Here's something: those Chinese ice skaters with the guy with the bum Achilles tendon, their routine tonight lined up perfectly with "Middle of Nowhere" by Hot Hot Heat, which I happened to be listening to while the TV was on mute and the figure skating was on. Sure, it's not The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon, but I was still taken by this discovery, and made Robbie watch it when he got home from Whole Foods. He was unimpressed.

I have to say, though, having a DVR has really improved the Olympics for us. Not only can we skip over every segment with Dick Button, but we can also have it on in the background until we hear a commentator start yelling about a costly fall, and then we can back it up and watch the costly fall over and over again. It really takes the guesswork out of spectating.

Other than that, not too much is going on. I'm just working and getting ready for next week, when I go to Germany, a trip I have the sneaking suspicion I haven't previously announced in this blog. I'm going, though, and it should be pretty awesome, even though I have what I strongly believe to be the worst itinerary between two first-world destinations in the history of flight next Tuesday. In fact, I'll offer a prize to anyone who can guess how many airports I'll be visiting before I arrive at Julie and Tobias' (obviously, some of you are disqualified from guessing). Once I get there, though, it should be great fun, and I have my iPod and some new books to keep me busy for the traveling.

And finally, a happy Valentine's Day to all of you. I speak sincerely when I say that I think this is the most beautiful love affair between a girl and a small group of friends, family, old acquaintances, in-laws, regular late-night visitors, and someone I don't know in Indiana that ever was.

So a conversation I had today got me to thinking, and I thought I'd present my question to all of you. Let's say I was interested in expanding my Netflix queue, and let's say it had crossed my mind that I haven't seen many David Lynch movies. Let's say also that I couldn't sleep a full night for a month after I saw Mulholland Drive, and that the twenty minutes of "Twin Peaks" that I saw pretty much left me wide-eyed and twitching for all of eighth grade. (Come on, though, the backwards-forwards-talking dwarf? That was creepy.) Would it be a mistake to add Blue Velvet to my queue?

And now, a question (actually, several) from Mad $, who asks, "What are your views on curling and on the DC curling team, in particular. Who are your picks for the curling gold medals next week in Turin? And for a bonus question, which Piedmonese wine would you recommend to accompany the watching of the curling finals?"

Well, Mad $, I am almost completely indifferent to curling as an Olympic sport, although it seems like a fun hobby. To me, it seems like synchronized swimming or rhythmic gymnastics, in that, sure, it's probably actually quite physically taxing and it's fun to watch while you're eating some nachos or something, but basically, you still look like you're out there horsing around, and so it's hard to take curlers seriously as splendid examples of the Olympic ideal. That said, I am one thousand percent in favor of the DC curling team, because I am strongly pro-DC-voting-representation and I think it's a travesty that they don't already have it, so anything that draws attention to their plight and embarrasses the rest of the country on this issue is swell as far as I'm concerned. And I think it's fair to say that the DC curling team would certainly embarrass the rest of the country.

As you no doubt already know, thirteen countries are fielding teams in Olympic curling. Obviously the smart money would be on Norway or Great Britain, which won the gold in men's and women's curling, respectively, in 2002, but my mother and her investment portfolio are convinced that the Finns can do anything, and also last night I was reading a history of Finland and it was pretty interesting, so I'm tempted to back them for at least one curling gold. Not to mention that the Finns have sentimental favorite Markku Uusipaavalniemi, who is also a world-class (okay, maybe just Finn-class) diver and who built his own curling rink where the team could train. Also, the Olympic website lists his height as "187," and how could you not back a man who's over 15 feet tall? So, I'm going with Finland for the men, and, let's see, Great Britain for the women again.

And finally, since no Piedmontese wines are actually made in Turin, I think it would be a serious party foul to serve any during the Olympics. Much smarter to go with some nice Cinzano.

And now, while I'm awaiting more questions, it's time for Dreams I Have Had Lately, The Upcoming Travel Edition.

