Truth be told, as I’ve pointed out frequently, I hate winter. Cold and ice aren’t for me. My DNA programmed me for tropical living, but somehow the message got garbled on the way to my parents.
So here I sit and shiver in Berks County, wondering when global warming is going to permanently seize squatter’s rights here.
Suffice it to say that I find frigid temps to be rather arctic if not downright barbarian.
Give me the glazing, jiggling heat of summer anytime. Let the hot breath of a burnt-orange sun boil my pale skin and usher sizzling spears of sunshine into my retinas.
After all, that’s why they invented sunblock and sunglasses.
So, it shouldn’t come to as a shock to all of you that I will essentially ignore the upcoming Winter Olympic Games, a hodgepodge of sham sports that somebody who got stuck in a snowdrift long ago in Lapland invented out of the sheer boredom of disorienting emptiness.
The Winter Olympic Games don’t stir my drab soul because just looking at all those snowy landscapes wraps around me like a cold, wet towel.
Next month’s 2018 Winter Olympics will take place in South Korea. What genius made that decision? Nothing like holding a winter sports carnival in the world’s most unstable nuclear hot spot.
Pyeongchang is the host city. Or is it PyeongChang? Evidently even its city fathers are confused on the spelling, let alone the media.
Granted, I realize that the approaching Games have the North and South Koreans at least talking again and reportedly North Korean athletes will compete.
Of course, if they don’t all medal, will that give North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, he of the flattering haircut, an excuse to finally scratch that notoriously itchy nuclear trigger finger of his?
My wife will be glued to the Winter Olympics so I suspect I will catch some of the corpuscle-popping excitement of ice dancing. And I have to concede that those skiers who glide down mountains of snow like so many strands of blown grass do exhibit extraordinary balance.
But it all becomes rather redundant quickly. After all, if you’ve seen one slippery slope, you’ve seen them all. But I admit that it is somewhat entertaining to see some skiers hit so many gates their skis resemble thresher blades.
The ice skaters wear absurd outfits and a triple axel, a triple toe loop and a Salchow are almost as confusing as the judges’ scoring.
Of course, some of the events require a ton of guts, events that would turn me into a quivering pat of butter unless I already had been transformed into a popsicle.
Snowboarding, ski jumping and luge (in which folks plummet down a glacier-slick mountainside while strapped to a tiny toboggan) require equal amounts of courage and insanity.
But I would rather discuss Russian literature with a polar bear than watch the nerve-numbing biathlon.
Perhaps it would give the Winter Olympics the buzz it sorely needs if Kim Jong-un joined the North Korean bobsled team and his bobsled came without brakes.
Now that would be fun to watch!
