The U.S. Open was this weekend. It was supposed to be done today, until Tiger Woods started putting together some ridiculous golf Saturday and today. I was watching yesterday, and Tiger was making everything. EVERYTHING. He chipped from just beyond the fringe, and the ball freaking HITTHEFLAGPOLE and dropped in. That’s crazy. Makes the field he’s playing against freaked out. Anyhow, the big news today was this Rocco Mediate, who lives and breathes the U.S. Open. His is being billed as a “Cinderella Story” by the networks, because Mediate hasn’t won much in a long time and now he’s coming out of essentially nowhere to challenge, as he says, “the number one player on grass.”
A relieved Tiger looks like he’s shaking. probably from
the adrenaline. “[The putt] was a little wobbly,” he said.
“I played two balls outside right and I just
stayed committed. I felt like I was playing ‘Plinko.’”
I swear, this guy must have sold his soul to the
devil. Can anyone be that good?
The “Unhealthiest Drink in America” is the Baskin Robbin’s Large Heath Bar Shake. It has more calories than the DAILYRECOMMENDEDVALUE for all food intake.
I love something unsustainable. It’s damaging, unrealistic, divorced from reality, and yet I love it all the same. The multitude of indisputable facts, which should corrode my fondness for the object of my love, still fail to tarnish the image in my mind. I’m subject to the delusion of addiction, I suppose.
The object of my troubles is rather more mundane than, say, drugs. Yet, it is just as potent a shaper of lives.
I love the suburbs.
Poisonous to the environment, gently curving rows of houses require far more energy to heat because they share no walls. Happy husbands inadvertently dump waste fertilizer into the water supply, slicking over the ponds with algae in neighboring watersheds. Wildlife is bulldozed for sprawling shopping centers which will hollow out to shanty towns of cheap stores as the tax-base collapses and the 30 year suburb boom-town cycle moves to another prime metropolitan ring. Long commutes to city jobs burn untold gallons of gasoline and choke the highways leading in and out of the nearby city. And that’s just the beginning.
With the rising costs of energy: natural gas, diesel, gasoline, propane, we begin to realize that only for a infinitesimally narrow slice of history was it, or will it ever be, possible to live the way we did in suburbia.
Yet here I am, rather more than a bit stuck in my mindset. I love nothing more than to hop on my bike on a warm summer evening and just… take a ride. A golden, even light drapes itself over children playing and neighbors chatting on their driveways. Fresh cut grass. A little league team’s barbecue in a backyard, moms and dads chatting about the game and the odd-jobs for the weekend. But most of all, most of all, I can see the sky. It’s a big sky, not eviscerated by the deep stabbing needles of tall buildings, but merely a little ragged on the edges from houses poking into the horizon line. In the distance, birds. Nearby, a family dog. Order. Peace.
And in a calm that seems infinite, on a summer evening that stretches on for days, it’s easy to forget transiency of it all. Drop me into the deep pool of naïveté, and as the cool water surrounds me, may I swim a little longer before surfacing to the harsh realities of a changing world.
Mark Friedman, DDS uses Macs to enhance his dental practice in a wide variety of ways. Apple profiled this dentist and outlines the advantages that his approach affords.
“The implications are countless,” he continues. “Say my hygienist detects a speckled white spot in a patient’s mouth during a prophylaxis. She can capture it, at differing magnification levels, right into iMovie. Then, while the patient’s still having his teeth cleaned, an assistant can share the automatically compressed video file with an oral surgeon via e-mail. iMovie also lets us export a still image that we adjust in iPhoto and send to our color photo printer. So by the time our patient leaves, we know whether the surgeon wants a biopsy now or prefers to re-check it in a week.
The vicissitudes of life dictate that one is single at some point. Jim Gaffigan, with some observations:
I like being married, I hated being single. The worst
is when you would ask someone out and then they
would shoot you down, yeah. ‘Cause really what
they’re saying is, “You know what, I don’t even feel
like eating a free meal around you. You make me want
to go on a diet.”
Another good song from Death Cab for Cutie’s latest album Narrow Stairs.
You look so defeated lying there in your new twin size bed
With a single pillow underneath your single head
I guess you decided that that old queen was more space than you would need
Now it’s in the alley behind your apartment with a sign that says it’s free