Adaptive Curmudgeon

The rural life is idyllic and peaceful, until it goes to shit. Here’s the story:

I had a great day but was too busy to maintain a fire in the woodstove. No worries. I’m not entirely a caveman, I just let the furnace handle things while I took care of other matters. (I have more than one source of heat. Two is one and one is none!)

Then I ran to town to handle some errands. As the sun set, the temperature dropped like a rock. Driving home, the local radio station gave a weather report that said evening temps might go as low as -5. My truck’s external temp reading was -8 and dropping. The DJ, while introducing the next song, said it was -10. The weather report was fake news! Nothing infuriates me more than a weather report that contradicts the conditions you can see out the damn window.

Back at home the furnace was stoically burning through money (or the fossil fuel equivalent) and everyone was asleep. Grumbling something Dad-like and Curmudgeonly about not being made of money I set out to light the cold stove.

Woodstoves are pretty reliable once you get used to them. When I’m paying attention and the wood supply is high quality I’ll keep it going 24/7 for weeks at a time without too much fuss. I was foolish to get lazy and let it go out because starting from cold is a minor (not large) hassle.

Woodstoves aren’t like modern appliances. They’re finicky. You have to get used to babysitting them. It’s not their fault. They have more uncertainty in their world. Chunks of dead tree are not a calibrated condition like natural gas. As an analogy, most of us are used to modern, fuel injected dullmobiles with automatic transmission, anti-lock brakes, and (the horrors!) backup collision avoidance alarms. You can be damn near dead and drive a minivan. Old school vehicles with clutches and carburetors require the operator know the car’s idiosyncrasies. As you get used to it you run them with greater situational awareness. They’re perfectly adequate but not mindless.

So there I was, transitioning from modern life’s cocooned world to my trusty woodstove. I raked the ash into the ash pan and put down a wad of crumpled up newspaper. (Given the state of what was once called journalism, this is the only remaining legitimate value of a newspaper.) Then I added a couple sticks of fatwood. (A needless luxury, but one I recommend to all woodstove owners.) Then some kindling. Then some medium limbwood to fill the box.

(My stove likes to operate with a full firebox so I loaded it to the brim.)

Most of the time I don’t have to do all this. There’s usually a few warm embers in the ash and it’s a bit faster to build a fire. But it was definitely cold, dead, out. Reaching into the firebox I could actually feel cold air flowing down from the chimney into the firebox. I glanced at the outdoor thermometer. -12 and still dropping.

I opened all the stove’s air vents (it’s an “airtight” woodstove”) and lit a match.

The launch sequence is predictable and happens 99.999% of the time: The match lights the newspaper which first smokes a bit (filling the woodbox with smoke) and then bursts into flame; thus clearing the view through the window and blowing the smoke up the chimney. This is always a cheery scene and never fails to brighten my outlook. The paper burns hot and heats the kindling and small wood on top of it. The small wood smokes considerably, you can see smoke building and churning through the glass window, and then it too catches fire. The fire builds and within five to ten minutes it’s burning clean as a whistle and pretty as a postcard.

If you were so inclined you could watch my chimney during this process. You’d see a bunch of darkish smoke as the fire starts, and then, almost as if by magic, 80% of it dissipates, from then on the chimney will mostly have a wispy trail of cheery white smoke… such a small amount that even eco-weenies would be happy. (So long as they don’t notice the 10 minute start up phase.) I’ll add that in very cold conditions with no wind the warm exhaust of a good hot stove will meet the cold air and produce big poofy white clouds of condensation. I find them quite charming. Don’t get your EPA in a bundle, this is mostly condensation. The same thing you’d see from  your own breath.

Instead of the predictable startup cycle (which has been the case every damn startup all winter) things went to hell! The cold outer air from the chimney sunk down into the firebox with enough volume to overpower the weak pulse of warm air from the fledgling fire. The smoke, since it couldn’t go up the chimney, poured out of the stove into MY HOUSE!

I went apeshit and started tinkering with vents and poking kindling to coax the fire to light faster.

There was no risk to the house. It was just annoying. But it was REALLY annoying. I had the choice of extinguishing the fire (which oddly will make even more smoke) or trying to build the fire hotter to create enough hot exhaust (a process which obviously will make even more smoke). I added heat to the situation by swearing at it.

After a panicky half hour shitfest, the situation was under control. The stove was burning clean and the draft was in the proper (up the chimney) direction. I was slumped in my chair, beer in hand and miserable.

