I'm struck by two thoughts while watching the moguls competition. First, as someone who's preferred method of negotiating moguls is to do so on his behind (Podborski: "Look how he keeps his cheeks together!"), I can't help but be impressed. Second, I should have been an orthopedist.

I'm in Greece as I type this, spending a week working and recovering from jet lag - just long enough to be completely screwed up when I return to San Francisco.

One of the nice things about being here is that I can't see NBC's coverage of the Olympics. Instead, I have Eurosport, which is doing 24 hour coverage of nothing but the Olympics? You want curling? They've got it all.

It's really refreshing. The do a highlight reel every morning, and then do live coverage of pretty much everything during the day, and time shift their way through the night.

Yeah, it's in German. Yeah, they don't have Dick Button. Nobody's perfect.

Summer Sanders was always considered a great addition to any US Swim team because she always had her best swims on relays, just killing herself for her country and her teammates. Even when her individual results were lacking, she always kicked ass on the relays. What a shame Shani Davis cannot feel the same way. I am guessing he does not have much national pride? It certainly seems he only cares about individual results and not about any other. Davis is only in one race, Hederick is in 5, including the same race Davis is in. Hederick wants the US team to do well.

When Ted Ligety won the gold in combined, he was tackled by teammates, and then hoisted up on their shoulders. There was much celebration by the whole team. Everybody was thrilled for him! When Chad Hedrick won his gold, last Olympics' champion of the same event, an American, was by the track in tears for his friend. Should Davis win gold, I doubt any of that happens.

Great athletes step forward and perform whenever they can. "They want the ball" to quote a really bad movie. Others don't.

I've actually found the coverage of this years Olympics rather tasteful and restrained. I haven't watched anything on the parent network, but the hockey and curling that I've watched on USA and CNBC have been almost completely devoid of the sappy melodrama that had become the core of Olympic coverage the last time I paid attention to such things. Pretty much the only piece of personal information that's been imparted about the curlers is that one of them owns a pizza place -- no struggles against dread diseases or a paralyzing fear of ice.

One thing that does bother me: the camera angles used for curling. Why do they show the lead releasing the stone from his frontside, in close-up, so you can't tell where he's positioned on the lane? It strikes me that filming him from behind, like pro-bowling does, or from above would give the audience a better sense of what the team is trying to do on a given throw. But I don't want to complain too loudly. I am very happy that I can watch curling at all, and truly ecstatic that I can watch it live.

And King: no shout out for the U.S. women's curling team picking up their first victory in an exciting match against Denmark? For shame...

King, I know you have a dislike for the judged sports, or the events that feature one athlete after another. Why isn't the team pursuit in ice skating for you then? It's straight up heads up battlin! There is strategy involved- what team members to put on the ice, how to stagger them at the start, how to skate so close together without getting a seventeen inch blade lodged in your thigh, etc. It actually kind of reminded me of the team time trials at the Tour de France in a way... but anyway- here is an even that took your boredeom-inspiring race against the clock and revamped it- now your time doesn't matter at all, so long as it's faster than the team you are currently skating against.

Also- I like those freestyle moguls. But maybe we could make it more interesting by removing the judging aspect- you could put flags down the course like slalom or downhill, give them score based purely on time and not missing flags- and add a high jump bar at each of the two jumps! This way, all the things you have to do require no judging! I think I'm onto something. Look for Freestyle Highjumping in British Columbia.

Naked supermodel flamethrower fighting . . . an image that will carry me gleefully through two meetings and a conference call. Ahhhhh.

...but I saw it as part of the local Chicago NBC affiliate's "ancillary" coverage of the Olympics. One of the members of the four-man bobsled/bobsleigh team is a strongly religious man who wanted to observe the Shroud, so his teammates accompanied him to the church where it's displayed. However, they saw only a "facsimile" of the actual Shroud, which is in highly delicate condition and will be not be shown to the public for several more years.

I care who wins some of the events, but I guess I just don't care enough to sit through hours of coverage to find out when a click of the mouse gets me the info a lot sooner. I guess it's kind of like the Australian Open or the Indy 500, I want to know who wins more than I want to watch it happen.

If I could watch the games live it would be a lot more exciting. But the pre-packaged focusing on the American athletes stuff just doesn't work anymore for me. I wonder if this will be the last olympics televised in this format. The Vancouver games probably can't be because of the time difference since the usual prime-time events will not have even happened when it's prime time in most of the country, and I doubt that in 2008 anyone is going to want to watch events in prime time when they heard the result 12 hours before.