The Winter Olympics are here. Yay! And proof you can never win

Today starts the Winter Olympics, and I’m sure I’m not alone in being psyched. (Well, I know I’m not alone, because the woman in bed next to me is psyched, too)>

I’m a sucker for the Olympics, I really am. Sure, they’re wildly overproduced by NBC, and we don’t know who half the athletes are, and for about two weeks they’re incredibly important and then you forget about them for four more years.

But I love, love, love them. And the Winter Olympics, the poor, unloved stepchild of the Olympic Games, start tonight.

Can’t wait. Can’t wait, first and foremost, for the Olympic hockey tournament, which should be awesome. There may not be any greater pressure on any team, ever, in the Olympics, than the pressure on Canada to win the gold. I can’t wait for the speedskating, which I always find compelling because it seems so easy to do (just skate really fast!) but is so hard.

I can’t wait for the luge, just because it’s so much fun to say luge. I can’t wait for the skeleton, which is hilarious because it’s basically a guy soaring downhill by himself at like, 60 miles per hour. How much fun is it to see if he makes it, or goes crashing into something?

And of course, the Lewis family’s latest obsession, discovered in the 2006 Games: Curling.  I am totally fascinated by this sport, and yeah, it’s a sport. The idea that one guy lets go a 42-pound “rock,” then yells at two other guys to furiously sweep and try to get that rock at an exact point on the other end of the ice, well, man, that’s compelling stuff.

Sure it’s like shuffleboard on ice, kinda. But it’s also got crazy strategy and takes skill and strength and man, I just love it.

By the way, when I told Julie tonight that the first time curling will be on TV is on the 16th, she simply looked at me and said, “Yeah, I know already. I looked it up too.”

See why we had to get married? Enjoy the Opening Ceremonies from Vancouver. (And by the way, my favorite part of the Opening Ceremonies is when Bob Costas comes up with some random fact about a tiny country. “Matt, did you know that Lichtenstein has 14 bridges, yet only 11 cars? “No, Bob, I was not aware of that!”)

**So this cracked me up. John Robinson, an editor at the Greensboro News & Record, tweeted the other day that a reader called to cancel their subscription, because their newspaper was delivered.

The reader cancelled because she couldn’t believe that, with such a terrible snowstorm raging, the newspaper put the carriers in danger like that.

You just can’t win with some people.