and now for something completely different...

Why is curling so oddly compelling?

Yesterday I ended up watching the entire women's gold medal curling match. I don't know why, but it was riveting television...far superior then all of that ice skating NBC has been forcing down our collective throats for the past 2 weeks.

Maybe it was riveting just because I was trying to figure out how the whole thing worked, but after that is seemed to become a strategic mix of chess and billiards, adding in the whole sliding a granite stone down a sheet of ice and getting it to "curl" and stop exactly where intended.