Curling

So what is curling, you ask? I know it's easy to make fun of, but it really is a great sport. It has been described as shuffleboard on ice with the strategy of chess.

I went to my first out-of-town bonspiel this past weekend in Bowling Green, Ohio. There were seven of us from our Knoxville club that made the trip up. I curled on a team with Kerry Cholka, Dennis Laney, and Sandra Takata.

Here are a few pictures from the weekend. I've tried to explain some of what is going on.

Each team member delivers two stones in each end (an "inning"). You have a slider on one foot and push yourself out of the hack with the other foot, using your broom to stabilize you. You and the stone are moving together, and you release it with a slight twist to allow it to curl, or curve, as it slows down. The stones are made of granite and weigh 42 pounds each.


The team's skip is at the other end of the ice calling the shot. Kerry is giving me an aim point based on where she wants the stone to end up. Only one team scores per end, and it's the team with the rock closest to the center of the house (the concentric circles). You score a point for each rock that you have in the house that's closer to the center than your opponent's closest rock.


Sweepers help get the stone down the ice. Sweeping the ice keeps the stone from slowing down, and there are two reasons to sweep. One is for distance -- sweeping can make a stone go about ten feet further than it would on its own; the other is for line -- the stone curls as it slows down, so if you keep it from slowing down it won't curl as much. You have to balance the two. Sandra and I are sweeping Dennis' shot.


Curling is definitely a team sport; it takes all four people to get a rock where you want it. Here are two pictures that show all four of us. Notice in the second one that vice-skip Sandra is skipping when Kerry delivers.


Strategy is a huge part of curling. Here's a typical strategy session for our team -- Kerry and Sandra figuring out the call while Dennis and I are waiting, talking, and laughing!


Some more strategizing while waiting for the other team's shot.


The scoreboards show the score across the middle row, and the end numbers are hung above and below. The board on the left shows red 5, blue 1. On the right, we're blue and are getting beat 3 to 1.


Here's the Bowling Green rink. It's dedicated curling ice, so there's no hockey or skating.


By tradition, the curlers are bagpiped onto the ice for the finals.


Dennis and I are sweeping hard to get the stone where we want it. I'm thinking this is a fast shot to take out an opponent's rock not in the picture. There's some definite speed to the picture based on the blur, what our legs are doing (I take big sideways steps when moving fast) and how far out front my broom is. We would be sweeping for line to keep the stone going straight for the other rock.


Sandra delivering.


Kerry delivering. She uses a stabilizer instead of a broom.


Dennis delivering.

Me delivering.

Dennis and me waiting between shots.

Urban Dare Nashville

After being a fan of the Amazing Race so long, I finally got to participate in a small version in Nashville called the Urban Dare. It's a one-day race held in cities around the country and was in Nashville on May 31. Check out their website at http://www.urbandare.com/

My friend Diane, also an Amazing Race fan, went with me from Knoxville. What follows are the clues we were given and how we fulfilled them. We finished in 3:47, significantly behind the first place team with a time of 1:54. We were in 34th place out of 45 teams. We weren't last! We wound up covering about 5.5 miles by foot. It was a great experience, and I'll definitely go back next year.

1. Since this is the week of Memorial Day, we will remember some of the heroes who keep us safe. Get your picture with a memorial to firefighters.

The memorial is on the east side of the Schermerhorn Symphony Hall. This was our first stop (although you don't have to the clues in order), so we're still looking rested.

2. TRIPLE PLAY – First get your picture pointing at Tennessee on the globe at a memorial to a war fought in the ETO and PTO. Second, nearby find the Urban Dare official for your ode to our soldiers dare. Get ready for your best original “I don’t know, but I’ve been told…” chant. Third, go find your bubble dare.

This is the WWII memorial at the Bicentennial Mall. Our chant was "I don't know, but I've been told, unscrambling words is getting old." That's because we were stumped by clue 4 below. Another part of the "ode to our soldiers" dare was each of us having to do 20 pushups. Finally, the bubble dare was finding someone in the Farmer's Market who had bubble gum in a dish of whipped cream. Diane did this dare and had to get the bubble gum without using her hands (i.e., sticking her face into the dish to get it), then chewing it and blowing a bubble. However, she quickly learned why they used whipped cream -- the sugar in it messes with the bubble gum, making it hard to form a bubble.

3. Devil Went Down to Georgia is one of his better-known songs. Get your picture with his first check from Elvis Presley – 5 whole dollars!

There's a Charlie Daniels museum on 2nd Avenue near the Hard Rock Cafe.

