Category Archives: golf culture

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The Last Weekend

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IMG_0157The last weekend of golf is like the final sips of a good bottle of wine. Some people stop after the first glass, but I tend to take golf to the bitter dregs if given the opportunity. I played last weekend during a splash of 60 degree weather. I walked 3 holes -the first three of Wakonda which are the toughest three starting holes in Iowa. I birdied the first hole by holing a chip, tripled the second after getting in the bunker off the tee shot and flubbing the sand shot due to wet sand, and bogeying the third after getting on in regulation and three putting.

This was 2009 in a precise nutshell. I should give up golf and only write about it.

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NaNoWriMo -National Novel Writing Month -an excerpt

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bookcoverThe national novel writing month approaches. During this month, the challenge is to complete a 50,000 word novel starting on November 1, 2009 through November 30, 2009. The general daily goal is 1667 words a day. Although I am not suppose to start writing, I have submitted an excerpt for my NaNoWriMo home page which I am submitting here. I chose as the title, abandonner which is the French verb, to abandon. Chick Lit is my genre for NaNoWriMo. It is a topic of interest for me. The inner workings of the woman’s mind and her behavior in a natural setting is an avocation for me. I was the first grandson in a household full of women who pampered and spoiled me back in Korea. This was my Eden. Immigrating to America tore me away from this idyllic state, and the tables are now turned.

This coming month’s effort is dedicated to my deceased grandmother who, it is said, would terrorize the household, sending maids and daughter-in-laws out to the market in search of whatever rare, out of season, imported, or altogether-difficult-to-find fruit, viand, cake, dumpling or morsel that I demanded. I was that important at one time. So here you go, a rare and hopefully tasty tidbit of what is to come draining out of my head:

Parma, Ohio 1975

When I was six, a little Serbian girl fell in love with me. She had alabaster skin with black hair in pixie bangs, and I remember her green eyes staring at me. She always wore a brown knit sweater, a cardigan, that I later found out was made by her grandmother in Serbia. Sometimes she wore a black beret. I was doodling at my desk when she grabbed my hand and dragged me over to her desk. It was late fall and we were all working on Halloween drawings. She handed me a Valentine and kissed me on the cheek and ran away.

We became inseparable that year, the first grade couple of note. We were going to get married. We held hands and ate lunch together and played house with poignant accuracy. Hers was a Serbian household constructed of small wooden furniture and plastic. I mostly did what she told me to do. That Easter, she shared with me a rough bread with a kind of butter she called kajmak. The only time we fought was when I wanted to play ball with the other boys during recess. She would fume and watch with singleminded determination.

Summer came and we promised to see each other in the fall. I lied. She looked sad as we walked down to the school entrance and went opposite ways. She thought it was going to be a summer of separation as our parents did not socialize only to be reunited in the fall. I knew it would be goodbye forever as we were going to move away, but I was rendered mute. When I got home, I was whisked away to a family friend’s to stay the night as our furniture was packed. We left the next morning.

It would be nice to say that I think about her frequently, but that is not true. I hardly think about her at all. If I do, its mostly to wonder if she remembered me and thought about me, and how remarkably sad she must have been that following fall. I decided, in my first grade mind, to not dwell on such sad matters and move forward. If this sadness made me heavy with regret, it would be a rejection of it to let me be light again. But I do think about her, and it was thirty five years later that I met her again…

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Why the Yankees Must Win

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IMG_0140It was 2001 and all the world was rooting for New York. The World Series was playing into November because of the start of the War at the End of the World that would define this decade. The whole team was still there -Joe Torre, Bernie, Paul, Tino, Luis, Scotty along with Andy, Jorge, Mariano, and Jeter. Characters were on that team -Knoblauch the head case, and Clemens the man who chucks lumber in anger because of ‘roid rage.

It was pretty much a done deal it seemed, a fitting tonic to soothe the wounds of a city in mourning. The loss to the tandem ace pairing of Schilling and Johnson was hard but in the scope of the events that had taken place only a few months before, it was unseemly to complain too much. Bully for the ‘Backs. Life will go on, no?

But we lost all those guys the subsequent year, and it was never the same again. From 2001 to the fall of 2008 when the Yankees didn’t even make the post season, it was very clear that no amount of money could buy back the chemistry of the early Torre years. 2004 seemed automatic but revealed the weakness of the Yankees flailing arms and the team seemed broken and grasping for a way out of the cave.

The core was always there, but they seemed apart from a team that was never equal to the sum of its parts. This year, it seems different. That threeway happy dance in the infield of A-Rod, Jeter, and Teixeira at the end of the ALCS is something different and not seen in a long time.

My belief is that the fate of the country, and even the world is tied to the health of New York City, that city of Babel that will prove or disprove humanity’s ability to get along. The Yankees are an important barometer of the city’s health. A Yankee team that is doing the happy dance in the inaugural year of the new stadium is nothing but good news for everyone, even Philadelphians.

I congratulate the Phillies on their pennant, but they must now do their patriotic duty and service to mankind by giving a good show, even win a game or two in Philadelphia, and bring the show back to New York for a final Yankee victory in game 6. It would be the only decent thing to do.

