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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (4385)	4/2/2001 8:50:43 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6089

Brooms and these 42 lb. granite stones, it looks like shuffleboard in extreme slow motion. The first site google turned up was www.curling.com , but it has a for sale sign out. You could be a curling dot com baron!

To: Poet who wrote (4385)	4/3/2001 10:55:57 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6089

Yes, it's played with brooms on the ice. Though the brooms are not used to push the stone along. Rather, they are used to adjust the speed of the stone (if you brush the ice hard it melts it slightly and the stone moves faster and further. So the idea is for the thrower, or really slider since that's how it's done, to slide the stone with slightly less force (the technical term is weight) than it needs to get to where you want it to get to and the sweepers sweep just the right amount to get the stone to exactly the right place. Also, stones curl (move sideways) as they travel down the ice, and if you sweep them they move straighter because they can't bite quite as much on the slightly wet swept ice as on the dry unswept ice. So if the stone is starting to curl early, and might wreck on a guard (a stone out in front of the rings that you're trying to go just past so your stone will curl behind it and wind up buried under cover) you sweep the stone hard (actually sweep in front of the stone hard) to keep it from moving over onto the guard. All very highly technical strategy, requires skill not only in knowing what stone you want to hit at what angle to get a double raise or a freeze or a hit and roll or a nose hit, but reading the ice to see whether this stone is going to move more or less than you thought when it was released. There. That's more than you wanted to know about curling. But come on over this weekend and watch the world championship with me, and you'll get hooked. I guarantee it!