4. Go to SUBPAR CLIQUE (TWO WORD JUMBLE) for your spellbound dare.

This was our major oops of the race, which really stumped us and sent us all kinds of wrong directions. We didn't immediately get the word jumble, so I had my friend from work, Teresa, try to crack it on the internet. Most word jumble sites would only do one word, not two, so she had to do some searching. She found a site that would do it, but it was apparently a word finder, not a de-jumbler. So it appeared that the only solution using all the characters was ARQUEBUS CLIP. An arquebus is a Civil-War era musket, so we went to Civil War museums to no avail. One of the workers in the State Museum (where we had to go for clue 10) mentioned that other teams had gone to the public square for this one. PUBLIC SQUARE. Duh. How could we have missed that?

The spellbound dare involved being given the word "confidential," and we had to go through the flower beds looking for posts with letters and numbers. We had to total the numbers of all the letters in our word and tell that to the race official to get our stamp.

5. Get your picture with a mural depicting Willie Nelson.

We found this guitar on Broadway in front of Legends -- not really a mural, but we thought it must be it. It was an acceptable photo, but the race director was going for a mural near the Hampton Inn on 3rd Ave. Other teams found a mural of several artists, including Willie, inside The Stage club, which was also accepted.

6. You will find lions holding up the lights in front of a lodge off Broadway. Get your picture with one of these lions.

This is at the Masonic Lodge at the corner of Broadway and 7th. My mom said she had noticed the lion posts recently, and she thought they were somewhere near Hume Fogg High School. So we just walked around looking for them, and found them here, just on the other side of 7th from the school.

7. Get your picture with Eli the dragon in front of a local theater.

We went right to where the Children's Theater on 2nd Avenue used to be, but got there and we couldn't find it. The old one had been torn down, but we couldn't see the new one, just 1.5 blocks from there, because it's behind Howard School. That took several minutes to figure out, including a frustrating call for directions to 800-Free411, which still had the old address on 2nd.

8. Captain Ryman, owner of the Ryman steamboat line and builder of the Union Gospel Tabernacle, lived in a house near here from 1885-1926. Go to the site where this house stood for your wheelbarrow dare.

We weren't sure for a while where this site was or if it was near the Ryman Auditorium. But it's up on Rutledge Hill at 2nd and Lea, just down from the Children's Theater. We had to do a human wheelbarrow.

9. The tower on this building is designed after the monument of Lysicrates in Athens, Greece. The architect, William Strickland, died in 1854 and is entombed above the cornerstone. Go to the North side of the grounds of this building for your upwardly mobile dare.

I knew right away that this was the Capitol Building, but we went to the north side and didn't see anyone. The race official was all the way down on James Robertson Parkway, and the dare was for one team member to kick a soccer ball up the hill through the cones, against the wall, and then back down.

10. Get your picture with Renoir’s La Danseuse au Tambourine in a section of a museum where it posts that visitors may find these artworks inappropriate for viewing. Then while you go back up the escalator take a picture of one of several nudes that must have been deemed to be appropriate for viewing. Go figure.

This was our other problematic clue. My initial two guesses were either the Frist Center or the downtown library. We went to the Frist, but they said they didn't have that Renoir -- just two others. So we went to our next stop, but then came back to the Frist, thinking that just had to be it. But another docent said no, and that there was no escalator there anyway. So we went to the library, and it wasn't there either. Turns out there was a travelling Renoir exhibit at the TN State Museum. (You would have thought the folks at the Frist would have known that.) After we figured that out, we walked by TPAC that had a huge banner on the side of the building advertising it. At least we weren't standing under the banner trying to figure out where the Renoir could be.

11. Is this restaurant’s name a reference to UFO? Or perhaps it refers to the way they serve their food. Get your picture in front of this place.

Even though I had never been there, I quickly figured out that this was the Flying Saucer on 10th behind the Union Station Hotel. We thought it would be fun to stop for a beer mid-race, but we decided it would take to long. We went back for a post-race beer instead!

FINISH – Go to Paradise Park for your final and most puzzling dare.

Paradise Park is a dumpy, smoky bar in the 400 block of Broadway. We had to work a 60-piece puzzle to complete the dare. Most other teams had come and gone already, and the few teams still hanging around all seemed to be smoking. (Go figure -- run a race and have a smoke.) So we headed back to the Flying Saucer.

5:00 minute bonus – Photo hunt – take a picture of a human pyramid 3-2-1. They must be non-competitors in the race.

We didn't get 6 people to build a pyramid. We should've done this while in one of the parks when there were people around. Another team got folks to do it in the Flying Saucer.