summing up the 2014 winter olympics, with help from my sister

This seems like an appropriate time to point out the good points and the not-so-good points of the Olympic Games.

Good point. They don't last as long as the professional football season, even though they cost more.

Another good point. We can boo Russian athletes without wondering if they are the new kickers or special team that cost our team money that they shouldn't have spent and will now be in a bad mood and the contract cost will not be justified. This is not something I think about, as you probably guessed, but Himself worries about the Giants constantly and now that he has almost concluded that their standard of play is hopeless, he's balancing the plusses and minuses of an effort to rebuild the team by buying expensive talent. We know how well that worked for the Knicks.

Maybe that wasn't such a good point.

Here's a good point. We can give the children and their friends a history lesson in the pointlessness of war without sounding like anything other than people who are really, really interested in sports trivia.

viz:  Each event - each sport - is the peaceful remnant of a skill that was once an art of war. For example, cave-dwellers threw rocks at each other. Now we have the shot-put.  Other cave-dwellers ran away from the cave-dwellers who threw rocks. Now we have footraces. In fact, thanks to early war, we also have jumping and rolling, refined to an art. We have gymnastics, thanks to those whose evasive tactics were more artful. And we have boxing and wrestling, from those who didn't evade fast enough.


As, um, civilization progressed, the javelin throw and fencing in all four divisions, foil, something, something else and épée, came to be. Early man wanted blood, but at a reasonable distance.

Some of women's evasive skills developed, but were not taken seriously. Women kept practicing.

As things that went boom and things that can hurt at a distance were developed, we got events that involved getting projectiles to a goal or line without having to get there oneself - tennis - and we got shooting. In fact, due to the needs of war when cold countries were invaded and attempted to resist, we got the winter biathlon. Wearing white to blend in, ski quietly up to a place where you can hide behind a fir or birch, shoot a few times, put rifle back, ski away before enemy figures out where you were standing.

Officers left battles on horseback while a victorious enemy pursued on foot.

Just about every event can, with a very small knowledge of military history and an open mind - what an odd combination! - anyway, just about every Olympic event can be tied to something that was once considered an essential warlike skill.

Discuss: do half-pipe events trace back to getting away from enemy via sewers and tunnels?

So now we come, as inevitably we must, to the sport of Curling.

What, we ask ourselves, is this doing here? In some ice-bound pre-Pelepponesian epic battle, did soldiers while away the time before battle by skidding stones at sitting stones?

I think not.

Why, then, is this a sport? Is the real action hoping that someone will fall through the ice? Or fall over drunk (can't imagine any sober person wanting to do this)?

The final proof that it takes the boring medals: a few days ago someone sent me a video - concept was that curling is boring and needs livening up so an enthusiast produced a video showing Curling Using Cats Instead of Stones. 

I watched it.

No difference. Once you said "Oh, yeah, look, cats," it was just as boring as regular curling. Cats look bored too.

So I sent the video to my sister, and here is her reply:

Do not let my dog know about this video. We watch curling for the uniforms.

Every girl should have a sister.