Hilton Head is in the news this time of year because of the golf tournament on the Harbour Town course with the iconic light house on the 18th green. It made the news yesterday because an alligator interfered with play -the golfer unfortunately didn’t take the free drop being ignorant of Hilton Head and alligator rules.

The gators on Hilton Head are hogs -fat, mean, and not shy. All the courses have gator rules as well as poisonous snake rules, and the smart golfer takes the free drop. Hilton Head is not the place where you let your toddlers roam free or they might end up free lunch. It’s only a few steps from being a malarial swamp, but it’s blessed with a strange lack of flying vermin. Few mosquitos is very nice, but the island has hedge fund managers infesting the palmettos like velociraptors clad in Tommy Hilfiger. New Yorkers it has in spades like bed bugs on a transient’s hairy knee. It’s Aspen on the tidewater, the Hamptons unburdened by its Long Island umbilical to Manhattan, a New Yorker’s semitropical Hong Kong on the South Carolina/Georgia sea coast. Hilton Head, like Boca Raton, Austin, and Charlotte, is in the South but not of it.

Hilton Head’s isolation proffers it automatic business class status compared to the economy class experience of jitney creeping to the Hamptons on a Friday evening, but really it takes about the same amount of time to get to either place from midtown. Once you arrive, you will notice that Hilton Head is culturally indistinguishable from 78th and Lexington. Sunday mornings, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between Harbor Town and Southhampton as you hunt and gather for coffee, bagels, and the New York Times.

The sea air is a hint saltier off Montauk and Southampton. The terroir of Hilton Head is a twee riper with more ferment of low tide than is available in Long Island. The aborigines on both islands have been pushed out -on Hilton Head, the once Gullah speaking inhabitants and their white confreres commute from the mainland, unable to afford their island and its taxes. In the Hamptons, the aborigines are long gone, and the more recent inhabitants, the establishment WASP -an endangered species, survives by intermarrying with the new money like the English did with the Normans, only the invading hordes today sport last names like Cohen, Freeman, Chen, and O’Hanlon (the ethnic stereotypes, not the law firm).

When you see Harbour Town on the TV, you think about some kind of tradition, a deep south Cape Cod, but it’s all a pleasant sham. Look hard as you want for the humble shacks out of Conrack -they’re buried beneath the rusticated mini mall around Publix. You might even think the Harbour Town course is super exclusive like Augusta, but au contraire, you just need enough bank. The irony of the Masters getting annually harangued for their peculiar institutions is in the fact that Shinnecock out on Long Island, while no less exclusive and hidebound, gets off the hook because the USGA moves the target around like a 3 card Monte dealer. While it is unlikely that I will get to play on either Augusta or Shinnecock in this life, I can swing Harbour Town once every few years. That is great.

And I’ll finish with this. The Ayn Rand/Gordon Gekko creed of “Greed is good” does work in America because we lack the education and sophistication to dedicate ourselves to political ideals more sophisticated than “less taxes, less government, more God,” but once you get there, once you have arrived, after all the striving and self improving which can take generations from broken English immigrant green grocers to graduate school educated doctors and lawyers, to pretensions to establishment, you are equally bound by the other great American rule voiced by Marx (Groucho, not Karl), “I would never join a club that would have me as its member.” We’re happy to be on Hilton Head, but we know there is something better. Specifically, it’s a helicopter ride to Fisher’s Island.

marriage brochure

For my old friend Mark who just got married. Congratulations.

I played my first round of golf at Wakonda for 2012 yesterday. I was in fact the first one to play at 8am -usually there is a morning crew on Saturdays that plays early despite the elements but none were present. I suspect that they like everyone else, was waiting on the 60+ degree weather later in the day. It was around 40 degrees when I teed off, but I was inspired. I parred the first hole which leaves me generally happy if nothing else happens during the round. It was the perfect drive that faded ever so slightly away from the blocking tree on the left and landed 170 yards away from the green. With the pin forward and middle and green elevated about 20 feet, with an aggressive 1-2 club wind cutting left to right, I barrel rolled a slightly drawn 5 iron that lifted into the cross wind and straigtened out, landing hard on the front slope and rolling without momentum onto the green, ending up 8 feet away from the hole. Missing the birdie, I made a 4 footer for par.

