 23, 2012

the mother of anthem gaffes

A couple of times I posted entries about the Star Spangled Banner, the singing thereof, and the mistakes that get made. But this beats them all. Kazakhstan's shooting team won the gold at a competition in Kuwait. But -- due to what can most-charitably be described as a mixup -- at the medal ceremony, instead of the actual national anthem of Kazakhstan, organizers played the parody anthem from the Borat movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Apparently the technical crew went to the internet for the anthem and pulled the wrong one. Here's a video showing part of the ceremony:

I do have to say that gold medalist, Maria Dmitrienko, showed remarkable poise and grace in not reacting to the fact that it wasn't her country's anthem playing.

I am amused by the line, which begins at 0:18 in the above video, "Kazakhstan prostitutes cleanest in the region."

The article I linked to (above) also mentioned that the Serbian anthem was wrong. It has a sidebar listing other anthem gaffes. My favorite (among the listed) is described as follows:
Instead of singing "we love your mountains" in his attempt on the Croatian anthem, an English opera singer sings "my penis is a mountain" 

1 comment:

  1. At least they bothered to look for the anthem. When the Israeli fencing team won an international competition in austria, they didn't bother playing the anthem at all. The tournament officials said that they didn't have a recording on the new anthem, only the old one. No, Israel has not changed anthems.

    http://www.upi.com/Sports_News/2009/11/15/No-Israeli-anthem-at-fencing-competition/UPI-26801258298969/

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