The last benchmark before the arrival of spring

If I keep this up, Gabriel at ModFab is going to beat me senseless for trespassing on his cultural turf.

But perhaps the most fun read of the morning is Salon's interview with U.S. National Figure Skating championship Jonny Weir.

Now, to be honest, I haven't followed skating much the last few years, for all that I used to be a HUGE fan. I even ran a World Figure Skating Championship pool at my football/NCAA basketball-crazed place of employment one year. (The biggest testosterone-crazed football fans were the ones who got the most into it.) For a couple of years, I did some database and desktop publishing work for Ice Theatre of New York and even took some skating lessons, where I just absolutely, positively, could NOT get the hang of right-over-left crossovers.

I never much cared for the traditional skaters; I liked the ones who were INTERESTING. And for a while, after the Kerrigan/Harding smackdown (and was I the only person in America who cheered when Kerrigan got her knee whacked?), there were enough people able to cash in on the notoriety that skaters who DIDN'T win gold medals were able to find work. But skating has always had its rebels and iconoclasts: Debi Thomas, who insisted on being herself but ended up getting spooked by the Katarina Witt hype. Christopher Bowman, the straightest male skater ever, a huge talent who was determined to break all the rules and ended up forgetting how to skate. Gary Beacom, who often defied the laws of physics, got kicked out of the 1984 Olympics for refusing to get off the ice after compulsory figures. Nicole Bobek, skating's favorite slut; another huge talent plagued with consistency problem. Allen Schramm, perhaps the oddest oddball to ever hit the ice, whose career went nowhere and is now a choreographer. Rory Flack and her unbelievable Russian splits. The Duchesneys, the hottest brother/sister ice dancers in history. These two generated so much heat that it was often uncomfortable to watch them.

The problem is that most skaters are hopelessly conventional. Sure, Michelle Kwan is great, but after almost ten years, she's a yawn. Men's skating in the U.S. was dominated for too many years by Andrew Lloyd Weber devote and perennial also-ran Todd Eldridge and Michael "Look how straight I am! I have a hot blond wife whom I keep knocking up!" Weiss, neither of whom could quite bring home the goods.

But now there's the gloriously iconoclastic and gleefully snarky Jonny Weir, a.k.a. "Tinkerbell", who despite being in seventh place after a less-than-stellar short program, is worth a look in the freeskate.

(UPDATED to correct misspelling of "championship" as "championwhip". The latter involved too many visions of Tom DeLay in spangled spandex -- an image to monstrous to even contemplate.)