Had enough bad news for a while? Tired of the bickering in Washington, the wild spending, and the prospect of invaders from space?
Let’s root around for some different column fodder this week:
– Be honest now.
If a guy took you to a golf tournament and every time a golfer hit the ball he screamed “IN THE HOLE!” would you ever go out with that person again? (Interestingly, you never hear female spectators at golf tournaments scream “IN THE HOLE!” Only guys do this. I think they’re the same guys who paint their faces team colors and mug for the TV cameras at football games.)
If you suffered through a date with such a person, wouldn’t you give that guy his walking papers at the door that night?
“I’m sorry, but this isn’t going to work out,” you’d have to say. “I wasn’t aware that you’re a meathead.”
You don’t hear “patrons” scream “IN THE HOLE!” at The Masters, because the people in charge –in the past it was a guy whose first name was “Hootie” – rule with an iron fist. Boors, apparently, are whisked off and tortured at Augusta, and rightly so.
But now, in subsequent tournaments, the knuckleheads have returned. Detroit last week. Two weeks ago at The Travelers tournament in Connecticut. Before that, the PGA tournament in California. The horrible “IN THE HOLE!” people are back.
I used to think the people who run The Masters were prissy fussbudgets who get a little carried away.
But sometimes it takes extreme measures to deal with a guy who screams “IN THE HOLE!”
More power to the prissy fussbudgets.
– Golf is the only sport I watch anymore. I like the pastoral setting. And golfers don’t feel the need to scold us about our politics. Golf may be the final refuge for people who just want to watch a sporting event without thinking about politics.
– At the liquor store recently, the guy in front of me had on a t-shirt that said, “Cleverly Disguised as a Responsible Adult.”
Pretty funny. But then the guy lived up to his t-shirt, and kept everyone in line behind him waiting as he thought up sure-fire lottery ticket numbers for numerous tickets. He stared at the ceiling as he came up with the numbers, sometimes saying, “No, that’s not right,” and revising his pick.
I checked the news, and didn’t see anything about a local man winning the lottery, so our wait was for naught.
Sometimes the t-shirt says it all.
– Is it just me, or are people on television and radio talking faster and faster every year? My wife will blame it on my geriatric ears, but increasingly these days people I would like to listen to are talking faster than I can listen.
Ben Shapiro, on the radio, talks so fast that about half of what he says flies by me like a corn husk in a tornado. Candace Owens tries to keep her words-per-minute down, but puts the pedal to the metal when she gets emphatic. There are other examples.
Harry Nilssen said it best: “Everybody’s talkin’ at me. But I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’. Only the echoes of my mind.”
– Pat Boone should be an inspiration to us all. Eighty seven years old, worth an estimated $50 million, and showing up every whipstitch in television ads.
He’s a natural to advertise walk-in bathtubs. But when he advertises health supplements from a golf course, wearing knickers, well, all this oldster can think about is those awful knickers.
You’d think a guy that rich could buy a decent pair of pants.
– About those space aliens Navy pilots keep spotting: Can you look at the Milky Way on a a moonless, clear summer night, and believe we’re the only ones, out of all those stars and their circling planets, who can travel in space? Are we the only ones who can send a rover and drone to a neighboring planet?
I doubt it.
– And finally, reporter Lara Logan used a term recently that I think sums up the state of things pretty accurately:
“Holy Guacamole!”
(And she said it slowly enough to understand.)
Dave Simpson can be contacted at davesimpson145@hotmail.com
