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The Brother and lads in his digs take a dim view of the audio quality in CBC's coverage of figure skating.

"It's tinny," the Brother declared on Sunday night. "It's like listening to someone's sad little mini-tape recorder played over the phone to you. I mean, seriously, I'd rather hear the music when Tessa and Scott dance than listen to Kurt Browning chirping away about the intricacies of putting your left leg out and your right leg in. It's like a fella explaining the hokey-pokey."

I could only nod in agreement. I can only nod to most things right now. The Brother and the lads are not in their digs. They're in my home. They're up all night and in bed all day. When awake, glued to the TV watching the Winter Olympics. Oh, my shattered nerves. The other day, the Brother was online and in an almighty foul mood.

"What's going on?" I asked.

The answer was this: "I've joined an important forum: Stop Drugs In Curling."

So, dear readers, if anyone asks who is leading the war on drugs in curling, you can safely answer, "The Brother."

The snowboard competition had them gripped, briefly. Then they realized like everyone else that it was like a loop, the footage of fellas having multiple attempts at the same damn thing.

"You know the worst thing about being a snowboarder?" the Brother asked the lads.

The lads are three slouchy louts named Gerrit, Gavin and Dave.

" I do!" said Gavin. "Having to admit to yourself that you're boring."

The Brother acknowledged this as the truth itself.

No wonder this man has no girlfriend, I was thinking. "What happened with the young lady you were seeing?" I asked in an innocent voice.

"It was an amicable uncoupling," he said all too quickly.

Then Dave, the usually silent one, said, "She left him for a musician, guitar player in a band."

"Scott Russell on CBC looks tired," the Brother said, trying to change the subject. This amused me.

The Brother and the lads slept through the opening ceremony, as I knew they would. They awoke mid-morning and the first noise I heard was Gerrit moaning, "Tessa and and Scott, Tessa and Scott!"

The Brother came awake in a squall and said, "The way she looks at him!"

And Gavin replied by rote, "The way he looks at her!"

Days later and peppermint schnapps consumed, against my stern warnings, the curling intrigued them, and then it didn't. "Kevin Koe-eey!" they chanted, one of the warnings that schnapps had been consumed again.

"Where's Rita?" I inquired, worried about my cat.

"Rita's in Florida," was the reply. Before I could panic, it was explained that since Rita spends most of the winter months perched on a warm radiator in my house, the lads had named said radiator "Florida."

I was informed, too, that Rita likes the ski jumping and that she's gripped by it, when I'm not around. Things flying through the air! The lads took a shine to Japan's ski-jumping legend Noriaki Kasai, who is 45 years old and promising to return for the next Winter Games. He is, obviously, an inspiration to lazy-looking louts everywhere. It's never too late to truly shine.

There was commotion when Cassie Sharpe won gold in the freestyle halfpipe. The lads were in love. But their devotion to Tessa and Scott knows no bounds. There was utter silence during Monday night's climactic gold-medal skate. The kind of silence that comes over men when they look at beauty and grace and start to sweat.

"They are like Canada," the Brother said, when he could finally speak. "They epitomize this country. They're not a couple, it's not formal, it's just the vibe, it's just love. They're not together, and outside of their word, nobody understands how they can do that. That's Canada."

The probability of this being true stunned me. The gnomic truth of it. I broached the subject of the Brother's breakup with the girlfriend. Had he shown her his sensitive side? He hemmed and hawed, obviously exhausted by his brief epiphany about Tessa and Scott.

Dave smiled, vengefully. "Night after night, who treats you right, you know baby it's the guitar man," he announced.

Trouble was brewing. I ordered the lot of them out of the house and told them to convene at the Done Right Inn. "Don't talk to anyone," I said. "Unless you're explaining Tessa and Scott as emblematic of Canada."

Scott Russell is not half as tired as I am.

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