KING "CURLING" KAUFMAN: If you haven't been reading Salon lately, King Kaufman is also on the curling beat. First here:

I kind of forget about this every four years, but I love curling. I have no idea why. There's nothing about the playing of the game that interests me particularly, but it's somehow hypnotic. Compared to curling, bowling is like a flamethrower fight between naked movie stars on motorcycles, but there's just something about curling's deliberate pace, its simplicity, its regular guy and gal competitors, its buffoonish spectacle of frantic sweeping, that tickles me somehow. I can watch curling all day long. I used to watch it as a kid when, for reasons entirely lost on me then as now, it was on PBS on Saturday mornings. Unless I'm mistaken, the brooms back then looked like brooms, where now they look more like plastic mops. That's a loss, but it's still a fine, fine game.

Japan had a commanding 6-1 lead at the midway point. NBC announcer Don Duguid put it well when he said that it was like being behind 42-7 at the half in football. The U.S. came back to win in dramatic fashion on the 10th and final end -- an end is like an inning -- as they did again in an evening match when they stunned heavily favored Sweden on skip Kari Erickson's perfect draw on the last stone. I know you have no idea what I'm talking about, and I'm not entirely convinced I do either, but take my word for it: It was exciting!

Then here:

NBC daytime host Jim Lampley practically came out of his shoes, he was so excited Thursday at the prospect of the Dream Team round starting. He was giddy. I thought he was going to lick the face of hockey analyst Bill Clement, who was a rugged center for the Philadelphia Flyers' Stanley Cup-winning "Broad Street Bullies" teams in the mid-'70s and who wanted nothing more, I kid you not, than to talk about curling! It seems he used to play it on Wednesday afternoons during his minor league rookie year in Quebec City, and he fell in love with it. "There's a lot to it," he said to a panting Lampley, who kept trying to bring the subject back to hockey. "It's a great, great sport."

I'm telling you, curling is the growth sport of the millennium. You spend a few minutes with it and you're hooked. NBC and its hench-networks are showing plenty of curling, which is good, but they're concentrating way too much on the mediocre American teams, which are both 2-3. Can we see the Canadians and the Germans please? Both sexes. And also the Norwegian men and the Swiss women, who we did get to see beat the Americans Thursday.

His tongue is no doubt in cheek, but the CNBC curling gurus were also talking about the bright future of curling. I mean, why is it on all the time this year? I don't think it was like that in Nagano, but the fact that Salt Lake City is within the continental United States probably gives the NBCs some room to highlight odd sports you don't see at any other time. And Kaufman is right, curling is strangely watchable; it has to do with the brooms and the way the person throwing the stone just gently releases it and keeps on sliding behind it for a little while. It's, like, what a sport in zero gravity would kind of look like, so maybe I derive a similar satisfaction in watching curling as I do watching the Blue Danube space-station docking scene in 2001: an sort of poetry in motion of decidedly non-poetic looking objects and people (unlike figure skating, where the people are pretty poetic looking too.)

Kaufman also calls figure skating "a horrible sport." But at least he called it a sport.