Flotsam and Jetsam - Weekend Edition

Let's see if I can accumulate enough items to support a respectable F&J post.  At Unplayable Lies we have standards....low standards admittedly, but all the same:

• The Sports Illustrated Golf Group, which includes Golf Magazine, has launched a weekly digital golf e-zine, under the awkward name SI Golf+ Digital. Once upon a time I received their Golf+ as an insert to my Sports Illustrated, but that disappeared as the magazine industry went into free fall. One can sign up for e-mail notices here.

There's some good stuff in the premiere issue, including the first six pages of a new Michael Bamberger novel and a smile-inducing Alan Shipnuck piece on Bob Hope.  I acknowledge that the PGA Tour event that bore his name was on life support and badly needed a sponsor, but couldn't we have found a way to keep his name (and memory) front and center?

My great hope is that this new e-zine releases a certain John Garrity series from publishing purgatory.  By way of background, Garrity wrote a fascinating series for SI called This Old Course, concerning the renovation of the University of Florida golf course by architect Bobby Weed.  That series can be found on John's Top Fifty website, though without the photographs that accompanied the original publication.

Then, in early 2011, John provided exciting news, he was reviving the TOC franchise, with a multi-part This Old Course - Ashkernish... be still my foolish heart!  However, after running the first two installments, SI and John went dark.  Fingers crossed, the remaining pieces see the light of day in their new publication.  I have crude scans of the first two installment which I may try to share here, if only for the spectacular aerial photography of the dramatic site. 

• I turned on the Hope Humana yesterday, and this was the first swing I saw:

Timing is everything in life, eh?  And as long as we're in the desert, take a look at this rather fortunate shot by amateur Chris Mohan:

I've always said that the key to success in this game is ensuring that your bad shots are, you know, really bad.

• Your experience reading my posts will vary wildly based upon how soon after publication you happen upon them.  That's because of the services of longtime friend and proofreader to the stars, Al Zimmermann.  Take a bow Al!

Within an hour of publication I receive an e-mail from Al detailing each and every offense committed against the Gods of grammar and punctuation, and the e-mails seem to take on an increasingly exasperated tone.   But Al being Al (and I assure you there's no better Al than Al), each of the correction e-mails has its own priceless nugget.

By way of example, this morning I posted a couple of updates to the Brora, Brora, Brora post, and in the last sentence mistakenly typed "Tis tip" when I obviously meant "This tip."  Al's correction is as follows, "If you’re speaking of Tat Tip, the renowned Vietnamese horticulturist, then you need to capitalize the T in “tip”.  Otherwise, you should probably change “Tat” to “That”."  I'm assuming that there is no such Vietnamese horticulturalist, but I refuse to give Al the satisfaction of googling it.

And since I have the attention span of a 5-year old, I can't resist the temptation to recount a great bon mot from Dorothy Parker, of Algonquin Round Table fame.  Challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence, she responded, "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think."  I'll be here all week folks...be sure to tip your waitress.

Early in this long, strange trip I complimented Al on his proofreading skills, to which he responded, "Well, it’s easy to find the typos when you’re not paying much attention to the content." 

 Al is not now nor has he ever been a golfer, but we salute you, Sir, for your contribution to the game.

• Our friend Geoff Shackelford and Scottish golf writer John Huggan have gone to DEFCON 5 over the recent cheating allegations against Sergio Garcia, perennial runner-up to Vijay in the Tour's Miss Congeniality voting.  Let's go to the videotape, in which Sergio is seen to tamp down an obstruction in his putting line:

Now, my immediate reaction is that this is eerily reminiscent of an incident from last year involving Englishman Simon Dyson.

My reaction to the Dyson incident was that it seemed an instinctive action, without malice aforethought, as it were.  He certainly deserved a two-shot penalty, but he was disqualified from the event and remains, as far as I know, on double secret probation.  It just seemed a bit out of proportion to the offense, but each can draw his own conclusion.

The matter was resolved when Sergio showed rules official John Paramour the ball mark he was fixing, and that should have been the end of the matter.  Except for some reason John Huggan, who's typically quite level-headed and droll, demanded that the Americans apologize to the wronged Sergio, whereupon Geoff got his Shackelford up and provided us with this priceless multi-count indictment against Sergio.  My favorite and yours, of course, being the loogie in the cup at Doral.  Some things never get old:

But according to no better authority than the man himself, I'm overreacting because:

"But it (the spit) did go in the middle (of the hole) and wasn't going to affect anyone else. If it did, I would have wiped it off."

 Well, never mind then.

•  Per my cable box, it is exactly 12:35 p.m. as I hit "publish" for this post.  Al, you're on the clock!

UPDATE:  Al clocked in at 2:27 p.m.  That's not as quick as for most previous pieces, though in his defense it was an embarrassingly long  list of corrections.