The rest of the round was a story of trying to trick the wind, but I got handsy and it showed. The 9th hole capped a decent round for me with a par -an 8 iron sent 165 yards with a stiff wind at the back, landing on the fringe, a running chip to 4 feet, and putt for par. This leaves me with a great deal of hope for this year, my final year at Wakonda to hit par. And that is bittersweet because my favorite place to be in Iowa is at the Wakonda Club on a Saturday morning before sun up, when the pro shop and first tee are shrouded in blue twilight. May the ball ever find the hole for you.

Jeremy Lin is not basketball’s Tebow. He’s a barrier breaking Jackie Robinson for Asian- and Harvard-Americans. For years, all they thought we could do was be attorneys or urologists, but this shows there is more than one way to pass the rock. Now scouts will have to notice that non-black, non-Croatian dude dribbling the ball so well with the four color pen in his short pocket. Asian Harvard-Americans from Orange County to Westchester County are rejoicing. Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last.

Inspired by the egg dish in V is for Vendetta, it was called eggy in a basket. The circular toast that comes out of the center is fun for eating yourself or for toddlers. Want to know from my UK friends if this actually exists as a breakfast dish.

It seems CES is all about reacting to Apple -Ultrabooks that are indistinguishable from MacBook Airs, smartphones that try to beat iPhone on features, cloud services that plagiarize Steve Jobs presentation slides, TV’s you talk to that try to preempt a Siri hosted Apple TV. The best stuff is when they try to be themselves, like Windows Mobile which is not very Microsoft in that it is stylish and easy to use, again like Apple.

When irony is so obvious, it no longer is ironic. It’s just sad. It’s just a bunch of small fish in a small pond. A tall hobbit contest.



More hoddeok from maangchi.com. The beauty of this recipe is the convenience of having this treat with minimal prep or cooking. Overall easier than making pancakes for a crowd.

Thoughts before a holiday cruise.
1. If I don’t pay enough for my tickets will I be Irish dancing day and night in steerage.
2. Will there be a series of unsolved murders and will I have to solve them?
3. As we sail into the Bermuda triangle, will there be wifi?
4. If we land on a lost continent, will dinosaur taste like chicken.
5. Will there be monsters?
6. If I ever have to man an oar, will I be man enough?
7. Would the food charge on the lifeboats include tip.
8. Does the rule women and children first include man-children?
9. Does our fare include tribute for harpies, sirens, and cyclops?
10. What is the dollar to doubloon exchange rate?

Thoughts during a cruise

1. Some non-Titanic cruise movies they should screen at Movies Under the Stars: The 5th Element, Steve Zissou and the Life Aquatic, Battlestar Galactica, but they don’t take requests.
2. Back is aft, forward is forward, right is starboard, left is port, and the bathroom is the head. Kind of funny that left is port.
3. Nobody shouts “land-ho!” when land is clearly ho.
4. Our steward has better manners than any of us.
5. The tropical paradise of Eleuthera is a dollop of sand in the middle of the ocean –if it wasn’t for the concession stand, I’d say two weeks tops before the party descends into cannibalism and Lord of the Flies worship.
6. Trying to figure out what is the real reason behind the all you can eat policy.
7. Sea Law implies that the captain is a benevolent despot and we are his happy children. Surprisingly, I sleep well.
8. Man Overboard! Don’t yell that.
9. Vomiting toddlers are treated like infected zombies.
10. There is no poop deck, just a walking track.

Thoughts After A Cruise

1. Grateful that there were no Kraken, Cyclops, or carnivorous Mermaids showing up asking for tips.
2. No icebergs.
3. Gastroenteritis outbreak averted by 36 hour quarantine of 2 year old in a 8×10 cell.
4. Scopalamine patch effective in creating zombie red eye, furry dry mouth, and Cross Bronx traffic jam constipation.
5. Baristas no longer hassling me over my morning precoffee aphasia.
6. Income inequality’s logical end point is well illustrated by the juxtaposition of Paradise Island and the slums over the hill from Nassau.
7. All you can eat does not mean all you can digest.
8. They gouge you with the Wifi, the drinks, the tips, and the duty free stuff that is not profit free.
9. Our particular cruise had the ambience of an over the top Bar Mitzvah that would not end.
10. Ship’s doctor thankfully didn’t want a tip
    

    The Only Fellow Who Didn't Want a Tip

    .