Bald is beautiful on the curling ice

Let’s all admit it: we’ve thought this for a while. Being bald is advantageous to curling. Now the Medicine Hat News, which is providing coverage of the Canadian Open Grand Slam event, has put our thoughts into words with a nice nugget on the follicly challenged rock-tossers who are at the top of the game. In fact, writer Bruce Penton got Glenn Howard to admit that there’s a reason to the lack of hair:

 “It’s stress,” said Howard, the Ontario skip who has four world titles (two as skip) to his credit. “The stress we have to put up from the front end day after day is the reason has to be,” saidHoward. “It’s hard to live with that every day. And you can quote me on that.” 

Over at the Canadian Mixed (which is apparently still being held these days for what reason, I'm not sure), Joe Pavia has some notes including a good one on Quebec skip Mike Fournier and his great blog.

Just before he came to Ottawa he published 'Great and Powerful Curling Gods -- Hear my Prayer! I would offer to sacrifice a virgin in your honour but I am not likely to find one at a Mixed Nationals.' Fournier's blog can be read at http://inthehousecurling.blogspot.ca/2013.

And in case you didn’t get the news yet or hear Ian Tetley yelling, Erika Brown and her rink won the U.S. Women’s trials and will represent the Americans in Sochi.

''We all wanted to get back there, that's for sure,'' Brown said. ''Everyone played so great all week, but the last three games we really played the best we could when we needed to.''

Meanwhile the men’s event will need a third game after Pete Fenson defeated John Shuster in the second match of a best-of-three final on Saturday. The two teams will meet on Sunday for all the marbles and Fenson isn’t worried.

“We’ve been through it lots of times,” Fenson said. “My team handles these big games really well. I never worry about them. I know they are going to show up, and I know they’re going to be relaxed.”

And the Tweet of the Day goes out to Brad Jacobs who got an early morning wake up call. 

6:14am wake up call on my only day to sleep in and had to pee in a cup #comeon #backtobed
— Brad Jacobs (@bradjacobs15) November 17, 2013