Morning Miscellany

I'm working on a longer piece, but as it's nowhere near ready and there's 3" of new white stuff (and still snowing), let me throw you a couple of items to make it worth your while to have gotten out of bed:

• GolfBlogger runs a recurring Ridiculous Golf Item of the Week feature and his current offering is this item:

Besides the fact that it doesn't look much like Obama, what's the market for such an item?

On this subject, our friends Glenn and Jewelle ran into Obama last year at a golf course on Oahu.  What would any of us say to the President in such a chance encounter?  Glenn did well I thought, asking him if those were his clubs or rentals, secure in the knowledge that the guy doesn't fly commercial.  And POTUS seems to have gotten the joke, responding "I'm not good enough to play with rental clubs."

But the funniest part was later in the round.  After hitting the halfway house, Glenn attempted to do the environmentally conscious thing by putting his beverage container in some sort of recycling container.  Some sort of motor skill failure (Glenn insists it was a gust of wind and is sticking to that story) resulted in a loud metallic crashing sound, whereupon Glenn immediately became a Person of Interest to the Secret Service.

• I watched exactly none of the first round from Pebble, et al though Jordan Spieth's 67 on  Spyglass can't be a bad start.  The video below is making the rounds, and belongs in the These Guys are Good category:

Shackelford helpfully reminds us of less successful celebrations:

See, that's why they're on the Champions Tour.  Clearly their chest-eye coordination has deteriorated.

• Shackelford posts a great time-lapse video of the renovation of the 17th hole at Newport Beach Country Club.  Notwithstanding that I can click through to YouTube and watch the video, when I try to embed through Blogger YouTube swears that no such video exists.  So you'll just have to click through and give Shack a pageview.

• There's more from Doral, the USGA has followed the R&A's lead in allowing distance measuring devices in amateur events and Tiger and Haney are going at it again, but now I must go skiing.  See you on the other side.