In a way, the Winter Olympics are perfect for us all.
You know, we’re not exactly the smartest populace. We revel in nonsense (24) macho violence (American football), and slick packaging (Totinos Pizza? In a roll?) in our consumption. We cheer for tired storylines (Andy and Erin on The Office) and easy jokes (Jay Leno), really anything funneling us toward cathartic predictability.
So the Winter Olympics take care of all that. NBC pays tons of dough for the right to shovel heaps of Americana and human interest toward nothing sports like Figure Skating and downhill skiing and speed skating that are otherwise interminably dull. And in between all of that tripe, we’ve got Exhibit-A of tongue-in-cheek Olympic predictability:
Curling. Yep.
Perhaps you’ve missed quips from several of your Facebook friends – devoting status updates to the mystical game of Curling! Either they’re excited to watch it! Or they can’t understand how it’s a sport! Let alone an Olympic sport! Or – because winter is here in the Midwest – they’re outside trying it!
Fucking please. This screams douche.
Perhaps you follow people on Twitter, who again, yearn to make fun of #Curling. They just want you to know HOW FUCKING WEIRD CURLING IS! I know, Z-O-M-motherfucking-G!
Wherever you’re at, curling is the easy joke. It’s tried, it’s true, and it’s either so weird it deserves snide scorn, or so weird it’s preternaturally cool. Even Slate doesn’t know what to make of curling. (It hates tired Olympic coverage, but curling’s probably progressive, so whatevs.)
Maybe you’re not online, and instead you subscribe to a broadsheet. And you’ve discovered heaps of local columnists, whose conglomerate employers have improbably Ok’d an expense account to subsidize stories of curling, learning to curl, and trying curling for the first time. IF ONLY I HAD A ZAMBONI…
So this is where we are. You can’t escape it. And no one wants you to. Instead, we’re forced to grin and bear the insufferable onslaught of dopes laughing at curling. But this is entertainment, and this is us, and this is the Olympics. Wait – they use brushes! How weird!
‘Scuse me. I gotta go try this. Till later.