My face was ruddy red from a blast of snow, my eyes were watering from smoke, and my hands were practically frostbit. I was on my last beer and had a headache.

I’d closed off the woodstove room from the rest of the house and opened a window. I had my auxiliary backup fan venting the room. It was maybe 50 degrees indoors and about -14 outdoors.

It had been a hectic half hour. My big heavy duty metal fan (which I use for “projects” like evacuating hot attics before I re-insulate or dusty barns when I’m shoveling) had fallen in battle. It had been blasting a zillion cubic feet per minute of smoky air out of my house when it fell off the window ledge. It landed in a snowdrift and when I reached to retrieve it it shifted and sunk into the fluff. It was like being attacked by a snowblower! A truckload of snow blasted into my face before the blades hit some ice and the fan self destructed with a clang. The spirit of the fan is now venting smoke in Valhalla.

Behind me, in the closed off part of the house I heard the furnace kick on; as if to say “give up Curmudgeon. Quit living quasi-selfreliantly in the hinterlands. Move to a condo in a city and put your balls back into the vice of debt. You’ll have natural gas magically arriving in a pipe and Chinese food delivered by Uber. Join the crowd, pay half your income in taxes and watch sportsball on cable until you die.” I gripped my beer in chilled hands and felt sorry for myself.

I nursed that one last beer in a 50 degree room for an hour; alternately baking half of my body while freezing the other half. The woodstove was burning with plenty of heat to keep the chimney exhaust going up (like God intended!) but it couldn’t heat a room with an open window on a -14 night. Meanwhile the fan and open window made the air crystal clear but I felt miserable.

Eventually, I called it good, closed up the windows, opened the doors to send the woodstove’s heat (but not smoke!) to the rest of the house, and collapsed in bed. What a cold, smoky, miserable night.

Without knowing how bad it would be, Mrs. Curmudgeon and I watched the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvN3hOSZV4w

Mrs. Curmudgeon clicked the link on her iPad. It was some sort of 1980’s BBC dance show with “live” “music”. I put “live” in quotes because it may or may not have been taped. I put “music” in quotes because, while it technically qualified as “music”, I consider it a form of torture.

Five women with the kind of hair that put holes in the ozone layer were “dancing”. We all know 1980’s women’s hair styles did not stand the test of time, but these were exceptional. If you strapped Marge Simpson and Peg Bundy to an exploding can of Aqua Net you’d get this look.

The choreography, meant to be sexy, misfired badly. It was less burlesque and more an implication that all five women were in heat.

The costumes were beyond terrible. I can only assume a stage hand sprayed the ladies with glue and dropped them off the roof into a dumpster filled with randomly cut polygons of thick vinyl scraps. All in garish neon colors. If a seamstress actually sewed the visual cacophony they were wearing then there’s a seamstress that created a sin against nature.

Perhaps the scraps were artfully arranged to look bad. Sort of a caveman motif. If Pebbles Flintstone took up meth and became a hooker… Nah! That still doesn’t explain neon vinyl.

Then they began singing… this made it worse.

I think the phrase “I eat cannibals” is clever. Similar to “I rob pirates”. Alas the underlying lyrics were a complete waste of a good hook. They sought to commingle cannibalistic consumption with sexual domination. This might have been interesting the first time a teenager screamed “bite me” to a rival in a street fight but since then it’s been pathetic.

They kept singing. It kept getting worse. Clever, it was not.

I glanced at Mrs. Curmudgeon and was suddenly afraid. She (like most of humanity) has better taste than me. This abomination, which was annoying me, was drilling into her cerebral cortex and taking a dump there.

Her brow furrowed. She began to frown. Like most men, I don’t want my wife annoyed; if only in the interest if domestic tranquility.

I tried to break the tension.

“They’re like some sort of proto-Spice Girls?” I hinted.

Honestly, I know nothing about the Spice Girls except they were a cluster (five?) of women who strutted around stage reciting lyrics. For whatever reason, people didn’t hate the Spice Girls. Perhaps I was watching the wrecked heap of bicycle parts tossed behind the Wright Brother’s garage? Was this the primordial goo from which emerged the flying jalopy that became the Spice Girls?

I needn’t mention that among the women strutting around the stage, the number playing instruments was… zero. Because, of course they couldn’t play instruments. Unless you’re Pavarotti (or his equivalent) you ought have an instrument in hand before they let you on stage. I  don’t care if it’s a kazoo, you ought to play an instrument or you’re just doing karaoke!

