EclecticLip

(Note: originally written March 3.  Posted March 27.) 

Aya was lucky enough to get some tickets to watch the Japanese women’s curling team in action. So we attended the round-robin tournament, where eight loudly-shouting teams played four simultaneous games, a hearty crowd cheered them on, and public service announcements asked people to turn their cellphones off. A big round of applause went to the curling fan who dressed in body paint, briefs and a Canadian flag cape, with a poster reading “marry me Cheryl Bernard”. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so for the sake of brevity I attached one below.

Keeping with the scattershot illogic of imperial units, each curling team gets 73 minutes to throw their stones, which weigh 41 pounds each (plus or minus three).  These are prime numbers!  Consider that 40 pounds makes for a nice round number, with 42 pounds being “three stone” in the archaic British system. 

And 75 minutes would’ve made a lot of sense (games would cap out at 2.5 hours, max, not including breaks).  How did these people colonize most of the world?!?  The maximum length of a game — counting both teams’ time-budgets, the two complimentary one-minute timeouts, and thirteen minutes of resting time between rounds — turns out to 163 minutes.  Another prime number!
 
Incidentally, Canada House had a curling stone from 1535 on display.  It was recovered from the bottom of a lake in Scotland.  Clearly, the playoffs ran a bit long that year.   

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(click to enlarge)

(Note: originally written March 3.  Posted March 27) 

Now that the Olympics are over, and I’ve sworn off lineups until… oh, the next Lady Gaga concert, I have some Olympic tales, which I shall hereby recount. ’cause I’m a sharing kind of guy.

Now, I was one of the crazy not-so-few who lined up for the free Zipline strung across Robson Square, braving the elements and getting to know my line-neighbours. As it turns out, one of the people in front of me was a biologist; we chatted about the recent true-colour dinosaur rendition in National Geographic, based on a scanning-electron microscope comparison of modern feathers with ancient fossilized imprints. But mostly we commented on the folks behind us, who weren’t savvy enough to get in line two hours before the Zipline opened. :)

Thus it was that four bathroom-break-interrupted hours after I arrived, I got my eighteen seconds of fun, looking down on the cacophonous rabble as I sped by. Sort of a dinosaur’s-eye-view of Robson Square — if you were one of the bigger dinosaurs, that is. Running somewhere in a hurry. I repeated the experience two days later to reserve a place near the front of the line for, uh, someone who said she felt like sleeping in that morning.