I'm Excited to Throw Rocks at Houses Again!!!

     Sorry for the long pause in between my blog posts....sort of. I have been working on my film critic podcast, The Freaking Film Fanatic, now available in the iTunes store. No biggie! But I have been also doing a lot of things lately. 

     So, I often tell people that I used to be in a Curling league at the Utah Olympic Oval, and that I have two Utah Winter Games medals for curling....

     I have a bronze and a silver. I am more proud of the bronze because there were a lot of teams that competed that year, where as the silver was from a year there weren't a whole lot of teams that competed. The gold medal alludes me, but I am excited to announce that I will be curling at the Olympic Oval Curling League again after so many years. I am so excited. I even had my own curling broom, but I don't know what happened to it after I moved to West Jordan from Magna.

     However, I am super excited because I bought a new broom from Goldline Curling Supplies. 

It's color is Red Dragon. It has a 1 1/8" handle, and is called The Fiberlite Air X Curling Broom. It's pretty light. The lighter the broom, the more pressure you can apply to the ice to help the rock glide farther.

     Usually, people name their sports equipment , or cars, or things they love, so I have given my new broom a name.  It will from now and forever be called Broomhilda Von Shaft.

     Those of you who know me also know that I have a guilty pleasure for Quentin Tarantino films, and Broomhilda Von Shaft is the name of Kerry Washington's character in the film Django Unchained. It's perfect because, It's a broom, and brooms have a shaft. So, it pretty much named itself.

     I am attending a curling class this evening, and then the league officially starts on September 14th. I am so excited.

     Curling might sound and look really strange, but trust me, if you took the Olympic Oval's Learn to Curl class, you would love it. There is a ton of athletic elements. Scrubbing the ice with a broom takes a lot of strength and a lot of precision, and the strategic element is often compared to and called Chess on ice. There is so much strategy that is needed to play the game. 

     I first saw it in the 2002 Winter Olympics here in Salt Lake City, where it was officially made an Olympic sport. I thought it looked strange and always wondered how to play it and all of the rules. Then I was at the Oval watching a friend play in a hockey game, and I saw a flier for the Learn To Curl Night, so I went and immediately fell in love with the sport. I wish people would try it out instead of making jokes about it, because it is so cool. Also, pro curlers in Canada are freaking National Treasures. There's a reason it's so huge there. 

     It's easy to learn and understand. You can look up the rules on Wikipedia and then search for a Canadian tournament called The Brier, and there are lots for full curling matches.  The videos are close to three hours long though. In competitions, players play rounds which are called Ends, and they work like baseball. Each big tournament match has ten ends. Each team has eight rocks, so sixteen total, and each team takes turns pushing the stones down the sheet to the target, which is called The House, and after all sixteen stones have been thrown, the team with the closest rocks to the center of the house scores points. Only one team scores in an end, and the team that doesn't score in one round,  gets to throw the last stone in the next end called The Hammer, which is a big deal.

     The videos might seem boring if you don't know the rules at all, but if you take the time to learn the rules, watching a match is actually pretty exciting and interesting. Watching what strategies the players come up with with each stone throw is really cool. The Canadian tournaments actually put little microphones on the players so that you can hear what they are planning to do. It's really fun. Trust me, I wouldn't lie to you now, would I.

     Anywho, I just thought that I would write up this post really quick. I have been busy, and I have some new podcasts to record and edit for movie reviews. I am still having trouble with Facebook letting me send out a message to everyone I'm friends with to have them subscribe to the podcast. If you could subscribe and share it, I would appreciate it so much.

     So, without anything else left to say, I will post something again soon.

     With much love from Uncky Nate and Broomhilda Von Shaft, Stay safe, and be nice!