Seth’s blog

I was surprised how much I liked the Olympics opening ceremonies on Friday. I hadn’t been so transfixed by an Olympic event since Joan Benoit won the first woman’s marathon, leading the whole way. At one point during the opening ceremonies a young girl in a red dress sang a Chinese song. Or so it seemed:

The girl in the red dress with the pigtails, called Lin Miaoke, 9, and from a Beijing primary school, has become a national sensation since Friday night, giving interviews to all the most popular newspapers.

But the show’s musical designer felt forced to set the record straight. He gave an interview to Beijing radio saying the real singer was a seven-year-old girl who had won a gruelling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called “Hymn to the Motherland”.

At the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching a rehearsal pronounced that the winner, a girl called Yang Peiyi, might have a perfect voice but was unsuited to the lead role because of her buck teeth.

Weston Price’s research, described in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, implies that buck teeth are caused by too little of a dietary growth factor, which a commenter described as “the menaquinone-4 form of vitamin K2.”