Why all your friends send you all the curling videos
It's because they love you.
One of the signs you’ve talked about curling enough is when everybody you know emails or texts you a cute GIF or meme that involves curling somehow. Whether it’s cat curling, taking away Canadian bacon’s little brooms, human curling, car curling, Roomba curling, the joke about a man using a broom … we’ve seen it all, and all the shares keep adding up.
It’s perhaps the most ornery of the habits but at least it demonstrates your footing in the societal structure.
Every once in a while we get a new one to cleanse the palate, and now we have marmot curling. Who knows why we have marmot curling. But we do. They seem very happy about it. (And they’re making perfect hit and rolls, so perhaps it’s time to see if the marmot curlers can beat the robot curlers.)
I’d love to say this is unique to curling, but I’m sure if you were into falconry, people would be sending you all kinds of weird falconry minutiae that crosses their feeds, such as Ohio legalizing the use of owls for hunting. Yes, that was a thing we did this month, and I’m sure if you have a falconer in your proximity, they are getting tons of emails about it.
So count up all the texts/links being sent your way, don’t be sad that you’ve seen it before, and own your status as the curling person in your regular life social circle. At least we now have the marmot video.
I’m not one for hard opinions but I’m going to go out on a limb and say this year wasn’t very good. Maybe it wasn’t your worst year, and perhaps, heaven forbid, you will remember 2020 fondly, perhaps even a moment from March 2020 - present, thanks to some personal milestones. I personally had a great time competing at mixed curling playdowns in January, which definitely could not have been just 11 months ago, nope, that was at least five years ago. Matt Dunstone wrecking the other teams’ tenth ends in the Brier? That was probably back in 2017, at least. Since March, the landscape of curling was basically a lot more podcasts. So many podcasts.
Anyways, hopefully you got some ice time wherever you dwell, and at least some virtual stones and/or broomstacks in lieu of that. So far I got in three weeks of real live games myself. I’m sure 2021 will have more rocks in the house. Stay safe.