Blessed by the Potato

It’s been a pretty decent winter for us this year, though my curling team hasn’t done all that great (how we can barely get enough people to keep from defaulting each week when we have 6 on the roster…). We’ve also got a departmental minispiel coming up, and being one of the few people who actually curls on a regular basis in the department, I wrote a guide for everyone else. The departmental secretary converted it into an acrobat file, and I’ve put it here so everyone else can read it as well: So You Want To Be A Curler.

It’s a short introduction that I wrote in about an hour or two, and I’ve noticed a few typos and the like after reading it again, but since it’s already in PDF I won’t bother trying to correct them; it’s still readable. While it is a decent introduction (IMHO), it was written specifically for our department, so some things may not apply. For example, if you’re going to take up curling in a proper league, you may need to provide your own broom & slider, and there may be a more stringent dress code. One-off curling nights (many clubs, departments, and even businesses seem to have them) will still provide you with brooms, but may use tape on your shoe instead of a slip-on slider (which works better).

Also, I noticed this story on the Canadian Red Cross thanks to Boing Boing. It’s a little nuts, especially for an organisation that shouldn’t be frivolously spending money. Basically, they’re “requesting” game companies stop using the Red Cross as a marker for health powerups and the like. While I can see not wanting to be in violent games at all, I think that it actually helps them a bit, since it gets into everyone’s minds that the red cross emblem is equated to healing and medicine. Furthermore, I’m not sure that the red cross deserves trademark protection in the first place — it’s a pretty basic, common symbol.