The Olympics are coming! The Olympics are coming!

Turned on the TV last night, and there on the screen, a mere 24 hours after the Super Bowl, were Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, the last two people you would have imagined seeing in the wake of Gronk and Nick Foles and Grumpy McGumplestein, aka Bill Belichick. At some undetermined point in time we went from setting the Liberty Bell on fire in Philadelphia to Tara and Johnny talking about Mikaela Shiffrin, and it was some strange stuff.

Of course, it was also some marvelous stuff, because Tara and Johnny on my screen could mean only one thing: The Winter Olympics are coming!

Four days after the Super Bowl, they open in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Thursday night, and the Blob is all manner of geeked. The Blob loves him some Winter Games, you see. He loves them way more than the Summer Games, because the Winter Games have the Summer Games beat all hollow on the Trauma Unit Scale -- which is another way of saying they can booger you up real good.

(And no, the Blob is not talking about that moment when Katarina, Dorothy or Sonja misses the triple axel and goes splat on her sequins. That's just figure skating. The only boogering up that happens there is when Tonya Harding gets her hands on a tire iron, or someone forgets to lock the East German judge in her room.)

No, sir. The true boogering up happens later, when they ice down the banking at Daytona (or something similar) and crazy people go flying down it on sleds, either feet-first or head-first. The feet-first people are the lugers, and they are only mildly insane. The head-firsters are the skeleton folks, and they are Our Only Available President And His Kooky Enablers Level insane.

Only marginally less insane are the Alpine skiers, a bunch of Svens and Gustavs falling down the side of a mountain in entertaining ways. They call this "skiing" because they're wearing boards strapped to their feet and they're (mostly) going downhill upright. But they're not fooling anybody. It's still what Buzz Lightyear once called it: Falling with style.

All sorts of ways you can seriously maim yourself, in these Games.  Even better than the downhill is the slalom and giant slalom, where they put up gates for you to trip over as you fall down the hill. Short-track speedskating, meanwhile, is like NASCAR at Martinsville, only with razor-sharp skates instead of tires. Last slashed carotid wins!

Then there's ski-jumping, where more people with boards strapped to their feet go flying into space off a ramp. Nobody knows why they do this. But not for nothing did ABC's Wide World of Sports use some poor ski-jumper falling off the ramp to illustrate the Agony of Defeat.

Heard enough, yet? Hey, we haven't even gotten to ice hockey (people on razor-sharp blades wielding sticks). Or how about speed skating (more razor-sharp blades)? Or even the biathlon, which combines skiing through the woods with a rifle on your back, occasionally stopping to shoot at stuff?

Yes, the peril factor is high in the Winter Games, which is what makes them so much fun. Plus, there is curling. Who doesn't like a sport whose equipment includes brooms? It's kind of like combining shuffleboard with housework.

Plus, there's that Danish women's team.

God love these Games.