There Is No Cat

Groovy '60s Sounds from the Land of Smile!

Sunday, February 28, 2010

I'm always throwing hack weight

I didn't get to watch as much curling this year as I did during the last Winter Olympics, but I still got to see a fair amount, including the championship games for both the men and women. I used to watch curling on TV when I was growing up in Detroit, because the Canadian TV station across the river in Windsor used to air it often. I think it appealed to my sense of the absurd, with the sweeping in particular looking profoundly silly. But seeing it as an adult, I can definitely see the subtlties that evaded me when I was a kid. And I love a sport where some of the best athletes are in the forties. Kevin Martin, the Canadian men's skip, and Cheryl Bernard, the Canadian women's skip, are both 43; Carolyn Darbyshire of the Canadian team is 46. It's a pity we won't be seeing any more curling here in the U.S. until the next Winter Olympics, because I genuinely enjoy watching it. Then again, maybe we're better off not having it on TV here; NBC's host last night joked that NBC stood for "Nothing But Curling", but it was more like "Nothing But Commercials". It felt like we were only getting to watch half of the spiel.

In honor of the just-completed Olympic curling competition, here's my favorite curling-as-metaphor-for-failing-romance song, Tournament of Hearts by the Weakerthans.

Posted at 4:39 AM
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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio