addendum 5-19-2009 -sorry about privacy lock that prevented viewing earlier.
I had this idea that about performing motion capture of my swing -kind of like the way you see pro golfers to as they get scanned into the games. They usually have white dots taped on all the index parts of their bodies. Using Apple’s Keynote which also lets you record your presentation, I was able to recreate that motion capture. Taking the series of screen shots, I placed dots on the middle of my cap, my shoulders, my hands, and my clubhead, and then took out the picture leaving just the motion capture dots. Keynote has a wonderful and intuitive guide system that makes this very easy.
I recently took a lesson from the inimitable Bill Rose, pro emeritus at our course. He has the ability to distill swing advice to a minimal few principles. The first thing he said about my swing was about keeping the head still from address to contact. Thin shots -looked up and head went up. Chunks -head went down. I have been able to compensate by moving the hands, and getting contact every once in a while, but never consistently. Strangely, it showed up less in my drives and more in my wedges where missteps seem to be magnified.
The video shows what you can do with about 2 hours on the Mac. Taking Mr. Rose’ advice, I spent several hours on the range yesterday evening and found myself hitting in a 5 foot radius around a pin 150 yards away -consistently. Its one of those moments where you just don’t want to leave the range because everything seems to click. Fairway wood -ohmygod -straight, high and mighty.
Now if I could get this to go on the course. I will film this modified swing later this season if it holds up. The other adjustment was taking out the last quarter turn that took me past horizontal -hands to right ear with full shoulder turn again kept me in the slot and made it easier to keep my head still.
I played Saturday and Sunday on Wakonda -it’s convalescence from a replacement of her greens and fairways now complete. Many trees are gone, more have been planted, and it’s not playing any easier. I was playing in the 80’s and 90’s this spring on other courses. Coming back, I barely got through just 9 holes on Saturday in 38 degree wind chill and 25 mile/hr winds. Yesterday, I played in club 2 man best ball -was bested by a pair of brothers, but found a new friend in partner TR.
The greens -I can’t say enough about how
A1/A4 hybrid bentgrass -the good stuff
perfectly smooth the grass is and how wicked fast the ball rolls. On 14, a par three with two tiers, my ball on the fringe, on failing to roll up to the second tier, rolled back and off the green. It is like the surface of a very expensive billiard table -the never skipped or jumped but rolled end over end like on a glass surface.
The look of the course is sharply different on some of the holes. No. 11 which I blogged about last year (link) had what I termed an oaken shield wall -all gone. The before and afters are below. The hole plays the same, but you can’t rely on underbrush and trees to slow your progress off to the next hole with errant shots. You need a perfect tee shot to the left center onto an ever narrowing fairway to get an uncluttered approach, or if you go right, you have to deal with the tree of despair which, gratifyingly, has been kept with a high fade with a long iron or hybrid.
Wakonda No. 11, May, 2008
Wakonda No. 11, May 2009
After the third putt...
The course remains a relentless test of golf and character with no bailouts, no quarter given. There is no safe place to run up the ball, no place to bail out with a short slice, and no place to ever let your guard down. It’s stunningly beautiful.
Wakonda No. 3, third of the toughest starting 3 holes of golf in Des Moines, possibly in Iowa.
The HAC event was played out at River Valley in Adel, Iowa. It is a gem that is privately owned by the original farmer (who is usually out on his tractor maintaining and will gladly stop for a chat). The weather was drizzly to monsoon downpour-ish.
We happy few
Me wearing a half a gallon of water
We pressed on knowing that without rain nor wind, it’s not golf (the original Scots is too barbaric for these pages). Everybody finished except for the fellows following us. After we clamored up to the 19th hole soaked to the bone (see picture below left), we were surprised to meet them happily imbibing and chatting. BK gave up on a back nine that found him 1 over through 6 holes, including an incredible series of chip-ins. They saw the rain and felt that it was not worth the trouble -there was lightning in the next county. They were surprised to hear that we finished out, sitting drinking beers dry as kittens and grandmothers. We fought a good fight bringing it in with our heads up -I shot a 90 for the day which is great because of the conditions. The ball was rooster tailing on the greens. In the midst of the worst of the downpour, facing a 180 yard par three, being unable to see more than 3 feet ahead, I launched my 220 yard club in the general direction of the hole and made it center vector, on the fringe. Not seeing anything but the ball is a great experience. Overall a great half day off from work.
So who won? Does it matter? It was a randomized aggregate team best ball over clusters of 6 holes. Teams and post game accounting determined by Mr. A, who emerged victorious! Congratulations!
Mowing lawn, listening to iPod, gives you a lot of time to think, and realize things can’t be all that bad…if you live in Iowa, and just played golf that morning.
Our match played among 20 of our esteemed neighbors is tomorrow afternoon. Its suppose to be fine weather. Game format and rules? -haven’t a clue. Too excited to start playing at all.
I have hit more practice balls this winter than all my previous years -here’s to hoping it paid off.
Wakonda Club opens with its newly resurfaced greens and fairways. Many old growth trees have been felled. I was at the practice tee this evening and it was a line of very happy golfists. Which lead me to think, what fine wives we have who let us enjoy this greatest of activities.
While golf marriages don’t have to be legalized, they really need to be recognized as a double plus good positive thing. When a friend fretted about playing on Friday, then Saturday, then putting in our matchplay event on Sunday morning, I pointed out that our dear club won’t be having such another grand reopening again for a long, long time, and so it would be cruel to have him not participate in what is surely an historic event. Deny that man golf, and he’s sure to start fantasizing about other women and Porsches.
There is no golf in science fiction that I know of. This doesn’t keep me from enjoying science fiction immensely. The new Star Trek movie is coming out and looks to be a huge bangup. Among Star Trek fans, there are two factions. Those who prefer Big Action are offered up episodes and movies involving wars with Klingons, Borgs, and Khan, and even thrown a planet eating monster that looks like a giant doobie. Those who prefer Big Ideas are given time travel stories (including one involving a sarcastic, cloacal time portal), moral dilemma recapitulating the issues of the 20th century, and anything involving empaths (people who can sense the emotional state of others -WTF!???!?!?). Then you have tribbles and fembots.
JJ Adams takes a turn at the old wheel, coming off his Cloverfield and Lost successes, and the preview shows a definite red state Big Action tilt. You see a mavericky kid and young adult Kirk speeding along in various fossil-fueled vehicles. The bi-specied Spock is seen trying to bludgeon a crewmate in this preview. (J’ever notice that Obama may actually have some Vulcan in him as well?). And that’s the thing, when the quintessential blue stater Spock is kii-yaa-ing and hacking at people, you know where the movie is going.
The Star Trek vehicle needs reinvigoration after spending many years in the Big Idea doldrums. I tried watching the first season of Enterprise but just couldn’t get over the show being stupefyingly boring. Reimaginations of “classic” shows inevitably have to incorporate the mood and tempo of the contemporary audiences.The remade Battlestar Galactica is the greatest television show ever, and you should have heard the shrieking about Starbuck being a girl in certain geek quarters. The best science fiction balances the Big Ideas with Big Action. Ridley Scott is a master of this with Blade Runner and Alien.
There are elements of homage in the preview. There is a Dreadnought class starship getting blown up -this is a reference from the Star Fleet technical manual. This kind of detail shows that JJ Adams and the writers are shockingly incredible Trek geeks. This would seem to me that they took their custodial duties with regard to the Star Trek canon seriously. Or it may just be a random teaser designed to draw in the middle aged Trekkies along with all the teens and twenty somethings who know nothing about Trek. I’m holding judgement and praying it’s not Star Trek Kids.
The missing Dreadnought, inspiration for many pages of spiral notebook art
Addendum: The ship in the HD preview (much clearer) is clearly not a Dreadnought, but rather a some kind of modification of either the Scout or Destroyer Class starship called the USS Kelvin with a topside crew/engineering pod in the picture shown from the back below:
Warp Nacelle on Bottom? or Blinding LED Rear Light
This addresses a serious problem I had with Technical Manual where there was no differentiation between the Scouts and the Destroyers (identical) and all you had was the saucer section. The topside main section appears to have the sensor array in the appropriate place.
The USS Kelvin does not show up in the Star Trek Technical Manual, which means that this production deviates from the canon by a large degree. I do know this will greatly bother many serious Trekkies who have nothing better to do than dissect blurry Youtube videos.
Interesting for local readers, Kirk (young adult) zips alongside cornfields to end up in some kind of future alien cityscape. Kirk’s backstory is that he was born and raised in Iowa (Riverside, Iowa -see below). Problem is, I don’t see a Kum & Go anywhere, which shows again how little attention to detail was given by Team JJ Adams.
Riverside, Iowa
Addendum: Prequel is available on iTunes as an iPhone App. Engaging comic book about the Romulan Apocalypse and time travel. Time travel is the sci fi equivalent of the dream sequence -it’s usually a sign of unimaginative thinking. It does allow for drastic changes to canon -after all -we are on another time line. The linearity of the timeline is something established by HG Wells, who avoided the going back in time to blow up your parents conundrum. The Planet of the Apes movies dealt with a non-linear timeline, and most recently, The Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles basically acknowledges that there is a fifth dimension -a history of time -meaning that linear views of history and causality can change so that the totality and end results are different over time. Kind of like seeing a full circle on the kaleidoscope rather than just a ray on the kaleidoscope. In this kind of world, there is no canon and JJ Adams can do what he wants. This is far more pleasing than the stupid negative universe where everything is opposite.
Addendum 5/14/2009: I saw it last weekend, took my seven year old and wife on Mother’s Day. The movie knocked my socks off. Everything makes intrinsic sense now. They needed to fluff up the old shaggy franchise, and they hit it out of the park. It was very entertaining. Iowa is elevated to the status of planet with cut scenes between Vulcan and Iowa. Also, it is clear to me that the canyon seen in the trailer is in fact a quarry used to deliver matter to be transformed Trek-style into starship plating. The Enterprise is made of Iowa dirt! Watching the movie in a theater in Des Moines was very special. My son who had been watching classic trek on the iPod Touch now thinks Star Trek is almost as good as his Clone Wars.
This was my comment on William K. Wolfrum’s excellent political and occasionally golf oriented blog (link).
regarding Cheney’s recent publicity campaign challenging the current sitting Presidents judgement and policies:
I think this is a campaign to shape public opinion, concentrate and shore up the base, to preempt some series of possible revelations coming down the pike. This is probably because they have nothing on Pres. Obama or his administration except for randoms bits. The revelation will do nothing less than result in the further marginalization of the GOP with a breakoff group of holdover moderates creating the seeds of viable opposition which we need in a democracy.
I used to track chatter on a great 9/11 conspiracy, and a good friend even divested in western civilization by selling out 401k’s, IRA’s, properties in San Francisco in 2002-2003 and put all of his money in oil and gold -now has built a beautiful house off the grid on a lake filled with trout in the pacific northwest -all based on the belief that there was a conspiracy.
I see now with Cheney’s ranting and the GOP’s loss that rather than conspiracy, it was opportunism and cronyism a la Teapot Dome. I used to vote GOP, was a big fan of Bush, Sr, but dropped out and voted for Gore in 2000 based on the treatment of McCain by GWB’s team and their appeal to the darker side of our natures. It’s the flight of moderates like me that have left the GOP in its current state.
We can’t print money fast enough to pay for this mess. It will be the duty of every citizen to hold, even cling, to the principles that created this country because we’re in for a long haul. Our minds aren’t geared to a ten year timeline but to the moods of our gut -and if we’re sated and typing away at the keyboard, it can’t be that bad, could it? Could it? &”(/.) -Mike Park
There is a golfer who has written a book about breaking par (link) in the span of a year from a state of hack. I am a fan of windmill tilting, and I have preordered the book. The author is on Twitter probably by order of his publicist, but his genuine reticence to go full tilt shill convinced me of his genuine qualities.
I think for someone with a reasonable swing, going from bogey to par golf is an achievable goal if it is dissected as a process, much like making a good pot of coffee, a perfect pancake, or repairing a ruptured aneurysm. I fancy that I can make my swing work on occasion.
Of course, unlike the previously mentioned procedures, golf involves a great deal of emotional baggage. A round of golf can reveal emotional subtext like nothing else except for maybe Thanksgiving dinner with the family.
You see the flashes of perfection like the fluttering of angel wings at the periphery of your vision. The ball sometimes flies as if guided by Providence. These shots out of our dreams are glimpses of our better selves.
As much as I try to put bad shots out of my mind, I think the key to the next level is getting the good shots out of my mind -or at least the most recent good shot. I will concentrate on blocking out the past and on facing the present situation -it’s natural as breathing in my profession, so I must strive to apply it in my avocation.
If you double after a birdie, you’re still one over for two holes where typically you’d be two over, so what’s the problem? I think the birdie is as much the problem as the double bogey, and my goal for this year is to focus on the present -the address, the stance, the takeaway, the rhythm, the swing, the follow through, and keeping my head still. The cosmic injustice of double bogeys following birdies will have to be stowed away for discussion after the match.
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” -Master Yoda.
Competition is an integral part of golf. Keeping an accurate handicap is the only honorable way to level the playing field. I proudly carry my most recent handicap card and keep a USGA Rules of Golf in my bag. It also means competing with my neighbors in our annual HAC series of tournaments, and entering in the tournaments in my club. Will keep you posted.
Ever since I moved to Iowa, I’ve been practicing at gardening. It is one of the skills that came naturally to my grandparents who grew up and raised kids in the hardest of times. I have learned that pretty much anything temperate will grow well in Iowa whose growing season can be stretched with an early planting (risking frost), and a second one in July. The box garden above came about because the ground though once used as a corn field, was in fact fairly hard and difficult to manage, and the critters (deer and rabbits) were also very difficult to manage. It is basically pressure treated lumber, three 16x12x1.5 inch pieces, two cut in half, and one cut in fourths to create two adjoining boxes. The lengths were such that we could drive the pieces home from Home Depot in our Honda CRV. This creates 64 cubic feet of volume. The area was chosen because it was in the summer sun path between the homes -it gets full sun from daybreak to sunset. We’ll be getting unbelievable tomatoes this year (knock on wood), but also specialty Korean vegetables that are very difficult to get from the grocery. My goal is to eventually make kimchi from dirt.
The idea that we need to live locally is one that is gaining favor. I just had a plate of blackberries shipped in from Chile and bought from Costco. Though convenient and delicious, it is also a bit unnatural. Out of season, people would eat canned fruit or preserves, not unripe fruit shipped from the antipodes and ripened in a box.
The boxes took about a total of a half hour to build with an electric drill and wood screws. Each 55quart back of gardening soil is 2.1 cubic feet, so we’ll need to get another 15 bags to fill the other box -we filled one with about 14 bags. This is costly, I know, but who has time to get dirt, lawn clippings, and shit in a bucket for a year to make your own topsoil -it isn’t that bad yet. The skills are not lost -just ask anybody over 70, and they all know how to garden and can to stow food for the winter.
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 