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The iPhonist

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As I have said, the iPhone brings out the creativity in individuals in ways that are unmatched by any other personal gadget. It has become the screen of choice. I have been playing with the iPhone app Brushes which let’s you create compelling artwork. David Hockney recently featured in the NYTimes now does much of his art on the iPhone. Several New Yorker covers have been created on iPhone by Jorge Columbo (link).

My latest piece was done in bed while watching the Yankees lose to the Angels. It’s my view to the right. More to come, but this device does not cease to amaze me and a tablet device will become de rigeur among creative people.

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Idiocracy -the greatest movie created by Fox, and buried by it

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SNC10668I just picked up Idiocracy from Amazon (link), finding this gem for all $4.99. It can be found on Youtube in bits and pieces. It is a brilliant indictment of our cultural decay. After it was made, it was released in only 7 cities and then conveniently buried. Rupert Murdoch, owner of the News Corporation, Fox, Fox News, 20th Century Fox, and much of the pro-Bush media likely had a hand in killing this movie which savages the corporate supported dumbassification of the land.

It can be interpreted as elitist, but elitist in the sense that smart people monopolize intelligence in an unfair way. The genius of this movie is that if you’re really stupid, you will laugh your ass off.

Nobelist Paul Krugman (they hand out those things to everyone these days) and NY Times columnist and Princeton Economics professor discusses the demise of American public education in his column today (link). Education was once celebrated. A generation ago, The Paper Chase was popular. Today, it’s variations on Jackass.

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My Mighty Red Pens

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If you accept this pen, it is an implicit endorsement of me.

The federal government cracked down on the allegedly briberous practice of pharmaceutical and medical device companies giving away pens and other swag (Plavix alarm clock anyone?) to physicians, nurses, office staff, and physician’s children. These rules were meant to avoid the impression that physician were endorsing these companies. I had always maintained that I could not be swayed by the giving of a pen, but if the government says so, so be it.

The problem is that now people are hoarding the logo pens. I have my private stash of Viagra pens that I’ll now keep like reliquary pre-embargo Cuban cigars. It was in a fit of libertarian pique that I decided to invert the relationship between Giver of Pens and Taker of Pens.

I decided to have my own pens manufactured, and have been giving them away at a torrid pace. There is no rule against my giving these pens to the drug and device sales reps -I tell them to drop them off wherever.

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The Eater of Golf Balls

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Steam rising from the beast

The HAC was played at the Tournament Club of Iowa (TCI –link). After 27 well fought holes, the South of Wilden crowd has won their first trophy in several decades. In my matches, paired with the stalwart MS, aka Cutter, we fought hard against our opponents, RT and TB, but driving accuracy, length, and good looks cannot match laser wedges and dropped twenty foot putts. My hat’s off to our opponents.

I have one comment to make about TCI. Designed by the inimitable Arnold Palmer, it is an anomaly in Iowa. Unlike much of Iowa which is flat as a tabletop, this area around Polk City above the dam is topographically more like the moderately hilly parts of Pennsylvania farm country. There are ravines and low buttes. Arnie, using his deep experience with golf as an instrument of pain, has created a monster that demands to be fed golf balls.

These are not subtle tricks of the light that cause golf balls to wink out into moderate rough like at Wakonda. No, its craters are like giant salad bowls filled with knee deep vegetation that swallow up those Titleists, Bridgestones, and Nikes like grains of table salt shaken into a green shag carpet.

Golf is about the mind. Each of us have fears that certain golf courses use to guide us away from our purpose of reaching the hole. I grew up playing golf in Florida, and I welcome water and sand. Florida, like Iowa, is usually flat, but water and beach sand are rare commodities here in Iowa and are usually my allies in matches against the land locked. Hills and elevation changes add a third dimension that I often find confounding on approaches, and the penalties of a lost ball are much higher than for water or sand.

But despite all this, everything is trumped by the ability to get the ball close and dropping that putt, and that is where I failed. It’s back to the lab.

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dropping putts is the whole point of golf

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Updated Golf Transparency

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GHINThe HAC, our neighborhood tournament, is coming up and to insure complete transparency in the handicap process, I again offer up my card. I have been struggling while I fix my short game using the books by Stan Utley available on Amazon. Occasionally, I will hit a pitch that defies all reason but it could be really really good or really really bad. I carry a 20 course handicap at Wakonda. The anomalous 76 taken under shamble/scramble/individual conditions was posted after some deliberation, again for the sake of transparency.

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Purgatory

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purgatoryIf the Old Testament, hellfire Christians are correct, then the best I can expect is to be in a line with quadrillions of people ahead of me, a line that includes Gandhi, Socrates, the Buddha, the entire pre-Columbian Aztec nation, most everyone who has ever lived in Marin County, aborted fetuses (each wearing an original sin pin on a simple gray smock), spilled semen (reconstituted as hopping demi-beings with whiplike tails, wearing half a black tee shirt with Onan in globby white letters), and a couple of my high school teachers. We’re all waiting to get processed and sent down a large hole in the clouds. We entertain each other with stories about our lives. I’m surrounded by a couple of billion demi-people who claim some relationship to me…