1. I arrive in Muenster only to discover, first, that Heather is already there, and second, that she and Julie are addressing invitations to a party. There's a stack of maybe fifty. I finally figure out that it's a party for a couple we know (I think it was the Buebbeseses, but it may have been Matt and Courtney). "I didn't know we were having a party," I say. "Oh, we didn't think you'd want to come, so we didn't invite you," Heather says. Julie, like a good hostess and cotillion alumna, is dismayed by the awkward situation.

2. Having taken the popular Muenster-Detroit flight back to the states, I learn while in the Detroit airport that USAir has booked the rest of my itinerary as Cincinnati-Cleveland, Cleveland-Pittsburgh. My parents, who are traveling with me, have a direct flight. "They can't do this to me," I say, plaintively, to my parents. "Sure they can," my father says, in the tone of voice he always uses to say "Sure they can," which I found incredibly annoying as a child and which, naturally, I've inherited. "This happens in business travel all the time. You need just need to take a cab to the Cincinnati airport." I think about renting a car and driving back to Pittsburgh, but figure that then the airline would confiscate my luggage. On my way to the taxi stand, I trip getting on the escalator, and spend the rest of the dream face-down in a sort of interior landscaping made of aquarium gravel.

Discussion questions:

1. Do we even know fifty people? If not, then who were they?
2. Why would USAir book me through both a Delta hub and a Continental hub?
3. Wouldn't it have been funnier and more topical if my itinerary had been Detroit-Denver, Denver-Indianapolis, Indianapolis-Cincinnati, Cincinnati-Pittsburgh?

And now, a question posed by my favorite (and, since we are being honest here, only) reader on Capitol Hill: "In your view, what are the major internal and external challenges facing (my address, deleted to weed out the more unambitious stalkers) and how would you, as resident, address these challenges?" (Here I should note in passing, again to be honest, that when I read this question out loud in my mind, it's totally in the soothing schoolmarmish voice.)

In the short term, the challenges we face here are numerous, but I believe that with concerted effort they can be solved. Internally, the most pressing challenge comes from the smoke detector in the kitchen, initially installed as a safety device but prone to constant, annoying false alarms that terrify the Commodore whenever we turn on the oven. I hardly think I need to remind my readers of the new safety risk, the little-boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome, if you will, posed by constant overstatement of the threat level in our kitchen, and so I propose in this forum, for the first time, that an exploratory committee be formed to consider moving the smoke alarm to an adjacent dining room wall. This may come as a shock to other members of the household who just got done putting the smoke detector up in the first place, but an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure in this case, especially if the alternative is putting the Commodore in therapy.

Next is the internal challenge posed by the Commodore himself, who keeps climbing on the television set. As he is likely to keep gaining weight, and as the set tips slightly even now when he jumps up on top of the TV, valid concerns have been raised about the set tipping over entirely one day, resulting in the loss of one of our most cherished possessions. The excellent solution has already been proposed, multiple times, of buying a sort of TV hutch thing with a top, allowing the Commodore to reach his ultimate goal of looking out the window above the television with little risk to the TV itself. However, naysayers on the other side of the sofa have proposed the alternate solution of not doing that. I think my readers will agree that this is a futile cost-cutting measure with potentially dire consequences.

Externally, the only short-term challenge facing us is that of the thing in the planting bed next to the driveway. When we first moved in, the temporary working theory was proposed, possibly by me, that this was a tree that was somehow out of season in July, but I think the time has come to face two hard facts: first, that it is overwhelmingly more likely that it is a weed that the ne'er-do-wells who lived here before us let get way out of hand, and second, that even if it is a tree, it's ugly and I don't like it. Discussions of what to do about this thing have become bogged down by the choice of cutting implements available to us--some advocate purchasing a hatchet, while others believe a saw would work fine. Action must be taken before the spring weed-growing season, however, or I'll be out there digging the damn thing out myself with a spoon.

