Check Your TV Temperature: Do You Have Olympic Fever?

I'm really glad Diane Werts wrote all about the Olympics coverage and where to find it, even on the Internet, so I didn't have to. Her comprehensive rundown, and instruction manual, was written for TV WORTH WATCHING, and can be found in today's FOR BETTER OR WERTS column.

Which leave me to ponder the bigger Olympics question regarding these gazillion hours of TV coverage, which is: Now that NBC has built it, will we come?

I'm not feeling any heat-flash waves of Olympics fever this time around. Not yet, anyway.

During the Winter Olympics, I'm pre-sold, because I have an indefensible fascination with the recently added Olympics sport of curling. But for the Summer Games, I rely on the mass media to get me worked up about specific athletes, sports and matchups. This time, the media haven't done their job well enough -- at least regarding the athletes themselves.

Oh I'm interested in the Beijing Olympics, all right. But before they begin, I'm most interested simply because they're in Beijing. The protests when the Olympic torch was being passed from runner to runner, that interests me. The uneasy opening and closing of certain web sites to visiting journalists at Olympic press sites, that interests me. The horrible air quality, the opening-night ceremony as an international showcase for China's new image, that interests me.

And oddly, I've found myself fascinated by the architecture of the sites erected for these 2008 Summer Olympics. The beehive-gone-amok design of the National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube. The dizzying National Stadium's "Bird Nest" design. I don't know how compelling the events held inside these venues will be over the next few weeks, but the exteriors show a dazzling amount of imagination and creativity.

But am I out of step, oohing and aahing the buildings and knowing more of their names than I do of the athletes within them. Do you have Olympic fever yet? And if you do, can you help infect me?