Well, all right, fine. Here's my take on the proposed rules changes, which comes from my extensive background of knowing nothing about figure skating and caring less: Alas for our poor hypothetical judge and his Hawaiian vacation, it does seem like the new rules should be pretty effective at preventing straight-up bribery. Amazing how the skating powers, baffled for decades by this problem, managed to come up with a solution in a few days.

I doubt the skating world will long put up with flying 14 folks in to every competition when only seven of them will be working. It would still be a waste of money to try to bribe judges if there were, say, three judges whose votes don't count.

It's good that they're getting rid of the 6.0 scoring system, which is seriously flawed, leading as it does to judges giving lower marks to skaters who skate early to "leave room" for later contestants. And also, once you've given someone a 6.0, what do you do if the next skater's just a little bit better?

But none of this changes the fact that the skaters are still subject to the whim of very subjective judges. They're still going to get lower marks for not smiling just so, for having costumes the judges don't like, for having performed poorly in the past, for being the type of girl who tunes up her own car. There will still be controversies. I think this is actually good for the sport, commercially, because the controversies are what keep people tuning in in such huge numbers.

But I don't think that a year from now, when these changes, or whatever these changes become after they've passed through various committees, are in effect, figure skating will be taken any more seriously as a sport. It'll still be what it is now: a sideshow that some folks love, some folks love to hate, and most folks ignore except in Olympic years, when they obsess over it.

The ongoing drama over the pairs skate overshadowed not just the hockey and the curling and the flying down the mountains, it even overshadowed figure skating's weird cousin, ice dancing, the finals of which were contested Monday.

NBC announcer Tom Hammond actually got a little apoplectic as the last group of skaters prepared to take the ice because the French couple, Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, used excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in their routine. Hammond was offended, he said, because "it trivializes a majestic moment in American history."

I think King's memory will survive the affront, but I'm not sure civilization itself is safe in the face of those outfits the French pair wore. With tattered bits of cloth and little medallions flying everywhere and some kind of rope motif winding around Peizerat's torso and one leg, they looked like the third runners up in the "make your own costume in five minutes with whatever's at hand" contest at a cast party for "Cats."

That shredded, "Cats" touring company look is big in ice dancing, as are moves straight out of bad '80s music videos. The Canadian pair, Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, busted out some dramatic, we are a part of the rhythm nation poses before starting their routine to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," and you just couldn't help laughing. What was the deal in the '80s with people posing with their outstretched fingers in front of their face and their cheeks sucked in?

But I digress. The Canadians fell spectacularly at the very end of their routine, both of them. He lifted her, lost his balance, and they went tumbling, but Bourne, even before she hit the surface, raised her arms -- she was horizontal, so she actually stretched them parallel to the ground -- in that smiling, ta-da! pose, which she held even as she and Kraatz, entangled, splatted onto the ice. Then she crawled over to her sprawled partner and, smiling, planted a kiss on his lips. The spill knocked them out of medal contention -- the fashion-forward French won the gold -- but it proved a point that NBC had tried to make emphatically earlier in the evening: Canadians are cool. (And goofy, but NBC missed that aspect.)

You heard me: Canadians are cool. It seems that a combination of their snazzy Olympic gear and worldwide sympathy for the plight of Sale and Pelletier has turned Canada into the baddest country on the planet. That's right. Canada. It's north of Iowa somewhere. Look at a map.

Canada is so cool that at one point, NBC was running a Jimmy Roberts report about how Canada is the coolest thing going in Salt Lake City at the same time that MSNBC was running a different report, by Kerry Sanders, about how Canada is the coolest thing going in Salt Lake City. I'm not sure what this convergence said the most about: Canada, NBC or Salt Lake City. But I hope our Canadian friends are enjoying their moment, because it's hard to imagine it lasting.

Here's wishing the same could be said for the f--ure s---ing c-----versy (I can't even stand to type it anymore), but we all know now that it's going to outlast the cockroaches. Well, all of us except Bonny Warner, a former luge champion who's now an NBC bobsled-luge-skeleton commentator. Talking about the controversy that's surrounded women's two-man bobsledder Jean Racine, who fired her pusher (that's the person who pushes and then rides in back) and best friend, Jen Davidson, two weeks before the Olympic trials, Warner said, "There's no doubt that controversy is not good for a sport."

And that's the dumbest thing anybody's said yet, including me.

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