« Buddy Ryan's Fantasy Team | Main | Andy Reid Fires Himself! And Reporters In Philly Swarm! »

November 12, 2006

Curling the Rock in The House

It's sort of like shuffleboard on ice, only with Canadian accents and appropriate levels of game-specific jargon

Prior to last night, my experience with the sport/ game of curling had been limited mostly to snippets of Olympic coverage in moments of February insomnia. I was pretty down with it, in a sort of team handball kind of way: I didn't know too much about it, but it looked like it would be pretty fun to play. Also, it definitely suggested a darts-and-bocce-you-can-down-cocktails-whilst-you-play-it vibe.

Check, check, and check. Good times at the Granite Curling Club in North C@L last night (the only dedicated curling sheet in the continental U.S. west of North Dakota!). My quick hits on curling:

Excellent jargon, as expected: as might be expected from a Canadian game, curling employs a most excellent catalog of game-specific jargon. The big grantie things that you push down the ice are called "rocks." Pretty straightforward. The big target area? That's called "the house." You don't throw the rock, you "curl" the rock. And the starting gate thingie is called the "hack"; you set up in the "hack position." Anyhoo, it was fun curling rocks into the house, especially when we replaced "house" with "hizzie."

You'll shoot your eye out: prior to stepping on the sheet (the ice), we got a lot of instructions in re: proper technique and safety for not falling on our asses on when curling, including a charming instructional video (which featured a cheery group of sneior citizens learning to curl). After watching the videos, I was pretty convinced that someone was going to break a wrist. But then we got out on the ice, and it was nearly as slippery as I expected. I guess the insturctional video should have been the hint that we weren't exactly the target market for all this. (No one broke their wrist.)

He Hit The F***ing Bull: so when you curl, you're supposed to aim at the target at the other end of the sheet provided by your skip (whose job it is to call the shots and tell you where to shoot it). There was a shot where I disagreed with our skip's strategy and pointed at another spot instead. Dude. The curling instructor sprinted the length of the sheet to give me a stern talking-to in re: why you don't shake off your skip in curling. She was extremely serious about this -- no questions, no excuses. When I protested that we were all new and couldn't aim the thing at all and why shouldn't I offer suggestions to the skip, she told me that this was just how it was done in curling. Gotcha. I shall never disagree with my skip again!

Don't do crack; it's a ghetto drug: as the photo above makes abundantly clear, curling is not a great sport if your jeans don't quite fit. Let's just say that there was much hitching-up-of-trousers prior to moving into the hack position.

BONUS Sonics coverage: outstanding piece in this week's Stranger (of all places) about the Sonics, Luke Ridnour, and why Nick Licata is a stupidface. Many thanks to the folks who tipped me off on this one -- it was outstanding. And not just because it sounds like this guy thinks the exact same things about the Sonics that I do (and by that I mean that he thinks that Luke Ridnour is undertalented). It's a great piece though -- a good sports piece, but more than that as well. Go Stranger.

Posted by thatkid at November 12, 2006 3:07 PM under C@L , Sonics , Sports , ThatKid

Comments

Posted by: Olivia at November 13, 2006 2:56 PM

Post a comment

About ThatKid

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 thatkidinthecorner