A front-page article in today's LA Times provides fodder for today's blog.  The front-page headline is innocuous:  "A bid to shake up Utah's liquor laws."  On an interior page, blazing across all six columns:  "Tearing down the Zion curtain?"
 
Now, the article is more balanced than the headlines would have one believe.  In fact, if anything, it supports the current Utah liquor laws.  It might be hard to see that, given the incendiary backpage headline and the article's continual reminder that the "politically powerful Mormon Church" controls things in Utah.  But even if I weren't in support of Utah's liquor laws, it would be tough for me to rush to change them because (gasp) they "stymie Salt Lake City's otherwise flourishing culinary scene and slow the growth of the state's $7.4 billion tourism industry."  Or, how about this:  "'It's silly--ridiculous'" that a restauranteur has the aesthetic of his restaurant hurt, or that a bartender has to pour drinks out of view of his patrons.

OMIGOSH!  LET'S TEAR DOWN THE ZION CURTAIN!!!!

Utah is being compared to the former Soviet bloc in a front-page article of the Times--and why?  It's liquor laws are different from California's?  And there is a sinister undertone in the "grandfatherly" voice of Apostle D. Todd Chistopherson because--why?  The Mormon Church favors limiting alcohol consumption?

This one, I confess, is a little easier to follow than some others from this week.  Hollywood has been in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, and when Hollywood can't get its drinks the way it wants them, heads will roll.  The Times is merely helping to roll the heads.

Along these same lines, I wonder why in the world I was led to believe that the Sochi Olympics were going to be the worst since Berlin in 1936.  Or what is so political about climate variations?  Or why, in the midst of the worst drought in 500 years, California doesn't just desalinate water from the largest ocean on earth?  There's a reason for everything, and it usually has nothing at all to do with such mundane things as the Olympics or climate variation or water.  It's usually tied in with someone's financial or emotional or political investments, and the only reason we are supposed to believe that contemporary Russia is worse than the former Soviet Union, or climate change means to vote for one candidate and not another, or there's something wrong with desalinated water (other than the tastelessness) is because somebody somewhere probably has a finger in some pot of money. 

Vives les Jeux Olympiques!

For some reason, it seems appropriate to praise the Olympics in French.  If my spelling is wrong (it usually is in French, and increasingly in English), tell me soon.  Or let it ride and make fun of me privately.

I love the Olympics.  I have a special affection for the Winter Olympics, having grown up in Siberia--I mean Southeastern Idaho.  We watched the Summer Olympics with a large dose of jealousy.  We knew we could never compete in the summer games because we could never play summer sports long enough to get good at them.

But winter sports!

I mean, I played hockey outdoors.  None of this wimpy, ice dancing in an indoor rink.  Indoor ice was always soft and squishy and just a little wet.  When outdoor ice got that way (sometime around May), we gave up hockey for our summer job of gaining weight for the coming winter.

Those of my friends who could ski (I never successfully did that on snow) could do it year-round in Idaho.  When the snow turned to water, they water-skied (I did that successfully--once).  Maybe that's why so many great skiers were born in Idaho (Picabo Street, Christin Cooper, Jeret "Speedy" Peterson,,  and Sage Kotsenberg).

But for me, it's all about hockey.  When the games were in Salt Lake City in 2002, I paid to send my daughter to watch obscure hockey games (the only ones we could afford) and made her report back to us so I could vicariously live the moment.  When Russian hockey coach, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov, said that no other medals were as important to Russians as the gold in ice hockey, I thought I had truly found a kindred spirit.  Idaho really is a part of Siberia.  Idahoans and the Siberians truly understand each other.  Yeah, figure skating is really nice, and last Olympics I really got into curling (there is a large part of my heart devoted to all things Canada), and I understand the hunting roots of the biathlon (see my last blog about Bambi's mom), but it's really all about hockey.

I mean if we're talking about the Olympics only in terms of sport.

But they're not really just sports are they?  They are all sorts of things:  cultural exchange, international love-fest, war-prevention strategy, travelogue, history lesson, geography lesson, foreign language lesson (isn't the Cyrillic alphabet fun?  don't you love the idea that "Sochi" can be spelled c--o--upside-down h--backward n?).  I think if I spent the rest of my life just learning every language in the world, I could die in the midst of a spree of fun (all right, I'm an admitted nerd anyway).

As long as I can pause every once in awhile for the Stanley Cup and the Olympics.