Mrs. Curmudgeon continued to glare at the screen. She has an impressive glare. I expected her iPad to burst into flames. I had to break the tension somehow:

“The 1980’s… Jesus what went wrong?” I mumbled.

Nope. Concentrated waves of distaste were radiating from Mrs. Curmudgeon. And I’d done nothing to dispel it. She was watching the music video equivalent of my 1980’s nemesis (the craptacular AMC Gremlin) and I could sense her blood pressure rising.

It kept going and going. The three and a half minute song was taking an eternity. Mrs. Curmudgeon was gritting her teeth. Can music be so bad that it gives you a stroke?

I tried one last time to break the tension. “At least they aren’t using an auto-tuner?”

The show started to wind up and Mrs. Curmudgeon shouted at the screen.

“THIS. IS. A. MESS!”

I couldn’t disagree.

Then it was over. She gently set the iPad down, as if resisting the urge to hurl it at the wall.

When she turned to me the glare was still there. “You… you suggested this.” She gesticulated vaguely at the iPad; as if a single wave could encompass the enormity of bad taste that I’d unleashed on the household.

“It did indeed suck.” I agreed, lamely.

“Your punishment, for suggesting the worst music video in history, is to bring me another drink.” She held out a glass. (We’d been bingewatching Venture Bros and drinking. She’d fetched the last round of mixed drinks. After what we’d seen, a stiff belt was definitely in order.)

“Absolutely!” Glad to get off so lightly, I scampered to the liquor cabinet.

How could three and a half minutes of “entertainment” turn out so tasteless? There had to be cameramen, choreographers, sound mixers, stage hands, etc… Couldn’t one of them have stopped it? Surely they knew it was a trainwreck. One of them should have said “This is not going well. We should stop this disaster before it hits the airwaves. Better to burn down the studio, fake our own deaths, and move to Antigua than commit this to electronic memory.” But no. The miracle of the internet had preserved an abomination of the 1980’s and heartlessly deposited a steaming heap of it in our living room.

“Make it a double!” Mrs. Curmudgeon was shouting from the other room.

Reflecting on the video we’d just watched, I filled her glass (and mine) to the rim. I returned with three bottles of liquor in hand. We needed it.

The 1980’s… what went wrong? Beware. There was a group called Toto Coleo and the internet preserves what they have wrought. Let’s never speak never of this again.

[Things started with clever Venture Bros references and shifted to questionable 1980’s Duran Duran music that at least tried to be deep. From there my faulty memory dredged up a music video that should have remained lost in time. Everyone at Curmudgeon Compound, including the dog, is still reeling from it.]

I mentioned to Mrs. Curmudgeon that I remembered a Duran Duran song that was played only once on the radio.

“You can’t remember the zip code of the house we’re living in right now but you remember a song on the radio that was played once.”

“I don’t recall much about it.”

“Played once. So long ago it’s when you still had a mullet?””

“Yeah, it’s weird. The radio always sucked but one day, when Duran Duran had hardly started, there was this one song. I don’t remember it but I remember the title. It was a clever title. Also, mullets rocked. No regrets about that!”

“Do tell?”

“It was called ‘I Eat Cannibals’. They played it once and never again. Sometime in the early 1980’s. Isn’t that a catchy title? I wonder why it never went anywhere.”

Mrs. Curmudgeon was already searching on her iDevice.

“A Duran Duran song that never got airplay? Are you sure?”

“I think so. Wouldn’t any band have a few unpopular songs? When’s the last time you heard ‘Happiness is a warm gun‘ on FM? I mean the Beatles are everywhere but that one disappeared.”

Mrs. Curmudgeon was puzzling over inconclusive search results. “I Eat Cannibals” by Duran Duran wasn’t coming up. It turned out to be a 1982 song by a group called Toto Coelo.

“Right year, wrong band.” She concluded.

“What the heck, hit play.” I prompted.

BAD MOVE!

Here’s the video, watch it if you dare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvN3hOSZV4w

The aftermath wasn’t good…

I was about to wrap up a blog-story when the weather changed. My workshop is easier to heat when it’s (relatively) warm out; so I seized the moment. I put away my computer and happily fabricated random shit in my shop. (I made slow but sure progress on a project I’ve been avoiding forever.)

The weather briefly got so warm some of the snow melted! This turned the dial to eleven. I hauled wood for the stove, hauled garbage to the dump, and hauled ass to get everything done. Ya’ gotta make hay while the sun shines.

