Japan tops U.S. women in Olympic curling

As a writer and reporter who likes to stay purely unbiased and objective, I have chosen to eschew television entirely in my home. I feel as though I can get more done if I never languish in front of the idiot box, and I really don’t accept the backdrop of corporate commercialism that they broadcast as the underpinning of society. There is no rule that says that you have to see things the way that they paint them out to be on television, and I am not just referring to the “news.” American culture in general is really not the way that it is depicted to be on television. But that subject is another article.

It’s true that I don’t watch television at home, but I do watch it when it is on at my favorite local watering hole, and they are always showing sports on TV there. This is good, because although I don’t like television, I do like most sports. When I walked up to the front door of the bar yesterday, I could see people intently looking up at the screen en masse, and I wondered what was on that was so compelling.
The TV was on a commercial when I entered. When I sat down, the bartender asked me what I was up to, as he is wont to do, and I told him “same old same old,” as I am wont to say, and he then let me know, rather excitedly by his standards, that they were watching curling.

“Curling?” I said.

“Yeah, curling,” he answered.

Then he went into a brief explanation of the game that he had just read from the old encyclopedia that they have on the book shelf in there. (It’s an old bar with a lot of character.) So then the curling game, or match, or whatever they call it, came back on. What they do in curling is roll this big rock on a sheet of ice toward a series of concentric circles that are the target, and they can’t touch it to guide it. They use brooms to brush the ice around the rock for some reason. I guess they think it guides the rock. It looks kind of funny. The game, or sport, is kind of like shuffleboard.

I can understand how people in Nordic lands back in the day might be bored enough to try to slide a rock into a circle. But for the life of me, I find it hard to understand how they would get the bright idea of chasing after the rock with brooms so they can rub the ice with them to guide the rock. But that’s what they do.

It was a close contest, but Japan won by the tiniest of margins when a little bit more of their rock was a little bit closer to the center of the inner circle than our rock. After the final measurement, we looked at one another up and down the bar, and sadly, we drowned our sorrows.