Early Morning Tee Time? Wake Up With a Putting Practice Session.

Early morning tee times definitely have their advantages... at least that's what I've heard.

In areas where mid-day temperatures soar, the fleeting coolness of the early hours may motivate some to rise with the sun, but  for the golfers I know, the biggest benefit seems to be that a less crowded course... and the absence of slower, casual golfers... allows for a much quicker round. "...so I can get my round in and be back home in time to have breakfast with the family" one friend of ours proudly put it.

I've also heard golfers liken their early AM rounds to a spiritual experience, where the purity of the untouched course and the awakening of flora & fauna, engender feelings of peace and well-being.

I'm more of a twilight golfer myself.  In fact, I like being in the last group out, if at all possible. Having more or less mastered the art of thermoregulation, even the most oppressive heat doesn't really bother me, and while there might be a bit of a backlog at the tees, if there's no one behind us stressing about it, I'm good. Plus, if you ask me there's something kind of Zen-like about reaching the 18 green at dusk.

Here's the thing though; according to certain sleep experts, most people hit the deepest part of their sleep cycles between 4a.m. and 6a.m.  So when you book that dew sweeper tee time you'll probably want to have a pretty effective wake-up system in place.  And that's where the small plexiglass orb pictured above comes in. It's the Sport Time Golf Green Alarm Clock and once it starts ringing, it won't stop till you sink a putt on its tiny plastic green. By that time, you'll not only be wide awake, you'll have some putting practice under your belt. How annoying awesome is that?

[Focalprice via GeekAlerts via Gizmodo]

Pundit

By a series of unlikely connections, I'm on a list of potential community panelists for Huffington Post Live. Yesterday morning I got a call (from an unknown NYC number; generally I don't pick up unknowns, but I thought it might be from my niece); turns out it was HuffPo asking if I'd like to participate in a panel later that day. A discussion of current events, topics to be determined at the last minute.

Well, I thought, why not. So later that day, around 1 pm local time, I found myself part of a video panel listening in and commenting when asked. First up, high on my list of things I think about, was Kanye West and his statement, hot off the presses, that he doesn't give a fuck what President Obama says. (Obama has twice called him a jackass.) I sat there as the HuffPo entertainment editor was interviewed, offering wisdom about Kanye's psyche, while I barely suppressed the desire to make a well-known hand motion indicating mental masturbation. Eventually I was asked my opinion; is it unusual, the host seemed to be asking, that an entertainer has influence on a president. Influence, I increduled? I think he has zero. I think he's a talented entertainer but I stopped listening to his opinions on anything a long time ago, I added. If he starts talking about how to remove a gallbladder, I might pay attention.

Another topic was the administration's announcement that access to research paid for by taxpayer funds will be freely accessible. Sounds fine to me. A young woman panelist said she thought all internet content should be free, and it's not right that some newspaper sites have a paywall. I said I agreed about taxpayer funded research, but that I didn't think providing high-quality news content for free was a viable business model. Otherwise, I said, you'd just get stuff like my blog, where I shoot off my mouth couple times a day, no charge.

The final topic was about an upcoming PBS show on the Women's Movement, to be aired, I think, tonight. The lady who produced it was interviewed, and was very nice. The host asked me something about whether women could get equal pay in a law firm, or access to med school. To which I replied by saying my grandmother had been the first president of the Oregon League of Women Voters, my aunt had been the first practicing female lawyer in Oregon; so I came from a family in which success for women was assumed. I pointed out that there are more women than men in med school nowadays, and that the place where I got my surgical training recently had a class of surgical interns that was all female. I could have added that the chairman (chairperson) of the department of surgery there is also a woman, but I forgot.

There was another segment about a Craig's List ad for dates to a wedding. At that point I was making faces. I was ready to say my son is getting married next month and I already had a date. But by then, they'd cut me off, I think.

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Why We're Screwed, Part Who Knows

On the question of whether budget deficits are getting bigger, smaller, or staying the same, 96% of Americans have it wrong. That rounds off to everyone. Pretty amazing. To what should we attribute such misinformation? How about constant lies and distractions spewing from the right, including but hardly limited to Fox "news." How about the fact that Rs have long since given up even pretending they care about facts? How about teabaggers who take actual fierce pride in not knowing what they're talking about?

Well, sure, those are easy. But 96% includes a lot of Democrats. What is it about them, too? Is it that, rather than making an effort to educate people, President Obama has had to spend his time responding to the idiocy and deceptions of John Boehner, and, just the other day, David Brooks? Is it that our media are so vapid and superficial that such matters take back seat to haircuts?

Whatever the reason, it's clear that not many people pay as much attention as I'd like to think. This stuff is pretty important; yet people simply don't care, or are too lazy to look beyond the crap they're fed, or are too invested in believing falsehoods in order to maintain their sense of self.

Well, I guess the good news is that even if this blog had more readership it still wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. We've become a nation of narrow-minded, unthinking, self-deluding and self-destructive idiots, well past critical mass. Well, I suppose on some level it's freeing.

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Golf-inspired Cake Sweetens A Dreary Connecticut Weekend

US Open Cake                                                     ©Golf Girl Media

Here in Connecticut, mid-February can be somewhat... bitter.

This past Saturday... with temperatures just above freezing and  continual, cold rain... certainly fit that bill.

Ample amounts of dingy snow still linger on lawns and area courses are shuttered, so local golf-nuts had few options to satisfy their obsession;  basically, they were relegated to stints on the simulator and afternoons on the couch, watching the pros play in the uncharacteristically icy AZ desert.  

There was also the "make-a-massive-cake-inspired-by-a-major golf-championship" option, which is what I chose.

To be honest I'd been planning this cake for a couple of weeks,  as part of a fund raising event for our town's Historical Society.  The "Cake Creation Celebration" was actually scheduled for early February, but postponed due to ...what else... a snowstorm.

And so it was that I spent Thursday and Friday... and Saturday morning... baking, constructing and decorating the towering three-tiered confection at left.

I've clearly got a lot to learn about the finer points of cake design, but I stayed pretty true to my original plan.. and for an initial multi-tiered cake-baking effort, I was pretty happy with the way this US Open inspired cake turned out.

The only downside was that I consumed an unhealthy quantity of cake batter and buttercream in the process, but that was definitely part of the fun.  An maybe it's just par for the course if you're looking for a sweet, golf-inspired weekend in the depths of a Connecticut winter.

From the initial sketch... to the baking, construction and decoration.  In the end, the cake was reduced to crumbs.

Compatability

Since my Sunday newspaper column is, once again, on a local matter, I offer instead the above thoughts on the compatibility, or lack thereof, between science and religion. Seems a decent Sunday topic.

I've puzzled many times over the fact that some people I know, doctors of very high caliber (by some definition, scientists), are deeply religious. So it's not exactly true that the two are in all ways incompatible in vivo; observation tells us otherwise. It's just that, in order to be both a scientist (meaning anyone who understands and accepts the scientific method, and one who considers her/himself a realist who prefers to base beliefs and actions on demonstrable fact) and a standard-issue religionist, one has to create certain lacunae of thought, entry into which is self-prohibited.

For those who need it, it seems to work. But it's not really compatibility at work: it's compartmentalization. Like potassium and water: they're fine together, long as you put the potassium in a water-tight box.