Gymnastics commentary is becoming intolerable. In a sport understood by a tiny fraction of the US viewing audience and in which fortunes are made and lost based on tiny asymmetries and hundredths of a point, you?d think that announcers would have plenty to talk about. Say, explaining why no one ever gets anything but a 9-point-something, even though the scoring is out of 10. Their repertoire seems limited to the following topics.

• Romanians are mystical beings who perform front handsprings in the womb and are trained from birth to be Olympians. Pretty much, that's all anyone does in Romania. How cute!
  
• The farthest distance between two points in the known universe is smaller, metaphorically, than that between Waukesha, Wisconsin, home of Paul Hamm, who just wants to focus on the sport and not on arguments about why we keep cheating the South Koreans at the Olympics, and Athens, Greece.
  
• Speculation about whether an athlete "ever thought he'd be here, in Athens, the birthplace of the Olympics."
  
• The tiny hop on the landing. No one sticks landings anymore.
  

Of all the things to talk about, the incessant comments about the hop on the landing bother me the most. To most TV watchers, the hop is the only easily visible thing. The rest requires some knowledge of gymnastics. Then, they go to the smug, "any fool could see that," tone to say that someone's routine was way better or way worse than the last one. They use wine words to clarify: "Oh, he was just so crisp there! The finish was really clean, and so smooth." There has of yet been no talk about anyone's nose, but it bet it's coming.

Also, Mrs. Lopes next door caught the groundhog and one of its children by baiting a trap with...no, not nice fresh vegetables, which the groundhog appears to love eating. The answer is pastry.