Pitching on the line of the stumps to the left-handed James Pattinson, it straightened and caught him right in front.
Joined by the comedian Ruby Wax, now the poster girl for the benefits of mindfulness to overcome mental health problems, politicians including former ministers Lord Haworth and Jim Fitzpatrick straightened their spines and focused on their breath at the launch of an all party group to explore the potential for mindfulness in health, education, criminal justice.
They're not bleached or straightened or manufactured in laboratories, they're honest products of the natural world.
It's like a river that was young once that now has straightened out on its way to the ocean.
The deadly curve in Santiago could have been straightened out had politicians wanted the work to take longer (and spend more).
In truth, the west is living up to Mark Twain's famous dictum that "whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over".Things are not much better on the other side of the United States, in southern Florida, where the Army Corps of Engineers has dammed, leveed, straightened and engineered all the rivers that flow through the Everglades national park.
Straightened times may well loom for America's defence companies, but the fate of military programmes such as the C-17 ultimately depends not just on budgetary considerations and strategic shifts, but on pork-barrel politics, too.
The Gaillard Cut, a bottleneck, is being straightened and deepened by an extra metre.
Once upon a time, the "Torygraph" would have called for steady nerves and straightened shoulders.
To help tour buses, the winding narrow road up to Wolong is being widened and straightened (the boom of dynamite echoes up the gorge whose peaks are home to rarely seen wild pandas).
Why haven't banks' auditors straightened this out?
