Eagle

Thursday was a big golf day--my first ever eagle! I was playing at Evergreen golf course in Castleton, New York. The ninth hole is a short par four that was playing downwind. The scorecard says 311 yards, but I think realistically it was more like 270. I drove to the fringe and chipped in with a nine iron. Sweet.

As you can see, I went out in 39. Unfortunately, I shot 49 on the back (u-g-l-y). My first ever round in the seventies will have to wait until another post. I'm going to play an easy course this afternoon, maybe today's the day!

Backyard Visit

I Think It's Finally Spring II

Here's some cell-phone time-lapse photography from my office on Friday. Makes a fellow want to run out there and kick a field goal.

Rating Scale

Okay, I need help figuring out my rating scale for golf books. I had settled on the four-star system (★), but apparently the required font is not installed on everyone's computer and some people are getting a question mark. I'm assuming that everyone can see the one-half symbol, ½ (holler if you can't). Let me know which of these you like best. Suggestions for alternative scales will also be accepted!

Stars:   ★ ★ ★ ★

Dots:   ● ● ● ●

Asterisks:   ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

Golf scores:   albatross-eagle-birdie-par-bogey

Made-up scale:   inspirational-admirable-mediocre-dud

Academic scale:   A-B-C-D-F

I Think It's Finally Spring

Health Food

And the award for best oxymoronic snack food goes to...

Seriously, there is such a thing as Natural Cheetos. Pretty tasty. Picked fresh off the tree, no doubt.

Golf Library

After much deliberation I have finally released the first version of Dave's golf book ratings. (It's a permanent fixture over there in the right-hand column.) I went with the simple four-star rating system.

The four-star system has the advantage of being really simple, but also has the disadvantage of grouping all golf books into one category. Questions arise: How does one compare instructional books to biographies and novels? Do books get extra stars for being classics? I settled on this criterion: if a golf buddy wanted to borrow a book, how strongly would I recommend it?

Let me answer some additional questions:

• Did you really read all those books? Yes.
  


• Why? I'm tempted to make some comment about the winters in Upstate New York, but the truth is that I read golf gooks in the summer too. The honest answer is that I really do like golf that much.
  


• Is there really such a thing as a golf novel? Yes. See The Greatest Game Ever Played and Paper Tiger.
  


• Why didn't you list the authors? Not enough space. I debated this one for a while.
  


• Which instructional books should I read? Read Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, followed by The Plane Truth For Golfers. I'm planning a post on Ben Hogan, and I'll include some stuff about this book. It's a classic (the classic?). By the way, "Plane Truth" is a play on words for the swing plane in golf, I didn't misspell plain.
  


• Which non-instructional books should I read? Tough call! Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect is about the mental side of the game, and it's a great book. It's not a technical book, so I'm not considering it an instructional book. The Greatest Game Ever Played does a nice job of recounting early-twentieth-century golf in America.
  

Cincinnati

I've spent a lot of time lately on my two hobbies: 1) golf, and 2) applying to faculty positions. I find these pastimes to be wonderfully fulfilling. But how best to share these activities with those who read my blog?

Well, I have grand plans to post on Ben Hogan, and perhaps even on Francis Ouimet. I'm also thinking of rating all the books in my golf library, something along the lines of the Movies I've Seen This Year section of Pete's blog. Won't that be thrilling?

As for hobby #2, one thing I can do is disseminate some of the vast trivial knowledge that I've gathered about otherwise random cities where I have applied for jobs.

Speaking of trivial knowledge, man I really broke out a doozy yesterday. At the driving range, this guy mentioned to me that he belongs to Olde Kinderhook Golf Club. I said, "I read once that Olde Kinderhook is the origin of the phrase okay, and that Olde Kinderhook was the nickname of an American president who used to sign bills into law with the initials o.k." "That's true," he said, "not many people know that. It was president Van Buren."

True story! By the way, he was right about Van Buren.

So anyway, my latest application went to (drum roll)...Cincinnati Ohio! Did you know that Cincinnati is practically in Kentucky? I had no idea. Also, Cincinnati was home to the 2001 Cincinnati Race Riots. Nothing like a history of race riots to make me want to pack up and head south (actually more like southwest)!

But none of these things is what popped in my head when I first considered applying to the University of Cincinnati. Instead, from the depths of my aforementioned trivial knowledge base, I produced a flawless rendition of the WKRP in Cincinnati theme song:

Pete With a Mustache