Curling Slo-mo

Just chillin' yesterday watching some TV, and came across a Curling match between the US and Swedish teams. A few synapses fired producing these thoughts:

- A rather large expense was incurred to televise the match: at least two cameras and cameramen (one was up high to get the birds-eye view), commentators, a sidelines reporter, score graphics, editing, then send it out (probably via satellite), and broadcast it on a major network to most of the nation. All this effort for ... Curling?

- Curling looks fun to play, but it's not that interesting to watch. It's shuffleboard on ice.

- Can you call it a sport? Curling makes bowling look athletic. I'd call curling a fun activity, but a sport? I don't think so. I could go on a long rant here about many olympic "sports" that don't seem very sporty to me, but I won't.

But what made me laugh out loud was the slow motion replay. Yes, some brainiac decided that the viewers may have missed the subtle nuances of a granite rock sliding along the ice at 5 mph and striking another granite rock producing the expected Newtonian motion that every Earthling has a lifetime of familiarity. This absurdity hit me right in the funny bone. My wife and I chuckled about it for a few minutes and then we kept reviving it throughout the day, to our amusement. And the slo-mo shot wasn't even that interesting. The shot below from the 2006 Olympics was much more involved and thrilling, and they didn't slo-mo it once; real-time speed was perfect for appreciating it.



And since I was on YouTube, I found this Manatoba (that's Canada) TV commercial promoting Curling. I really though this was one of those Saturday Night Live fake commercials, but it's all too real.



Curling even has it's own merchandise, mostly trite and tired:

OK, this one was a little funny, and the next one was amusing because it's obscure:

But I became indignant when I came across this one:

So after man evolved to stand up-right, the next evolutionary step is squatting down to slide a rock along ice? Maybe some of my fellow homosapiens are taking that evolutionary path, but I prefer to take this one:

That's more like it! We use our brains to invent a machine (the bicycle) that amplifies our relatively weak physical strength (compared to other animals) allowing travel at much higher speeds (than running) over longer distances.