The Olympics are over, right? No, seriously — I don’t watch that much television here and when I do, it’s not like I can tell when the Games o’ Hercules - Winter Edition are being played. On German television, there’s alway a sports show featuring people skiing. Downhill skiing. Uphill skiing. Cross-country skiing. How to grocery shop wearing skis. Anything.

And that was before the Olympics. I was afraid to turn the TV on once the Games started.

Of course I did, eventually, to find things were even more strange than I thought: I ended up watching the Bronze Medal Women’s Curling match between the Canadian and American teams — and if anybody can give me one shred of a reason as to why German television showed the entirety of the fight for third place between two North American teams in a sport that basically no one understands, I’d greatly appreciate it.

That being said, showing the match might not be as strange as the fact that I watched the thing; it was like I figured, hey, the sport’s incomprehensible anyway, so why not see what it’s like when you can’t understand the announcers either? Very surreal — I would have gone out and got some acid just to take it to the next level of bizareness, ‘cept it was 10:30 on a Thursday night. And I’m not sure where I’d actually get acid. And, of course, I didn’t want to miss the stunning conclusion, in which a frozen wasteland of a country that does nothing other than play wacky winter sports beat the home team.

Uhh, yeah, somebody …

The game itself was actually somewhat compelling, despite the fact that I had no clue as to what was going on — and it wasn’t anywhere near compelling enough for me to, say, go and find the rules. (OK, that’s not true. They’re here. But I’m not going to read them.) I was particularly amused by the “chatter” during the game: Every time a stone was tossed, everybody would start screaming “hurry, hurry!” — and since nobody was allowed to touch the stone (I guess), the only thing that was being encouraged was the stone itself. It was like a whole new level of the screaming-at-the-ball-in-bowling strategy.

I was also amused at the curler’s footware. I’d always assumed they wore skates or something, but nope: the athletes seemed to glide along on one “ice shoe” while pushing off with the other foot, just like kids do when they encounter a patch of ice on the sidewalk. I just kept on waiting for someone to fall.

So I don’t think my exposure to the Sport of Kings (isn’t that what they call curling?) has converted me to a fan. But you know, it’d be really cool to have one of those stones. I could paint a face on it and call it Wilson or Martha or something. It’d be like a pet.