"Curling" up to dinner and the Winter Games

I'm curling up with a bowl of seafood soup and the Olympics in the sports bar at a bayside restaurant.  Lopez in the San Juan Islands, is just a stones throw away from Vancouver Canada.  I try things the baked oysters, and the Greek fisherman's stew.  I'm glad the food is adequate as I am having a hard time digesting the Olympic event. My Olympic viewing hopes anticipated the "zowie" action of downhill slalom, "ooo and yes!" of snowboarding half-pipe or the "wheee" of the ice skating, but for my dinner hour it would be the "huh?" of curling.

I try to be open. I just need to understand the sport. Maybe I can compare curling with another sport I know. Let's see, sports with brooms, sports with brooms... Quidditch? Nope, nothing similar. What engaged me is that for once, an Olympic sport seems close to my level of athleticism. Yes! The players appear in prime shape, unlike me, but isn't that overkill for the event requirements? I mean, I am actually primed for floor sweeping. My daily workout routine of sweeping the kitchen floor prepares me. Oh, and if I step that up a notch, adding daily sweeping of the bathrooms, dinning and living room, yard, then maybe I would be fit enough to be a curler. (Is that the correct description? Like the round objects woman wear in their hair at night to make it bouncey in the morning?)

You know they say that competition at that level is really a mind game. Curling is no exception. It appears similar to the Ouija board we had when we were kids. A game utilizing mental forces puportedly. One rests their fingers on the flat game piece and then it moves mysteriously across the board. Ours seemed to work but I think my brother faked us out. I don't really know as I only got to play it a couple times before the anti-occult police took the game away. At first I wondered if curling was the same deal. The hovering puck (called a stone) seems to mysteriously move across the ice following the path made clear by the brooms. Didn't the Zamboni already clean the ice?  OOOEEUUU. Are they moving it with their minds? Very mysterious. Hard to take my eyes off of it now. Could this be an interesting sport after all? Maybe, except for the mean element. While aiming for bulls-eye, the stones seem to bump into opponents stones with the intension of knocking them out of the circle. Being the victim of such cruel actions happened enough to me as a kid in croquette, when my ball would get sent across the grass into the bushes. Sigh... I guess it isn't the perfect sport for someone who likes big brothers to be nice.

Perhaps next time I'm at this sports bar for dinner, I'll order the curly fries, and curl up with a book.