There was even some water pooled over top of the ice in the driveway! (Very slippery!) This happens but it’s not common and I wasn’t concerned. Unlike Al Gore’s army of PowerPoint sniffers: I’m not foolish enough to think minor weather variation is the harbinger of global catastrophe. It’s just a warm break.

[Warning: RANT FOLLOWS] Of all the things one can panic over, “warm weather” is among the least inspiring. You gotta’ live a life very removed from nature for piddling shit like weather to freak you out! Attention marketing gurus for the “put the government in charge of everything because we’re all gonna’ die” crowd; if you want to get this particular Curmudgeon worried you gotta’ think differently. Talk about Ebola, ICBMs, meteor strikes, or a shortage of good beer. Weather won’t do it. I live in nature. I don’t view the environment as a strange alien threat. Weather isn’t ever going to freak me out. It’s just something that happens. But I digress…  [/RANT]

This morning the temperature is back to “normal”. Remember the melt-water that pooled up on the driveway ice? Well it froze my workshop door something fierce. Rather than bust my back taking a pickaxe to the ice I put out a generous amount of salt. Not on the whole area, mind you, that would be like pissing into the wind. I put down a strategic line sufficient to thaw a mini-canyon in key areas. I’ll let chemistry do the heavy lifting.

Salt takes time. What to do while I wait? Oh yeah, I have a blog…

You already know I was laughing my ass off at Venture Bros episode based on a Duran Duran video. Now here’s this thing you don’t know; in my misspent youth I listened to Duran Duran.

I know! You’re shocked and I’m embarrassed. But that’s how it is. I knew they weren’t cool. I knew they weren’t awesome. I knew they spent more time on their hair than mastering music theory. I knew all that. But, they populated every song with a hook and I couldn’t resist. It was a guilty pleasure. It’s like people who dance the Hokey Pokey. They know it’s lame but they enjoy doing it. In my defense, I was young and dumb.

Also, my choices were limited. The radio in my area was galactically bad, so anything with creativity came on cassette. The local place to buy cheap cassettes kicked me in the balls when they stopped carrying heavy metal and other better music. They did this because people though Satan was really attacking teenagers. I’m. Not. Making. That. Up.

For some reason AC/DC’s “Back in black” (a song about fiscal responsibility) was morally unacceptable but Duran Duran’s “Hungry like the wolf” (a song about sex craved teenage boys stalking and possibly assaulting innocent women”) was totally fine. Don’t ask me why. Like the current era, the 70’s and 80’s were also a time of mass stupidity. (I’ve discussed the mass hysteria of the 1980’s here.)

Mrs. Curmudgeon brought us another round of drinks while I fired up the internet for a trip on the Wayback machine. I present to you the incomprehensible symbolism of a proto-hair band:

In my next post I unleash the stupidest thing to happen in 1982 and am properly admonished by Mrs. Curmudgeon…

The Venture Bros. season six, episode two blew my mind! It’s drawn and framed in the style of a 1983 Duran Duran music video; “Is There Something I Should Know?” Rectangles and squares slide in and out of view to frame objects of symbolic import and the characters speak (not entirely) in Duran Duran lyrics.

One story arc (there are many) is the nefarious plot of, Augustus St. Cloud, who menaces Pete White and Master Billy Quizboy. St. Cloud’s superpowers involve an encyclopedic knowledge of pop trivia and “lots and lots of money“. He’s the kind of guy that would bore you with the story of VHS versus Betamax while searching Ebay to find the exact Betamax player to complete his collection. I’m the kind of guy that would run from him!

Meanwhile the story has done wonders with the angles and feel of the music video. Check out the screenshots below, I didn’t add those rectangles. On one level it’s just plain silly. On another level it’s wheels within wheels. Those dumb squares are the reflections of an 1980’s music video incorporated into a 2016 cable TV show that I streamed into my living room in 2019. We live in the future y’all!

St. Cloud likes buying “priceless heirlooms” (1980’s cultural artifacts) and then mistreating them for his amusement. He has purchased a red rubber ball that played a symbolic role on the Duran Duran video and has a pyramid from the video too. He says this is a time machine (which if you watch the 80’s video makes as much sense as anything else).

St. Cloud intends to send the ball back into time so that it never existed. This terrorizes Billy Quizboy who wants to preserve “collective history” but also on a deeper level he’s a character that exists entirely as a pop culture reference (in his case to quiz game shows of the 1960’s). For him it’s a real threat even though nobody on earth… including a half drunk Curmudgeonly blogger on a couch in 2019… takes anything from Duran Duran seriously.

