Every day brings a new Olympics twist.  By now we've heard a litany of concerns in the run-up to the August 2008 Games: Beijing has too much pollution, too few domestic media freedoms, too many unsavory partners from Khartoum to Rangoon.

      Tuesday,  Games organizers hit up against another glitch: the Games are too popular, too. 

       So many Chinese tried to buy tickets to Olympics events that the system crashed. Tuesday 1.84 million tickets became available for sale on a first-come, first-served basis. (That should have been the first hint of trouble: in China first-come, first-served is a surefire recipe for Darwinian chaos.) Eight million people tried to snarf up tickets in the first hour of sales, which was eight times more than what the official ticketing website was designed to handle. Then the hotline for ticket inquiries overloaded, after logging 3.8 million calls in an hour. At 6 PM Tuesday, the sales operation had to shut down.

       The poor guy responsible for ticket sales on Beijing's organizing committee, Rong Jun, admitted Wednesday that authorities had underestimated demand and preparations had been "flawed." He apologized, saying he was "ashamed" that the committee's work had "failed to satisfy the people."

        What does this tell us?  Paradoxically, Chinese officials have often felt compelled to explain to skeptical foreigners that Beijing's hosting of the Games is tremendously popular among ordinary citizens. The 2008 Olympics rack up more than 97 percent approval ratings in public opinion surveys, they point out. Just do the math: 97 percent of 1.3 billion people translates into a heck of alot of grassroots enthusiasm.

       So what went wrong?  By vastly under-rating domestic demand for tickets, it would appear at least some of China's propagandameisters didn't believe their own propaganda. Turns out their claim about the Games being wildly popular isn't hype, it's real. Go figure.