Across The Hog Line, With John Cullen

It's a strange thing to have a sports fandom that operates on something like the same life cycle as a cicada, but I do, and curling is that sport. Even by the standards of Olympic sports that I barely know how to watch, curling is both abstracted and wonderful to me—the opacity of it, the ASMR-adjacent audio experience, the strange and specific mastery required. I wanted to talk about curling before the Olympics go back into hibernation, and happily we were able to get John Cullen—author of the new book Curling Rocks! , host of the award-winning CBC curling podcast Broomgate , among other notable podcasts, and a former elite curler himself—on the pod to talk to us about it.

First we started with some other things, and anyone who wishes to skip past a long discussion of how I came to purchase Barstool-branded coffee at a deep discount, and why I now have it sitting in my home, should start the pod around the 15-minute mark. But those 15 minutes are densely packed, and include a long-awaited peek behind the curtain of my grocery shopping process, a deep reading of the (extensive) text on the package of Dan Katz's signature coffee product, the phrase "positive vibes" as a marker of the exact opposite of positive vibes, and John's experience recording too-spicy-for-TV jokes for a restaurant commercial.