I know. I don’t believe it either.

It’s the year of curling. I mean, I know I live in Canada and all, and grew up getting clonked on the head by my mother’s brooms in the hall closet every time I reached for my jacket. We had a broom closet, but she didn’t keep her brooms there. As I recall, she kept dog food, kitty litter, and old papers there. She had quite a variety of brooms, although she was not a big one for using them around the house. Just before my father came home from work each day, she’d throw away the newspaper and spray Pine-Sol in the air, and he’d say, “Oh, you’ve been cleaning!”

Myopia runs in the family. Hey, it has its uses.

Curling, right. Curling.

So my mother was a curler. My whole town was full of curlers; you could tell, because they were the grownups who weren’t ashamed to wear their team sweaters with the big shawl collars and their names in duplicate stitch, like some polar bowling team. I guess that’s what they were, really. Most of the action took place in the parking lot after the game (round? speil? chukker? Whatever the hell you call it) when the team would go out and crack open the beers that had been sitting in their cars, slowly becoming what they referred to as “Polar Cola” and what the police referred to as “Booze Slurpees.”

The police would send a car to sit opposite the parking lot and pull over anybody who got behind the wheel while he was still loaded. Mostly, though, people would get loaded, yak it up (so to speak, they did look like that, some of them, and after a couple of rounds smelled that way, too) for a couple of hours, and then get in the car and drive, more or less steadily, away. As long as the cop felt a decent slurpee-to-minute ratio had been achieved, he would let them go.

Curling. See, I just can’t seem to come around to talking about curling. My mother once asked me when I thought I’d be ready to take curling lessons, and I told her it would be shortly after, but definitely not before, my frontal lobotomy. I just couldn’t face it, then or now.

Now it’s cool. Curling. Cool. It’s on the front page of every paper, day after day. Countries are going nuts, and it’s not just Scotland this time. It was in Dose!

Years ago, I was flipping through channels and came across a truly eye-searing, couch-wetting pageant of the hilarious and the bizarre: a fashion show of Curling in the Twenty-First Century. As spectacle it could only be compared to watching the sidesplitting comedy routines of Yog-Sothoth, the Black Goat of the Wood with a Thousand Young. Let us just say that Barbarella does not look her best in a cowichan sweater, even if it’s knitted from strips of silver lame and adorned with dilithium crystals. This is not how the god Thunderbird sees himself, people.

But curling is here, it’s hot and there’s nothing I can do about it except hide. And link to amusing stories of spoiled journalists at the Olympics.

Egg McMuffins on their faces

Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star and some buddies were sitting in a McDonald’s making fun of curling – both, by the way, favorite pastimes of Olympic journalists.
“The lines got progressively worse as the evening went on,” Posnanski wrote, “which of course meant we were laughing harder. We probably were being pretty loud. But there was only one other guy in the entire restaurant, and hey, it was curling. What did he care?
” ‘Excuse me, guys,’ the guy said. He turned to us. He said: ‘I couldn’t help but overhear. It sounds like you guys are talking about my sport, curling.’
“We apologized for being loud. That’s when he reached into his bag and pulled out the silver medal he had won in curling at the Olympics in Nagano.
“Some things can happen only at the Olympics.
” ‘The sport’s not going anywhere,’ he said to us with a little edge in his voice, and he shook the Olympic medal. ‘The people are watching. The kids are playing.’ “