Any public endeavor on the scale of the Olympics has its bloopers. Entries into the Beijing Games' hit list of "oops" began mounting up even before the last sparkler from Friday's opening ceremonies died out. For one thing, some of the extravaganza's pyrotechnic wizardry turned out to be computer-generated special effects. Nearly all but the last of those gigantic fireworks “footprints” in the sky, which were shown on TV—awing four billion viewers worldwide as they "walked" from Tiananmen Square to the Bird's Nest—were in fact filmed last year and spliced digitally into the televised version.

And that really cute little girl singing the iconic song "Ode to the Motherland", the pixieish 9-year-old Lin Miaoke, was actually lip-synching to the voice of that not-quite-so-cute 7-year-old Yang Peiyi. Apparently a Politburo member decided Lin's voice wouldn't cut it while Yang's orthodontically challenged appearance was not ready for prime time. (I kept telling people this would be a made-for-TV "virtual Olympics".)

If you're a geek you'll recognize the fatal Blue Screen of Death, symbol of bugs and glitches in the Microsoft operating system

As if that's not tacky enough, now we hear about the cameo appearance made that evening by the all-too-familiar Blue Screen of Death. The BSOD message usually opens with the sentence: "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." Geeks consider it an icon of the many bugs and glitches in the Windows operating system.

Oh yes, the Chinese computer wizards who helped bring us the greatest show on earth Friday, and indeed the Olympics themselves, also confessed that all the computers used by Beijing Games organizers were programmed cautiously with Windows XP instead of Microsoft's newer Vista—because the latter has a penchant for becoming "not stable.” Bill Gates, who was in the audience at the opening ceremony, was apparently unaware that his presence was being eclipsed by these other stars of the Microsoft universe. Credit for zooming in on the Blue Screen of Death goes to the Website Gizmodo, where someone left a comment saying, “that's awesome, only a nerd would notice this.”

I should also mention that what looks like a rather smartly dressed human fly jogging 70 meters in mid-air, studiously ignoring the nearby Blue Screen of Death, is gymnast-turned-sportswear-mogul Li Ning, who is now space-walking all the way to the bank. As Fergus Naughton blogged about earlier, Li saw stock prices in his Hong Kong-listed Li Ning Co. Ltd..surge after he lit the Olympic torch at the highlight of Friday’s blowout. Li won six medals at the ’84 LA Games; he went on to head a sports apparel and accessories empire which, with 10.5 percent share of China's sportswear market, is now racing to catch up with Olympic sponsor Adidas's 15.6 percent and Nike's 16.7 percent share. Friday's one giant (CGI) leap for mankind made stocks controlled by Li USD 30 million more valuable by Monday—not bad for a single act of passive ambush marketing.

Apropos of Li Ning's $30-million-dollar space walk, his firm is providing athletic wear for the Olympic teams of China, Spain and Sweden. Which brings us to another of the Games’ bloopers. Everyone’s tut-tutting over the fact that the Spanish Olympic basketball team posed for a promotional ad that shows them—yup, all 15 of them—using their fingers to pull their eyes into slant-eyed squints. The image has been running in Spanish papers since Friday, part of a publicity campaign for team sponsor Seur, a courier firm in Spain. A Seur representative in Madrid said the firm meant no offense but had no immediate plans to pull the ad, which was slated to run until the end of the Games.

On his blog, point guard Jose Manuel Calderon—who also plays for NBA’s Toronto Raptors—said the team was responding to a request from the photographer and made what they thought “would be interpreted as an affectionate gesture." He added, "Some of my best friends in Toronto are originally Chinese, including one of our sponsors, the brand Li Ning." Frank Zhang, Li Ning's director of government and public affairs, played down the incident. "We don't think this is an insulting gesture to the Chinese…the gesture shows that the Spanish team is so humorous, relaxing and cute. They sat around a dragon pattern, which we think showed respect to the Chinese.”

Not everyone agrees. The Spanish team was consistently booed during its Tuesday game against China; world champion Spain won 85-75. The Chinese jeering was perhaps the most conspicuous public display of negative partisanship during the Games so far. Local residents have been instructed to be good sports by Chinese authorities, who have carefully vetted “approved” cheers that the audience may use. Booing isn't one of them.