St. Cloud has reconstructed the set from the video to add gravitas to his deadly monologue.  You know the kind of monologue I’m talking about “Mr. Bond, I’m going to slowly lower you in the piranha pool…”

Meanwhile, the animation and camera angles are still impressing me, even though I haven’t seen a music video since forever. Billy and St. Cloud argue over the ball as the basis of all subsequent culture; including the threat of an 80’s child actor becoming president.

This is Kim Fields from the Facts of Life.

Can you imagine the insanity of a world where the president is weird and not respected? The horrors! Thank God Duran Duran spared us from that shit!

Eventually the heroes(?) sacrifice everything to preserve the red ball. They think it a wise investment… because (of course) they’re pop culture references themselves. Billy explains “I lost my virginity to side A of Wu-Tang forever. We had to do it!” Perhaps I’ve seen into the mind of people who collect Star Trek lunch boxes and still-in-the-package GI Joe dolls.

I was laughing my ass off!

More to follow…

[This story came about as Mrs. Curmudgeon is trying to break me to the harness of “binge watching”. I’m slow to grok the idea. I’m the sort that never moved beyond a season’s TV taking a season to watch. After a single episode, I reflexively drift. She’s the normal one, waiting a week to see the next installment of whatever’s on TV is geezer-think nowadays. I still mourn the passing of the old TV’s rabbit ears. But, this old dog can still learn new tricks. I’d been working too hard in 2018 and in early 2019 deliberately set out to “potato” on my “couch”.]

Mrs. Curmudgeon patiently let me reject elevently dozen “binge watch” options (I’m picky!) until I settled upon Venture Bros. I totally love that show! If you’re looking for lowbrow entertainment that’s still got a decent dose of whit I highly recommend it.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the premise is obscure but perfect. The main protagonist, Rusty Venture, is a grown up Johnny Quest analogue. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about; Johnny Quest is a 1960’s Hanna Barbara children’s cartoon that either sucks or was awesome depending on your level of misty attachment to youthful experiences. YMMV if you grew up in a different era. If you’re a Millenial, it might trigger you; you may need to weep… not that anyone will care.)

Venture is cosmically uncool and part of a population of hapless “super scientist” hero types that run around mostly destroying cool weaponized toys (and in the case of Venture, squandering the inheritance left by a far more successful father). He and his his two (idiot/cloned) sons are protected by a Led Zepplin playing bodyguard (Brock Sampson). Brock is exceptionally good at killing things, oozes testosterone, and (as God intended) drives an orange 1969 Dodge ‘Hemi’ Charger. Brock is usually busy because the other half of the cast is a loose gaggle of “supervillians”. They’re equipped with super weapons, hair brained schemes, and armies of henchmen. (Brock tends to depopulate the latter, earning him nicknames like “Swedish murder machine” and “FrankenMullet”). For their part, the bad guys are nominally members of a trade union called “The Guild of Calamitous Intent” (motto: “Hate you can trust”) which may or may not be run by David Bowie. Shakespeare, it is not, but they had me at Guild of Calamitous Intent. Has there ever been a cooler name? Where do I sign up? (Click image to go to Amazon.)

In case you’re wondering, my favorite character is the Mighty Monarch. He’s as dogged in his pursuit of Rusty Venture as While E. Coyote was of that damn roadrunner. He has all the great character traits of a satirical nutjob. He shoots first and asks questions later, goes off half-cocked, laughs with glee at his own crazy plans, and genuinely loves his super hot also-villain wife; the ever patient Dr. The Mrs. Monarch. The best part of the Monarch is that nearly his every utterance is a loud proclamation! After a few drinks I probably sound like the Monarch. (Heck, I’m probably never more than a half a bottle of tequila away from acting like him.)

I began to grok bingewatching!

All this leads to season six, episode two. Mrs. Curmudgeon and I had been taking turns whipping up mixed drinks and I was grudgingly admitting this whole “bingewatch” thing had potential. The series’ writers, which had been clever and mixed it up in every episode, turned the dial to eleven with creativity. They felt it necessary to make an entire episode based on an obscure Duran Duran music video from 1983. Down the rabbit hole I went.

Stay turned for when it all goes to hell…

I had a great opportunity to get satirical:  the Trumpster is scheduled to make an 8 minute announcement tonight.

I wanted to write a funny post. I couldn’t. I tried but nitwits have worn my heart thin. After 8 minutes this evening, everyone will act stupid. Some will froth at the mouth in opposition “Orange Man Bad” and others will bitch that Trump didn’t personally bludgeon Nancy Pelosi to death with a mallet. These crazy reactions are already baked into the cake. It doesn’t matter what Trump says. He could announce he’s cured cancer, funded free college for hippies, will personally deliver pizza for every good kid on their 10th birthday, and talk about his new fuzzy puppy named “Cuddles”; it wouldn’t help.

