Also I've seen enough Canadians online to know that some Canadians, at least, are sometimes vocal in being proud not to be Americans. Although maybe that's just people from Ontario.

Porn sandwich?

"and that rebellious young fan of Elvis 'the pelvis' grew up to become… the surgeon-general. And now you know the rest of the story."

There's a statue of Mozart in Salzburg.

I support adding mixed curling to the Olympics. There are mixed curling national and world championships.

Yes, it was referred to, euphemistically, as "not a curling crowd."

Imagine watching a Red Sox - Yankees AL championship series if you'd never heard of those teams before. A lot of the meaning and appeal is lost if you don't know the backstories.

You can also drink while playing baseball at a recreational level.

There have been a lot of people asking, in apparent earnestness, if curling is an Olympic sport then why aren't beer pong and snowball fighting.

Also, the Russian fans, by and large, didn't understand the first thing about curling. So they'd basically cheer wildly whenever the Russian teams threw a stone and it went anywhere near the house or made contact with any other stone.

I know that some people are even slightly annoyed because we have curling commentators at the Olympics who are not as good as the team of Vic, Linda, and Russ that normally do curling commentating.

Head-to-head is used to break ties when ranking teams within the teams making it to the playoffs, but it isn't used to decide who gets into the playoff round.

I agree. That's why I questioned if such a model is "realistic or desirable" for the US.

That could work, if it had the funding. When there's enough viewership, sponsors will put up enough prize money to support such a system. Until then… government funding?

You make a good point. I think that would be effective for winning at the Olympics. However, it couldn't just be thrown together at the last minute. The team would need to curl together for at least a season. I don't know if having one special "all star" team would be good for encouraging more elite competition within…

I'm hearing this a lot from American curling fans. It seems to be built on an implicit assumption that the US ought to be doing really well at it. However, there's really just not a lot of depth of talent in curling in the US.

It's a funny comment, but completely unfair. He said that it took him two years to learn those things, not two years to be good enough at them to make it onto the US Olympic Team.

Isn't the round-robin portion the first part of the curling schedule at the Olympics?

As for the Russian skip, while I see the appeal, I don't get the hype.

I have no idea if there's any merit to the one accusation of a "fix" at the Olympics, but there is definitely an element of prejudging in ice dance. The commentators were talking about a pair who were well out of the running, saying that it is still very important for them to do their best here because "it helps them…