My Greatest Curling Shot

Below is a picture of what has to be my greatest/luckiest curling shot ever. 

My team is red and after getting the guard, our opponents drew to the back of the house behind the guard.  But then everybody just constantly made freezes.  By the way, my team is down four and we're in the seventh end.  We're feeling a little low because at one point we were up 4-1, so things hadn't been going our way for quite some time. 

Anyway, the opposing skip throws a perfect rock, basically right on the button and nearly frozen to everything else.  It's now my last rock (we have hammer).  There was some debate over going on the right side or the left side, but I felt more comfortable with the way it was curling on the right side and chose the shot shown by the blue arrow.  I threw that shot with way more weight than I ever throw.  Of course, that made me less accurate, but miracle of miracles, I hit the guard up front, which then went to the spot between our rock and theirs.  As if magically, their rock went to the side and my team scored four to tie the game.  Lead believes that the drag effect came into play here and I would agree because I don't really see how else this could've happened. 

We did lose the game in the next end (Why else would I be blogging right now instead of getting ready for my Sunday 8:30 game?) but this might be the greatest and luckiest shot I'll ever make.

A Conversation with Dex

For those that don't know, Dex is the general manager for the St. Paul Curling Club and he's also a coach.  My guess is that every top curler that comes out of the Twin Cities (and probably Minnesota) has spent some time with Dex.  However, if he's not too busy, he'll sit with you too.  Some highlights from what ended up being roughly a half hour conversation. 
-I might have an opportunity to curl in international tournaments due to my parents being from a country where there's no curling (and I'm the most experienced curler found so far).  I asked Dex if I had a chance of winning a game in such a tournament.  He said no.  At least he's honest.

-Vice and I volunteered to do commentary for a game for the upcoming World Seniors and Mixed Doubles Curling Championships in April since they might stream it online.  Dex said no (awww), but mentioned that it's better that it's on internet streaming because you can curse.  Apparently, you sometimes have to be able to say, "That was a [stupid] move."  (Note: I didn't really ask permission to discuss this conversation with Dex in a public forum, but I don't think this was a particularly bad comment to reveal.)

-The opposing skip asked Dex about the drag effect which I had never heard of.  Dex gave us a good demonstration (using beer glasses), but if you've never heard of it, this youtube video should give you some idea on it.  Completely unintuitive.

-My team is comprised of scientists/engineers and we recently devised some technology that we think would be cool to have in curling.  (I'll talk about it on the blog after writing a provisional patent application.)  We pitched the idea to Dex and he thought it sounded like a good idea and thought it could be used throughout the curling community.  He encouraged us to make a prototype, so let's see where that goes.

By the way, if Dean Gemmel reads my blog, I heartily recommend that he try to get Dex on for an episode of The Curling Show.  (According to Google Analytics, someone from his neck of the woods spent some time reading my blog after I posted about his show.)  Maybe I'll put this on twitter and we'll see if he responds.  I think it'd be a good tie in with the upcoming tournament.

Dex recently had some medical issues and we're all trying to help him out as much as he can.  The club is charging for its end of the year party for the first time to serve as a fundraiser.  Also, they're selling raffle tickets (winner gets $500) as another fundraiser.  Just want to encourage people to do whatever they can for Dex.