A sizable portion of the populace will see him on the screen and lose it. They’ll act like Satan just took a shit on their cat. They need to overreact. Hate for the Orange nitwit is part of their self image. If they said “the dude had some cogent points” a whole pent up landslide of cognitive dissonance would pummel their soul. So they double down… over and over again. And this doesn’t excuse the other side. Nancy Pelosi will be there and we’ll recoil in horror like she’s about to grab Toto the dog and stuff it in a blender.

Too many of us have lost the ability to simply change our minds. Can’t we perhaps decide one or another political thing is just not that mind blowing? We’re acting like cult members in the presence of normal society. We see the larger world and recoil from its indifference to our perceived self importance.

It’s drifting from funny to pathetic. The election was two years ago and that’s plenty of time to get used to a president you hate. For fuck sake, there are Vikings fans who watched their team tank last weekend and there were Cubs fans that went a century without a win. Yet folks just can’t fuckin’ deal with a couple years. Two years isn’t even that long in dog years. There are goldfish older than two years. It’s nothing! It’s simply a truth of the universe that no team wins every game. I see silver linings that are ignored. Remember when people said “your vote doesn’t matter”? Well, 63 million votes for Trump and suddenly the sun cannot rise in the east without it being proof that the voters were wrong. For two years.

Lack of perspective worries me. What happened to citizens in a Republic as opposed to petty rulers in a fiefdom? Are we to never have peace until the ones that want to rule… rule? And if those that want to rule crave the sweet nectar of power this desperately, what kind of revenge will they unleash when their time comes? Aside from better coffee and grunge music, what’s the difference and tipping point between Rwanda and Portland?

Ideas that were totally unremarkable a few years ago are now (in the immortal words of Vizzini) inconceivable. Lacking a deeper world view, everyone continually flips on their head; dogs meow, cats bark, up is down, light is dark, and I wonder where all the adults went. Both parties reverse themselves in their heightened panic: Republicans want to “reform” socialized medical care for which not one of them voted. Why reform that which you didn’t want? Democrats bitch that we’re not continuing a minor war in Syria. Since when are peaceniks upset about ending a war?

Through it all, molehills start as mountains and become cognitive blocks. Keep in mind that 99.875% of the budget is not the wall. It’s not sane to lose one’s shit over 0.125% of a budget request meant to do something that was literally Federal law 12 years ago.

Self inflicted trauma makes it hard to write jokes. We need to quit taking shit so seriously because it’s fucking up humor!

A.C.

P.S. I came up with 0.125% by dividing 5 billion (with a B) by 4 trillion (with a T). Point is, this is a hissy fit that’s not about money.

So, you’re curling and you’ve just thrown a stone. What do you do now? You’re probably already face down on the ice so, if you’ve got a modicum of dignity, you scramble into a couching position. Then watch your newly launched interplanetary ice probe slip slightly out of the planned trajectory and either stop too soon or too late. You can shout to your teammates “HARD HARD HARD” which is supposed to encourage them to sweep in front of the stone and make it go further. This would be useful if you could judge the difference between a stone thrown too lightly and one thrown too hard. This difference seems like 0.00001 grams force.

Your teammates, who have no idea what’s going on either, can sweep in front of the stone to make it go further, possibly because you’re screaming “HARD HARD HARD” like a maniac at a Metallica concert. Or they can leave the ice unswept so the stone stops shorter. Surprisingly, sweeping does have an effect (though a miniscule one). A 40-pound stone in motion on a nearly frictionless ice is only in a nearly frictionless state and the broom makes it even more nearly frictionless. Either that or it’s magic.

In the case of us noobs, we mostly stared at each incoming stone with wonder while it did whatever the hell it was going to do. The fact that people with one foot in a “slider” can (if they know how) skitter along swiping the ice in front of a huge rock tells you what you need to know about speed but don’t forget the invisible story of momentum. The stones, which move so slow and majestic, probably could break your ankle if you let them hit you. This would be pathetic because you’d have been hammered by something that moves slower than a riding lawnmower. For us noobs, it was a very real possibility. Half the time I was cringing, wondering what would happen if one of us faceplanted just in time to take a 40-pound rock to the head.

Invented. By. Drunk. Scotsmen.

