The Super Bowl Could Not Compete With Tape-Delayed Olympic Curling

Nobody else in my house likes football, and we are believers in democracy at least as far as concerns the television. And so it was that, Sunday evening, I had the Super Bowl streaming on my li'l laptop screen, and the gigantic TV was showing a tape-delayed CNBC broadcast of mixed doubles curling at the Milano Cortina Olympics.

I feel (but do not really have) a professional obligation to watch the NFL conference championships and Super Bowl, but an odd pattern developed at some point in the first quarter: The curling was stealing my attention away. It started in the commercial breaks, when I'd mute the stream to avoid the ads and the curling would catch my eye, and I'd miss a couple minutes of the game before I remembered I was trying to watch it and not tape-delayed curling. But there were so incredibly many commercial breaks, because the teams kept going three-and-out. The curling (thrilling, dramatic, from 12 hours in the past) would distract me for two minutes beyond the end of one commercial break, and I'd go "Oh shit, I'm missing the game!" and I'd pull the stream back up on my laptop and NBC would already be breaking for commercials again. And the curling (nerds with brooms having a sweeping contest) would sink its fiendish teeth back into my feeble attention span.

Americans Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin were going against Swedish siblings Isabella and Rasmus Wranå. The Swedish sister, Isabella, was wearing huge boxy eyeglasses and looked like an 8-year-old and was impossibly adorable; Dropkin, in turn, is far handsomer than curling calls for. The pairs' playing styles seemed to contrast: The Swedes would ease their stone slowly and delicately down the lane, playing for maximum precision and placement, and then Dropkin would send a stone rocketing along at freeway speeds and blast the Swedes' stones to hell. This struck me as an extremely apt representation of the respective nations' bearings in the world today, which, combined with Isabella's glasses, made it pretty much impossible to root for the Americans.