Well, the winter Olympics are almost over and I have some slight shame that I have not watched a single event or performance. I’ve followed it on the news, though, but the focus there seems to be more on the spectacular fails. Like Lindsey Vonn only making it for thirteen seconds down the hill before she broke her leg. Or the so-called Quad God in figure skating falling to the ice and making us all worried that in the future he might be down to triple at best. There’s no great rhyme that goes with the word triple, so the guy is kind of doomed. Triple Sickle has a nice sharp image, well suited to the skate blades, but sounds a bit too Soviet. Triple Nipple is an aspect of his body that the Quad God has tried to keep private, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so it’s a perfect rhyme but an unlikely contender as a replacement nickname.

The big surprise at the events was the cursing and the loud arguments and the alleged cheating. And no, not where you might expect it, in hockey or some other sport that relies on adrenaline and any other doping they can get away with, but curling. Let me repeat that. Curling. That’s that sport that nobody quite understands, and involves one man rolling a stone on slippery ice and two other men madly sweeping the ice in front to clear a smooth path, with the intensity of guys who haven’t cleaned their apartment in three months and guests are arriving for a party in the evening.

There has been widespread misreporting on the reason for the cursing. The truth is that the Swedish team mocked the Canadians for having cheap uniforms with inadequate moisture wicking, and the Canadian skip, not too quick on his feet, replied, “Fuck you, blondie.” It got worse from there.

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I’m old enough to remember when the guys I went to high school with used to complain about some subjects because they couldn’t see how they would be of any use to them in later life, when they were older and working in the real world. Many of those guys are now unemployed and don’t know how to speak French.

A classic complaint was about algebra and trigonometry, and I have to admit I was on their side on this one, because I didn’t plan to be a math prof, and so I had a hard time imagining how all those tans and cosines and square roots were going to be useful when, say, counting my change at the store to verify. Either because I was buying gum or there was the clerk at the cash register who had been working there for fifteen years since he had dropped out of high school.

I’m an adult now, a senior citizen even, and as I walk down the grocery aisle trying to figure out what I can afford this week, or doing the basic division to see if these two small jars of off-brand peanut butter are cheaper than this large jar of Kraft, I do wonder if algebra might speed up the process somehow. Maybe fractions aren’t enough and I need the help of more complicated calculations?

I roll my cart down the aisles very slowly, like it’s a walker on wheels. I’m looking for the red flags that indicate a sale. Now, it doesn’t matter how cheap the tins of sardines get, I’m not that desperate, and so I wouldn’t take them even if it was free. Some of my relatives used to eat them when I was growing up, and after they peeled back the lid, it was like a horrific maritime accident had taken place inside. Little fish, drowned in salty oil, all crammed in there like a mass grave, and the worst of it was that their goddamn heads were still attached. When I was a kid, my uncle used to start by taking out his pocket knife and gouging out one of the eyes just to get his taste buds prepared. He’d savour it like was red wine from a year that connoisseurs disagreed on, but I never witnessed a time when he sent it back. No. The head was the next thing to go and then the body (and tail, for fuck sake) was put into a slice of white bread and eaten like a Frankenstein hotdog. I still have nightmares.

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There’s a town called Harbour Grace in Newfoundland, the Canadian province I live in. It’s the oddly shaped island at the far east of the country (and for the record, Labrador on what Newfoundlanders call “the mainland,” is also part of the province). I’ve visited there and it’s a pretty little town, population less than three thousand. One of its claims to fame is that it was where Amelia Earhart took off from on May 20, 1932, to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

The town has a lovely statue in her honour, but this past April the horror happened. Someone stole the statue. This took some work. It’s life-sized and made of bronze and weighs over 300 kilograms. The good news is that it was recovered by the police in August, but frankly it was a little disturbing to look at the pieces she had been cut in to. It looked like the work of a demented serial killer. Her head had been cut off. Her two long boots (and legs) had been cut off at the knees. Her torso was cut in half and her head was chopped off too.

I don’t think the thieves had fully thought this through though. Sure, they pulled it off its pedestal in the town square and managed to do the mafia cutting work to make it more manageable to handle. But what now? This was big news in the province so they either had to keep the pieces in their houses and entertain their skeety friends when they dropped by for weed, or they had to melt it down. Were they thinking, maybe some big pots on the stove? Or an old oil drum? Whatever, these were guys who skipped not only math in school, but physics too. It takes a good 1,000 degrees Celsius to melt bronze.

A lot of the time, crime is often stupid like this, carried out by people just as stupid. There are no crackpot thieves who someone manage to remove all their DNA from the scene, and have connections at a foundry, or know some weird millionaire in eastern Europe who’s always wanted Earhart’s head on his mantelpiece. It’s never like that in real life. A bunch of guys get drunk, drag the statue to a town 30 km away, cut it up, and then get a dozen beer and go home talking all evening along the lines of, What the fuck are we going to do with this thing now?

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And that’s my time for this episode. Thanks for listening and please watch out for another set next Wednesday.