  Given a convex region in the plane, and a sweep-line as a tool, what is best
way to reduce the region to a single point by a sequence of sweeps? The problem
of sweeping points by orthogonal sweeps was first studied in [2]. Here we
consider the following \emph{slanted} variant of sweeping recently introduced
in [1]: In a single sweep, the sweep-line is placed at a start position
somewhere in the plane, then moved continuously according to a sweep vector
$\vec v$ (not necessarily orthogonal to the sweep-line) to another parallel end
position, and then lifted from the plane. The cost of a sequence of sweeps is
the sum of the lengths of the sweep vectors. The (optimal) sweeping cost of a
region is the infimum of the costs over all finite sweeping sequences for that
region. An optimal sweeping sequence for a region is one with a minimum total
cost, if it exists. Another parameter of interest is the number of sweeps.
  We show that there exist convex regions for which the optimal sweeping cost
cannot be attained by two sweeps. This disproves a conjecture of Bousany,
Karker, O'Rourke, and Sparaco stating that two sweeps (with vectors along the
two adjacent sides of a minimum-perimeter enclosing parallelogram) always
suffice [1]. Moreover, we conjecture that for some convex regions, no finite
sweeping sequence is optimal. On the other hand, we show that both the 2-sweep
algorithm based on minimum-perimeter enclosing rectangle and the 2-sweep
algorithm based on minimum-perimeter enclosing parallelogram achieve a $4/\pi
\approx 1.27$ approximation in this sweeping model.