In the long term, we are faced with two more intractable challenges, one internal and one external. Internally, there is the problem of clothes storage. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm content with two pairs of pants and a couple of shirts and have a strict something-in-something-out rule, but other members of the household are vastly more fashion-conscious, a problem that is exacerbated by the external threat that someone will give him another t-shirt and if you do I swear to God I will cut you while you sleep. Currently, other members of the household store their clothes in three closets and two and a half dressers, and there is simply not enough space should the clothing storage needs of our house increase, either by the addition of more clothes or by the addition of additional members, an acquisition that I should stress for Chi's benefit is absolutely not pending at this time. The solution that I propose for this is that in three years we move, and possibly abandon everything we already own in the process.

I have saved for last the most unpleasant and difficult long-term external problem facing our household. Many of us would like to ignore it, but increasingly we cannot: the fact is that dogs are increasingly walked past our house and not cleaned up after, in flagrant disregard of posted fines and potential imprisonment. Other members of our household had to clean up the front lawn three times last weekend, and here I take full responsibility for exacerbating the already tense situation by saying, "Well, come on, you can't tell me anyone in your family ever cleaned up after Marly ever, can you?" This was a tactical error, and I regret it. I informally plan to keep an eye on the lawn whenever possible and find a reason to appear suddenly on the front porch if I sense suspicious activity, but this may not be enough. However, discussions are also underway to somehow train the Commodore to cope with these threats, which would be an excellent use of his nearly infinite free time, and I'm hopeful that this will provide additional manpower, er, catpower to deal with the issue.

I'm still taking submissions, and I think we can agree that the first two questions have been a roaring success, so let's keep them coming.

From the comments we have Tizzed, who asks, "What made the previous post so damn funny?"

Well, Tizzed, I don't know that it was billed as "so damn funny" and had it been it certainly wouldn't have delivered, but the moderately funny thing about my last post was that I wouldn't immediately realize why Adam had sent me that article, because his dad is in the picture. He's the tall guy to the right of center, and he (well, he and the other people in the photo) got to ring the bell because it was Adobe's 20th anniversary of trading on the NASDAQ. Adam later sent me another photo where they're all standing around on a street outside the NASDAQ like it's a very, very alternate take of the cover of The Joshua Tree, but this was the article that I first read, so I thought it was the right one to post.

I did consider if there were any regular readers who might not recognize my father-in-law, but I couldn't come up with any, because I forgot that you and your succubus didn't actually come to our wedding. I figured with the daughter-in-law comment that it was at least moderately obvious, though. Actually, when I first posted I had you pegged as making a crack about how the hot girl modeling conservative t-shirts on the sidebar must be my mother-in-law, but then I reloaded and the hot girl modeling conservative t-shirts wasn't there anymore, so that was probably what put the kibosh on that.

Next up, we have a question from Adam, submitted via IM. His requires more thought, though.

Okay, I'd been reluctant to bring out the heavy artillery in this monthlong drought of bloggable material (interpret that as you will), but it's getting a little ridiculous, so it's meme time. As hip as you may think yourself, this still hurts me more than it hurts you, so be a sport and go along with it.

Our meme is simple: you ask me a question, and I answer it truthfully in a blog entry, whatever it is (within obvious limits). For example, you might ask, "What one song most reminds you of Dr. J every time you hear it?", and instead of the obvious answer that everyone would think of, I'd say, quite truthfully, that it is They Might Be Giants' "James K. Polk." (Sorry, I was just listening to that, and so it was on my mind.) You get the idea. I think this might go better with someone who isn't unrelentingly truthful at all times, but we'll do the best we can.

(Edit: not to imply that yesterday was part of the drought! No, that was a wellspring right there. I was speaking more generally.)

Adam just sent me this and I thought it was pretty awesome. So I thought I should put it up here, what with my birthday shout-out this year being so poorly received and all. (On the other hand, I carefully read the whole article before I figured out why Adam sent it to me, and then I sent it to Heather and she figured it out instantly, so maybe this isn't total compensation. Especially since Heather is off the daughter-in-law market.)