Speaking of “drunk”, after each “throw” of the rock, I’d shuffle off the ice to get another drink. This is the best part of the game.

There is scoring, teamwork, strategy, and precision. Or there would be if we could control the stones like real players. Our guide would wind up and launch (“throw”) a stone so beautifully you could hear angels smile. The stone would swish down the sheet, gently shove every other stone out of the way, edge slightly to one side or the other as planned, and suddenly stop within five microns of the target’s center. It was glorious.

Then, it would be my turn. I’d stagger up, launch the infernal rock like a hopeless awkward dipshit, drag my bearded face across the ice, and either fret over a limp underpowered failure that left it dead halfway down the lane or cringe because I’d overcompensated and rocketed the stone past the target like a runaway freight train. Overshots not only zoom past the back line but they crash into the wood bumpers loudly; informing everyone in earshot how much you suck. Undershots are almost more pathetic. They just sit there waiting for people to notice your ineptitude.

I looked like a chimp on crack, but was having fun. We “threw” the “stones” back and forth on the “sheet” and occasionally put a stone on the target. Stones on target scored following rules that had absolutely nothing to do with the right and proper way; which is firearms target shooting of course. In case you’re wondering, Canadians will look at you weird if you “throw a stone so it lands on the button” and shout in delight “right on the ten ring, next throw is a double tap!”

Each “end” required me and my opponent to do six or eight “throws” where us noobs stretched our body like taffy. Then we’d waddle about with brooms as the stones came back in stately, rotating, chaos. Then I’d top off from the flask for a bit of liquid muscle relaxant and play another “end”. Lather, rinse, repeat.

At some point I had to admit the slow beautiful orbit like stone throwing was wearing my ass out. I’m constitutionally incapable of being the first guy to quit… anything… so I steeled myself to tough it out. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one. Someone somewhere declared we’d had enough. Soon the game was over. I glanced at the simple, yet completely alien, scoreboard, had no idea who’d won, took a sip of beer, and decided I didn’t care. I happily removed the fiendish boot condom and made my way back to the bar.

More beer was consumed and I grazed on the potluck detritus. Someone had a tiny speaker bluetoothed to an iDevice and I tolerated the inevitable urban shit music. Some forgettable helium voiced widget sang while electronics tried to cover up her lack of talent. Folks (especially the younger set) seem to like that shit. Soon there was dancing. That’s my cue to slip out the back door. I’m perfectly happy with other people dancing but want nothing to do with it myself. Plus, I was out of beer.

You know you’ve had a great night when your whole-body aches from head to toe, you’re buzzed, and you’ve just slipped out the back door.

I highly recommend curling as the sport of Gods.

A.C.

P.S. Epilogue, for the nanny state nincompoops out there, I didn’t hit the road in that condition. I retrieved my bucket of beer and a toothbrush from my Dodge and then set out on foot. I walked through what seemed like a mile of snowdrifts to the nearby restaurant. There was a confusing discussion where I tried to order “metric” poutine (which made sense at the time but doesn’t now). From my booth I made a few phone calls (God knows how much I paid for them!). I cancelled my existing hotel reservation (“because I’m shitfaced in a place that isn’t Perkins”) and made a different reservation at a hotel I could see across the street (“I’m across the street in the not-Perkins”). I lived and the truck was happy to sit there all night. See? I’m all about safety.

The thing about curling is that it was invented by archaic drunk Scotsmen. There is no other explanation. Go back in time and imagine the kind of man who spent all summer whacking a testicle sized rock around a sheep pasture until it fell into a gopher hole. Imagine the sort of nut who would take the gopher hole game super-seriously until he’d molded it into a religion called golf. Next pickle his cerebrum. Keep him cooped up during a long cold winter. Give him scotch and bagpipes and nothing else to do. Eventually he’ll have cabin fever and wind up staggering around a lake playing oversized shuffleboard with a stone he swiped from the nearest sheep fence. That is curling.

I don’t care what the history books say, if you play the game, you know I’m right.

Other than the basics, I knew little about curling. Soon I was certain that it’s the best sport in the history of time. Why? Because there was a row of coat hangers at the sheets and above each coat hook was a cupholder for your drink. Designated beer holders?!? God damn I love curling!

Things took a downturn when I was handed a “broom” that looks nothing like a broom (more like a lame squeegee). I barely had time to grok the broom when I had to slip a ridiculous boot condom over my left boot’s treads. I did not like the boot condom.

