TONIGHT ON NBC -- OHNO AND DAVIS GO FOR GOLD: Olympic remainders:

• The Canadian curler who's 5 1/2 months pregnant.
• The twenty funniest figure skating faces of the Games.
• It's about time to start to get to know Kim Yu-Na, the South Korean figure skater who is as to the rest of the women's field in 2010 as Albert Pujols is to other hitters.
• No one yet knows whether Russian ice dancers Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin will be wearing their controversial aboriginal costumes for Sunday's original dance competition. (Compare with the 2000 Sydney Games, which allowed Midnight Oil to perform "Beds Are Burning" at the closing ceremonies while wearing black shirts which said "sorry".)
• The bobsleighers don't like the ice chute either.
• added! U.S. Speed Skating sponsor (and assistant sports psychologist) Stephen Colbert takes on a disturbing aspect of NBC's coverage -- while appearing on NBC.

OH LORD, STUCK IN A LODI AGAIN: Forbes brings you the twenty worst cities in America. A big shout-out for a local No. 2, Stockton, just edged out by Cleveland. Ohio and the California Central Valley can show ALOTT5MA fave Philadelphia (ha, No. 20!) what miserable is all about!

Here's the whole list, to avoid wading through the slideshow:

OTHERWISE KNOWN AS A ROADMAP FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS OF DINING OUT: Yesterday's announcement of the semifinalists for the 2010 James Beard Foundation Awards for chef/restaurant excellence will have a lot of familiar names for our readers across America, including:

• Stephen Starr, Lettuce Entertain You's Rich Melman and the guys who run Legal Sea Foods and Chipotle competing for Restaurateur of the Year.
• Tom Colicchio and Marc Vetri up for Chef of the Year. And among the nominees for Rising Star Chef of the Year is our favorite bearded cooking gnome, Kevin Gillespie of Woodfire Grill in Atlanta.
  
• Outstanding Restaurant semifinalists including Babbo, Vetri, Daniel, Vidalia and Spiaggia.
• Three Philadelphia contestants for New Restaurant of the Year, including Koo Zee Doo.
• Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is up for Wine and Spirits Professional.
• Beloved-by-my-Evidence-professor Arun Sampanthavivat among the Chicagoland nominees for Great Lakes Chef of the Year. And in addition to all the great Philadelphia chefs nominated in the Mid-Atlantic region, there's room for Bryan Voltaggio as well.
• Not a lot of love for Las Vegas -- only Picasso's Julian Serrano up for Restaurant of the Year, with Joël Robuchon getting the most nods in the specialized and regional categories.
  

WHO DOESN'T LIKE SAYING THE NAME 'DICK BUTTON'? More thoughts from Gretchen on last night's competition:

The men's free skate was everything Olympic figure skating should be -- extraordinary athleticism combined with grace, musicality, and even a little humor. Evan Lysacek's win was really a triumph for the new Code of Points. It seems like skaters are finally figuring out how to design programs that showcase not only jumps, but also the unsung elements of figure skating -- transitions, footwork, spins, and the quality of the skating. Evan's program was brilliantly designed to gather points at every moment. By contrast, Plushenko's program was basically a bunch of jumps, interspersed with the occasional hip swivel, strut, or blown kiss. It brought to mind his exhibition programs -- all preening, no actual skating. It was like he was doing Russian supper club choreography. Don't get me wrong -- I think he's a charismatic skater and his jumps are incredible -- but there's no question in my mind that Lysacek was the superior skater.

I loved Nobunari Oda's Charlie Chaplin tribute, and he gets major props for moving past the broken shoelace so quickly. (In 1994, Tonya Harding broke a shoelace before the long program and totally fell apart. Stephane Lambiel's closing spin, the highest-scoring spin of the night, moved so fast that I thought he might launch himself off the ice. Daisuke Takahashi was so good -- and if he had just been able to land that quad, he very well might have come away with the silver instead of the bronze. But my favorite program of the night was Johnny Weir's. He had the audience with him from the very beginning, and delivered the artistic performance of the evening. I thought he was ridiculously underscored on program components (including interpretation and choreography, where there's no way he should have been under Stephane Lambiel) but regardless of the scoring, he was really a star out there.

One final note: what is the future of the quad? As Adam pointed out and as Evan Lysacek demonstrated, the quad often isn't worth the risk. Only two skaters (Plushenko and Kazuka) delivered a clean quad last night. Four years ago, I thought that a quad would have been required for men's skating by now -- but then again, back in 1988, when Midori Ito was the first woman to land a clean triple axel in competition, I would have predicted that triple axels would have been de rigeur for women. Clearly, I was wrong both times. I wonder if we're just hitting the limit of the sport -- and if future developments in jumping will have to come from better skating technology, rather than from pushing the limit of the human body.

Video of all performances is here.

SO SORRY: Isaac has already discussed the upcoming Tiger Woods apologizapalozza, but hey, it gave EW an excuse to link to Dan Rydell's apology, so there's something worthwhile as a result, right?

PANTS ON THE ICE, PANTS ON THE ICE, LOOKIN' LIKE A FOOL IN THOSE PANTS ON THE ICE: One of the charms of the Winter Olympiad is that it marks the American public's quadrennial love affair with curling. Of course, the star of curling this year isn't (thus far) a team of strikingly attractive blondes, but pants. Namely, Norwegian curling pants--and yes, you can buy your own. If you're less sartorially and more mathematically inclined, there's "Curl With Math," which is basically FiveThirtyEight for curling.

FOR YOUR THOUGHTS: Take a look at the new back-of-the-penny design, which indeed (as one tweeter noted) looks like the logo for Abraham Lincoln's soccer team: