Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Bon Voyage, Mr. Al-Maliki

LEFTOVERS

hope you all (heh. as bill says -- all 2 of you) had a wonderful thanksgiving.

mine was wonderful. matt and mel drove up from columbus on wednesday afternoon. we met at danny boys for pre-holiday pizza. they left friday afternoon for another feast with mel's family in pittsburgh. for two days, we cooked, ate, laughed, watched football, played euchre and trivial pursuit, and laughed some more. it was awesome.

i cooked a huuuuge butterball -- 20 pounds. i wasn't thrilled with the bird this year, i must admit (sorry, mom). so far, leftovers have generated cold sandwiches, hot sandwiches, croquettes, and just plain reheats. what i don't use today in the turket pot pie dinner and sandwiches lunch will have to be frozen.

yesterday while i was napping, bill made cashew brittle. when i got up, i made some chocolate-raisin-peanut-marshmallow clusters. the holidays are off to a running start.

i'm boring. and busy. and feeling very thankful today.

Don't Cry

Michelle Wie is a 17-year-old high school student, who happens to play golf for money. In a golf tournament in Japan this week, she was the only female player of the 101 entrants and shot a score of 81 and a score of 80 in her two rounds. She was not invited to play the final two rounds, since she was 27 strokes behind the leader with 99 golfers ahead of her. It is likely that all of her expenses were paid and that she received appearance money paid by the sponsor. She did not qualify for the tournament, but was invited to play by the sponsor; and because of her failure to qualify to play the last two rounds, she will not receive a share of the prize money. She is scheduled to play in Hawaii against a field of men in the Sony Open in January, which is a PGA Tour tournament. Sony, one of her sponsors and the sponsor of the golf event, invited her and her entourage for a week in Hawaii.

She needs to practice.

I'm in favor of Michelle Wie playing against men. Here's the rub, however. She has not qualified to play in any of the "men's" tournaments in which she has played, but been given a starting spot in each tournament by the sponsor, in the hope that the money would roll in with all the publicity caused by the novelty of a woman playing in a "men's"event. She has not been competitive. There are plenty of other professional golfers who were more deserving of a spot in the field in those tournaments than Michelle Wie. In her previous two "men's" tournaments, she was dead last after two rounds and didn't make the cut for the final two rounds in each of those tournaments. Before that, she quit because it was too hot.

She should be required to earn a spot in any future PGA Tour events, by way of playing in a Monday qualifying round for the four spots in the tournament not guaranteed to anyone or by earning a PGA Tour card. Otherwise, she should try to play on the Nationwide Tour or satellite tournaments in the South against male competitors, if she can qualify there, or in exhibition matches against men.

And to do that, she needs to practice a whole lot more than she has lately and hike her game to a whole new level.

Happy Thanksgiving

I was planning to personally wish my two readers a happy and healthy Thanksgiving, but I didn't feel like trying to find their phone numbers; so, I'm doing it here.

I was in the grocery store yesterday and saw an article in one of the newspapers at the check-out counter about Laura Bush giving W. an ultimatum about his on-going affair with Condoleeza Rice. I wonder if she's the only secretary he's bopping or if he's in bed with any of his other secretaries.

I thought I'd take the dogs out for their morning walk and let them run around adjacent to the convention center, but there were 20,000 spandex-clad runners waiting to start the annual Thanksgiving Day run, about which I forgot. And it wasn't just the 20,000 runners. They brought all kinds of other people with them. And dogs ... they brought dogs, too. So much for our early morning walk with nobody around.

And I would be remiss in not pointing out to you that a new scientific study has found that women use exclamation marks significantly more than do men!!!!!!!!

I am flabbergasted!! I am bowled over by the conclusion reached by this research!!! What is more surprising is that it confirms previous studies!!!!!!! I repeat ... previous studies!!! Imagine that!!!

I have heard the expression, not directed to me personally, mind you (I take that back. Another player said that to me during a baseball game; he got hurt later in the game!! Unfortunate!!!), but to other athletes, "You throw like a girl!!!!"

Now, geeks have an insult upon which to fall back!!!!!!

Finally, since this post has taken a turn toward linguistics. The word of the day is "trencherman."

Banking in America

I'm not one of those financial types or banking guys with the fancy suits and ties and highly-polished shoes, who know everything there is to know about banking and financial markets, like the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and how much the U.S. dollar is worth from minute-to-minute these days. I took Economics 101 in college, back when the formula for the Dow Jones thingy hadn't been all modified so that the Dow Jones Industrials Average could shoot up to 10,000 instead of linger around 1,000 and really mean something to some people because 10,000 is so much bigger than 1,000 and must, therefore, be a good thing; so, I guess I could fake it a little if I had to.

And I was around when Ronald Reagan was president and did hear of the Laffer Curve and still can't understand, as Bush the Lesser apparently does, how spending a lot more than you have and cutting the amount of money you bring in tax-wise can possibly be a good thing; but, as I said before, I took only Economics 101 that started at 8 in the morning and really can't speak to that kind of thing, except that an overdraft charge of $34 is arbitrary and has no basis in reality. But that's banking and economics. Bankers figure out a way to justify that kind of insanity.

By the way, Key Bank, which is supposed to be a big-ass bank, discovered that one of its banker guys with nicely tailored suits, shiny shoes, a $5.8 million house on Long Island, a girlfriend with a $1.2 million necklace, and a wife and kids in a $1.2 million dollar house, had stolen about $23 million over the past three years ... then he admitted in a signed confession filed in federal court that he'd been doing it, undiscovered by the bank, for 10 years. Do the math. And he started with Key Bank 11 years ago ... go figure.

Key Bank owns or leases the tallest building between New York and Chicago ... that would be the Key Bank Building in Cleveland. Despite its obvious presence in Cleveland, Key Bank is not the "Official Bank of the Cleveland Browns." A sign on the Cleveland Browns Stadium flashed to me this morning, along with the 39-degree temperature, that the Bank of America is the "Official Bank of the Cleveland Browns." That is a strange and puzzling phenomenon.

But I'm not adept at banking or economics, as I indicated to you previously. There are three Bank of America branches listed in the on-line phone directory in the Cleveland area. I tried to find two of them one afternoon when my presently-Florida-based sister-in-law, PJ, who doesn't own a freeze-dried dog, but did drive with a freeze-dried dog in a convertible down to North Carolina, was traveling and asked me to make a deposit into her Bank of America account, giving me her account number, apparently trusting that I wouldn't steal her identity.

With my lovely navigator-wife directing me, we headed down Broadview Road, south of the city into the outer reaches of suburbia. The address for the bank was right next to an empty warehouse. No bank. We figured the bank probably moved to the address on Edgerton Road, which was very close to the Broadview Road location, since nobody was answering the phone listed for Broadview Road. Well, there was no fucking bank anywhere near the Edgerton Road address, either. There was nothing near that address ... except for the par-5 meandering along the other side of the road. Not even a vacant warehouse.

Those addresses are actually where the Ohio Turnpike intersects and passes beneath those roadways; and the Bank of America "branches" are ATM machines at the Ohio Turnpike rest stops.

There are no live employees working for Bank of America in Ohio. There are no offices for the Bank of America in Ohio. Any Bank of America address in Ohio is for an ATM machine. The phone numbers are for ATM machine modems.

So, why did the Bank of America pay all kinds of money to be the "Official Bank of the Cleveland Browns?"

Continuing Education

I can't remember when the powers that be instituted the requirement of continuing legal education. That requirement is not a bad thing. I have taught some courses and received credit toward the continuing education requirement. And I've taken courses that have been helpful because I was an acting judge for a number of years. I learned all about radar and laser speed detection devices, which has helped tremendously in my day-to-day driving. Also, I learned about machines to measure blood alcohol, which has helped me in defending DUI cases.

So, I can't say that the continuing legal education requirement imposed on lawyers is a useless exercise that is a way for some organizations conducting the seminars to make money, as some lawyers complain.

Anyone can apply to the state supreme court to be certified to put on seminars ... and get continuing education credit ... and get paid. I'm thinking about applying to put on a seminar. Here's the schedule that I propose for the seminar that I want to conduct:

LITIGATION SEMINAR

Drug Testing in Golf

Taking a step the male professional golfers have refused to take, as play begins in the tournament offering the most prize money ever, the Ladies' Professional Golf Association (LPGA) claims it will begin drug testing in 2008.

The PGA and the PGA Tour have knocked around the idea, but not many think that drug abuse is a problem in the pro golf ranks. In a sport where it is customary to tip a few "at the 19th hole" and to buy everyone at the course a drink after shooting a hole-in-one, in which colorful characters in professional golf history were known to drink to excess, in which aches and pains are commonplace and must be "ignored" to earn a paycheck in professional ranks, one might think that booze and drugs could be a problem.

Pro golfer Nick O'Hern made a pretty good living playing golf in 2006. He played in only 15 tournaments on the PGA Tour. As prize money, he earned ... let's call it what it is ... the outrageous sum of $995,235. Outrageous? Ninety-three golfers are ahead of him on the PGA Tour official money list, all making more than $1 million in prize money.

Why would professional golfers use performance-enhancing drugs, such as drugs that make the heart beat slower, anxiety-relieving psychotropics, and anabolic steroids?

The answer is obvious. And the prize money for which the professional golfers compete from week to week is supplemented by endorsement contracts ... Tiger Woods may have made almost $10,000,000 in prize money on the PGA Tour, but he made as much as $80,000,000 playing in other tournaments, playing with Nike equipment, shilling for Buick, and having other assorted endorsement deals, according to Forbes.

Nick O'Hern is supplied equipment by the Acushnet Golf Company, which owns the Titleist brand, and is reimbursed for many expenses. And he also won over $310,000 playing in Australia, being #2 on that money list.

So, should there be drug testing in golf? There is extensive, detailed testing of golf clubs and golf balls to ensure uniformity, eliminating unfair competitive advantages. Why allow unfair competitive advantages by those players who use drugs to enhance their performances?

Drug testing should be mandatory.

On Torture

The Vice President recently said in an interview vis-a-vis torture that "dunking" is a "no-brainer." There has been much written about "water-boarding," but not much really written about water-boarding. There are various definitions of the procedure, from dunking someone under water, as Dick the Barbarian would have everyone believe, to tying the victim to a board, wrapping plastic wrap around the victim's head, and pouring water on him or her, as those who want the ASPCA to believe that the procedure is relatively tame and non-life-threatening.

From a source I consider to be reliable, water-boarding starts the same as the relatively tame version. The victim is bound very securely to a board and then water is pumped into the victim's mouth, with nasal passages oftentimes blocked to prevent the expiration of water through the nose, and mouth sealed around the hose, to prevent expiration of water through the mouth, so that first the stomach fills and becomes distended. Eventually, the esophagus fills and water spills into the trachea and windpipe and into the lungs.

Those administering this form of torture interrogation must be well-trained so that the victim doesn't drown, lose consciousness, or suffer brain damage.

Hey, it's one of the "tools" in the War on Terror that is now "legal."

ONE MORE REASON

you know how i justify my starbucks "addiction" by their fair wages and availability of health insurance for their employees? well...

karma has kicked in -- jackson was just hired yesterday by a starbucks in florida! yay for jax! yay for starbucks! jackson LOVES interacting with people; and he, too, is crazy for starbucks coffee. he's been trying to get a job with the buck for 5 years. it's a perfect fit.

The War on Terror?

As a part of the International War on Terror, the United States Senate unanimously passed a bill that would enact a law entitled the "Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act," if passed by the House of Representatives.

Let's say that you were told by your friend, who works for ABC Fertilizer Company, that part of his job is feeding poisonous chemicals used in pesticides and herbicides to dogs and cats, causing them to suffer neurological defects and death. And you, being the animal lover you are, call a few friends, who also happen to think that this testing is cruel; and you all decide to make some signs with pictures of dead dogs and cats and deformed puppies and kittens and stand in front of the ABC Fertilizer Company on the public sidewalk to protest the killing of dogs and cats. And the wife of the company's general manager arrives in her Escalade to take her husband to lunch and you and your group of 30 friends shout things about the company being dog and cat killers and torturers.

You and your friends are arrested. You've threatened nobody. You have not trespassed on company property. But you are charged with violating a federal law called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act because you were harassing company employees and the general manager's wife, who also was afraid that her life was in danger because of all the crazy animal rights people out there. And by the way, a trucking company refused to send their trucks to pick up $250,000 worth of fertilizer because of the protest.

So, you are looking at a maximum 10 years in prison and paying for the $250,000 the company lost. And you have to hire a lawyer, who will have to defend you, claiming that the law infringes upon your right to free speech and that the law is vague as written, which are both issues that you would need to appeal to a higher court at even greater expense, and that the general manager's wife's reaction was not reasonable. I wish you well in your endeavor.

The House bill, which is even more restrictive than the Senate version, is still in committee; so, the law is not on the books ... yet.

Terrorism.

Are you kidding me?

The government already has many tools at its disposal to prosecute those animal rights activists who do commit crimes, such as arson, criminal damaging, and the like, the use of which has resulted in the convictions of those individuals.

Why do we another law that comes dangerously close to abridging First Amendment rights?

Saturday Annoyances

What kind of clumsy attempt at humor is this strip by Johnny Hart that was in this morning's newspaper?

"Penultimate" means "next-to-the-last." So, a firing squad is the next-to-the-last implementation of downsizing. I don't get it. Would someone explain it to me?

Or does Mr. Hart mean that it is the ultimate implementation of downsizing, meaning the best or the end of it? If so, and I think he is, he's using the wrong fucking word.

And what the fuck is it with the Citibank commercial with the guy with the foreign accent who kind of looks like that Rumanian gymnastics coach? Is that supposed to be cute or funny or something? It's fucking annoying. I changed the channel every time it was on. Fuck 'em.

The Fabulous Food Show is in Cleveland, which is a good thing; but I am not paying a $25 admission fee, which translates to $50 for two people, for the opportunity to spend more money on cooking stuff.

Maybe I'm just in one of those foul moods today.

DORKS ARE US

i guess i changed some after i became a gimp. that's really a hard thing for me to admit. matty put it to me this way when the fam was trying hard to get me to look at that:

you used to be a romulan. now you're a klingon.

i cannot tell you how much that bugged me. me? a klingon? what. ever.

The Cassini People Were Right

Now that the mid-term elections are over, we can start discussing important issues, one of which was the subject of talking head, recovering-drug-addict-acting-like-a-dry-drunk-or-like-he's-using-again Rush Limbaugh's weird, warped outlook on human behavior and life in general, which is stem cell research.

It's disconcerting to me that scientists at the University of Newcastle in Great Britain have applied to get permission to create part human, part cow embryo so that they can extract embryonic stem cells to conduct their stem cell research. Well, I'm not feeling disconcerted about the hybrid human-cow being created, but more so because these imaginative scientists claim they will destroy the human-cow embryo at age 14 days.

I mean, there are a lot of slang expressions that compare humans to cows in many respects. I need not repeat those comparisons here -- write them on a piece of paper and read them silently to yourself, wondering where you first heard these expressions, thereby giving you a blog topic. My objection to the human cow hybrid research is that we will never know how the human-cow will look, if these scientists get their wish and are permitted to destroy this living being before it has a chance to reach maturity. I am reminded of Jonathan Lethem's first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music and its menagerie of hybrid human/animals.

And by the way, the Cassini people were right.

The Cassini spacecraft, which has been wandering around Saturn snapping photos for the last couple years, was the object of significant protests when it was launched because it is powered by Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's) fueled by plutonium, which, by the way, was purchased from the old Soviet Union because it was too dangerous to be manufactured in this country. In any event, protesters feared that the rocket would explode or not make orbit and that the 230 pounds of plutonium would be vaporized and then chemically react with oxygen to form breathable, gaseous plutonium dioxide, which has been touted as one of the most deadly substances ever invented and a few molecules of which inhaled would cause lung cancer.

No big deal. The rocket took off. Cassini made it to Saturn. All is hunky-dory. Except now, Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager, is thinking about crashing the spacecraft into one of the moons of Saturn. Here's the rub, as Mr. Mitchell sees it:

The issue is the heat that would be generated by the RTGs and the environment that would be created (melted ice) that could be conducive to the viability of any Earth organisms that might have survived on the spacecraft to that point.

What? Earth organisms? Radioactive mutant Earth organisms? Hybrids, even? What about the treaty the U.S. signed in 1967?

The Cassini people were right.

I'M TALKING TO YOU!

what is it with you? do you really think that when people talk about a "sense of entitlement" that they're couldn't be talking about YOU? because, after all, you're rich or white or protestant or blonde or cute or, god forbid, all of those? so YOU don't have a sense of entitlement! noooo, you just deserve to cut in line or park in handicapped-marked spots (you're only running in for a second!) or whatever. you're a NICE PERSON! YOU'RE A CHRISTIAN!

****

i've noticed that it's more likely that a "person" (i call these "people" people to be generous. i think they believe they're more highly evolved than regular people; thus, the laws and traditions to which most of us regular people adhere don't apply to them) will illegally park in a handicapped-only spot in an upscale area than in a not-so-upscale area. if you read about a gimpy lady getting beat up in cleveland as she confronted a "super-person" who parked in a handicapped-only spot. i hope the news mentions that i got 'em good though.

*****

yesterday bill refused to wear his "i voted" sticker. he was more comfortable sporting a "curious george" sticker that he removed from a banana.

*****

more proof that matt is bill's kid: today on the phone, i thought of something else i wanted to tell him after starting my goodbyes. he said to me when i took a breath (although not yet finished), "yeahhhh, we said goodbye, right?" i went out to where bill was sitting reading the paper and smacked him on his bald head.

*****

yay to democrats! yay for us!

poor george. had to turn him off when he was talking about the message received that the american people wanted both parties to work together. as opposed to what he said when republcans won big a couple years ago: mandate. political capital. blah, blah, blah. no talk of working together when they were on top. typical. republicans. pffft.

The Meeting

So -- and I realize that I should not start a paragraph, let alone the whole story, with that word, but I am -- I attended my regular self-help, mental health group meeting last night.  As we were trudging through the reading selection, I realized that one guy was reading a whole lot better than he used to read; but what does one do in a situation like that?  Is it wise to commend him on his improvement? I think that could cause some difficulty.

At one of my first meetings, a huge hulk of a Bible-toting man was having a problem. He had stopped at DQ for a vanilla cone ... attention to detail is one of his things ... and a guy was looking at him.  That's all, just looking his way.  And the huge Bible-toting hulk of a man announced, "I felt like killin' 'im. Beating him bad." But he didn't, which turned out to be a good thing; except I've seen him at the DQ before every meeting he attends. I try to believe he likes his vanilla cones.

As I was saying, last night, a woman I hadn't seen before was at the meeting. Others knew her, though. She probably showed up only when I didn't ... seemed like an okay kind of person, except that she drank from her Starbucks cup louder than any human could. I don't know how she could possibly make some of the sounds she made. Now, I've heard people sucking coffee through the hole in the lid, making like a clicking sound. She was doing something different. She made other-worldly noises, like she had a long insect-like proboscis sticking into the little hole in the lid, sucking, ever sucking.

I checked the others sitting around the table. A 40-ish-looking woman shot glances at her. And then this 40-ish-looking woman leveled her gaze at me and motioned ever so slightly with her head, or maybe I just imagined that, as if telling me to tell the lady, a stranger to me, to stop doing what he was doing, just drinking her coffee, and risk either shattering her ego, finding out she was from another planet, or worse.

I kept my mouth shut.

VOTE!

if you don't, they can't not count your vote.

These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

I didn't write it. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote it in 1967.

History ... I guess it wasn't W's favorite subject.

Ohio Election

Diebold strikes again.

With over 100,000 absentee ballots in this county alone, the Board of Elections filed a lawsuit to try to get permission, not to tabulate the votes on these ballots, but to scan the ballots to record the votes in the computers. Kenneth Blackwell, the guy in charge of the elections in Ohio, would not allow the scanning to be done, even though the local Board claimed that it could not count all of the absentee ballots on election day.

Republican Kenneth Blackwell, while in charge of running the election, happens to be running for governor of Ohio. He doesn't admit that this might be a conflict of interest, just as he claimed being chairman of the Bush campaign in Ohio in 2004 was not a conflict of interest.

Blackwell's campaign received money from Diebold. Diebold was awarded the contract for supplying a computerized voting process without a competitive bid from any other company. In fact, Blackwell denied another company from submitting a bid, claiming that the company had no experience.

Diebold is the same company that replaced mother boards in voting machines in Maryland without any direction or knowledge of the election officials in Maryland. Diebold employees probably thought they had the same power in Maryland that they have in Ohio.

The judge in the scanning lawsuit ruled in favor of the local Board of Elections.

So, after the ruling, the Board of Elections ran test ballots through the scanners supplied by Diebold. The scanners didn't work on marked test ballots that had been folded and unfolded. All absentee ballots received in the mail are folded.

Apparently, previous Diebold tests, performed by Diebold for the Board of Elections in this heavily Democratic area of the state, where Blackwell is expected to do poorly against his Democratic opponent, Ted Strickland, did not include ballots that had been folded.

You may ask yourself how something as stupid as this could happen when the company claims in its website, "We're making sure that every vote is cast, counted and clearly accurate. It's all about preserving the voting process. And preserving freedom."

Preserving the voting process ... yeah, right.

Preserving freedom ... I've heard that phrase a lot since 9/11/2001 ... like if it is chanted over and over and over, I will somehow be convinced it is true. Methinks thou doth protest too much.

If you would like to try to get an answer to the question, on Monday morning at 9 a.m., Eastern Time, please call the Product Information Department at 1-330-490-4000 for your answer. And if you don't want to spend the money for a long distance call, try 800-999-3600.

IN THE KITCHEN WITH STACEY

i posted! i posted! in the kitchen! go there!

Leaving Montana

The decidedly-left-leaning J-dogg arrived at the airport to leave Montana at the same time that one of his way-less-than-favorite (I will not use the description the boy actually used) persons arrived, Secret Service and Homeland Security failing to totally shield him from the public. There are some who will claim that it was a coincidence, a chance encounter.

I find it no coincidence that Big Dick Cheney showed up in Kalispell at the time the J-dogg was leaving and no coincidence that W will be arriving in Montana tomorrow, all in attempts to undo the political damage done by the boy in that state.