The idea here is that your left foot now has absolutely zero traction while your right foot is still a regular Vibram soled boot (which is still slippery on ice mind you). When I say “zero traction” I mean it. You may think an ice skate has zero traction but that’s not true at all. An ice skate has an epic cutting edge. You can use that to control your motion. The shoe thing gave me no control whatsoever. Not forward, not backward, not lateral… totally fuckin’ useless.

There is no situation in life where asymmetric shoes are a good idea. I went down like a sack of potatoes and everyone was laughing. Only then did the second person step on the ice and they too went ass over teacup. Who’s laughing now? Then two more fell. Our host was desperately trying to instruct us on the fine art of keeping upright in the strange universe of asymmetrical ice shoes but we were too stupid to figure it out. None but our guide knew anything about anything and I wondered if he felt like the Napoleon women herding half sentient tadpoles around the hockey rink. Poor bastard.

I pulled my ass off the ice, hobbled to my drink for some liquid courage, stepped back on the ice, and balanced uneasily. Ballsy! One thing I’m sure of; asymmetric shoes are a unique experience and a great way to break a limb. (Wikipedia tells me the two shoes with different functions are called a “glider” and a “gripper”. This is totally unhelpful, but now you know it too.)

Invented. By. Drunk. Scotsmen.

Each lane (“sheet”) had a dozen or more “stones”. These Godzilla sized urinal cakes are made of granite. They’re color coded and numbered (I think the pros get to know each stone’s personality). They have a handy handle on the top but think carefully before you pick one up. I hefted one and promptly fell on my ass again. They’re heavy! Think bowling balls are heavy? Not a chance! Remember the drunk Scotsman theory? Double the weight of a mere bowling ball and you’re in the ballpark. I think I was noodling around with 40 pounds of granite… in asymmetric shoes…. on ice.

The huge mass impressed me. It’s pretty cool. They moved with mathematical precision. It was gorgeous to watch. 40 pounds of granite slides down the ice with arrogant amounts of momentum and you can sense Newtonian physics writ large. It felt less like pushing game pieces and more like establishing planetary trajectories. If bowling is rolling a cannonball, curling is shoving an asteroid into the void until it just kisses the edge of a gravity well.

Well that’s my description. YMMV.

Gorgeous motions don’t come easy. My stones didn’t go where I wanted. Ha! That’s an inadvertent pun but it is totally apropos!

It’s not just strength. It’s balance, coordination, and flexibility. You need the skills of a Cirque du Soleil gymnast to make ‘em go. I’m as flexible as a steel pipe. I was definitely out of my element.

How to throw a curling stone as explained by the Curmudgeon:

Here’s how you do it. You crouch against foot pegs (like the beginning of a running event). I think they’re called “hacks” but I called then “launchpads”. You’ve only got one foot against that solid launchpad. The other foot is a glider that’s moving all over the ice and is totally fucking useless.

In order to keep from falling over, you wedge the broom under your armpit and brace it against the ice. This doesn’t help a bit because you can’t easily grip a broomhandle with your armpit. Also, it’s braced against ice. Who came up with the idea of bracing against ice? The Three Stooges?

I’ll say this for it; when done right it looks very cool. I did not look cool.

You kick off the launchpad fairly hard and stretch out like a jaguar going for a kill. Except that you do it in slow motion; a mystic space jaguar on Quaaludes perhaps. The one leg that has launched has functioned like a pogo stick and is now bereft of kinetic energy. It drags behind you like a tailpipe that just fell off a Ford. Meanwhile the other leg is functioning as a monopod on a frictionless surface. The equivalent of a greased unicycle. With one leg splayed out and one twisted into a pretzel; pogo stick to the right and unicycle to the left… you’re already sliding madly forward. One hand is lightly resting on a stone that’s twice the weight of a bowling ball. The other is gripping a broom that is doing to no good whatsoever because it’s braced against fucking ice.

While you’ve got your whole body in motion (and spread across what feels like ten feet) you continue to slide on the foot with absolutely no traction (or lateral control), adjust the stone’s motion with the kind of precision NASA uses to put a probe on Mars, gently rotate the stone to impart spin, continue to balance with the broom, and then let go. The stone drifts away, almost frictionless and silent. Away it goes in glorious stately beauty.

Meanwhile, you’ve stretched so far that your nutsack is in Sacramento while your left shoulder is in Seattle. Then you faceplant on the ice like a turtle dropped from an airplane.

Did I take a few aspirin after this adventure? You’re damn straight I did. I needed it too, it was a week before I could walk without going in circles.

After action report follows in the upcoming last post…