Golf Ball Quotes

Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose

Jenny can still suck a golf ball through a garden hose and she guns my cock like a champ since she misplaced her false teeth!

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say the hard-on you've been sporting all afternoon is not on account of Mr. Nicholson continually bending over to pick up the golf balls, right?" "For fuck's sake, Dad!" James cursed, looking horrified at his father, who just shrugged his shoulders at his son's shocked expression. "Whaaat? Just making sure," he added, hardly hiding his amusement.

Golf... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.

And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls.

The moon is a golf ball in the sky. My motto is this: If you can’t hit a hole in one, fake it in a film studio.

Business cards, of course, are not proof of anything. Anyone can go to a print shop and have cards made that say anything they like. The king of Denmark can order business cards that say he sells golf balls. Your dentist can order business cards that say she is your grandmother. In order to escape from the castle of an enemy of mine, I once had cards printed that said I was an admiral in the French navy. Just because something is typed - whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book - this does not mean it is true.

Fuck golf anyway. Stupid goddamn game, chasing a ball around a perfectly good cow pasture.

It's considered good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.

A surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way.

You have to have balls to golf. That’s why The Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t play.

You cannot hit a golf ball consistently well if you think about the mechanics of your swing as you play.

One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball.

This country is what you make it. You understand that? It isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It’s just what you make it. That means you don’t make excuses for America’s bullshit. That’s what the Nazis and commies do. The Fatherland. The Motherland. America isn’t your parent. It’s your kid. And today I made America a place where you get your nose broken for telling a Jew he can’t play a round of golf. The only one allowed to tell me I can’t play golf is the ball.

Forty minutes later, my hatred for field hockey was in full bloom, courtesy of Nikki. Whoever thought it was a good idea to combine Tag with wooden golf clubs and a rodent-size ball should be beaten senseless.

The still-inflated catheter yanks right out of my penis. And that does hurt. It’s like peeing a golf ball. I scream and writhe on the floor.

Her favorite game was golf because its essential principles consisted of a stick, a small ball, and a state of mind.

Somebody once said that good conversation should be like a tennis match, with each player gracefully sending the ball back across the net; instead, most conversation is like a golf game, with each player stroking only his own ball, and waiting impatiently for the other to finish.

The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.

Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA's seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers. "The roof of the NSA's main operations building was littered with over five hundred antennas, including two large radomes that looked like enormous golf balls. The building itself was mammoth--over two million square feet, twice the size of CIA headquarters. Inside were eight million feet of telephone wire and eighty thousand square feet of permanently sealed windows.

There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast. "The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways. "Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren't. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the INdians by playing Bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that'll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller. "I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly ma in a mechanic's shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I'm lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I'm thinking, geez, this used to be a great state. "You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you're eighty years old driving through an orange grove.

A sand trap is like a politician in its duality. It represents two opposing viewpoints. You see, it was designed to trap your ball. So it exists to have balls land in it. But it was also designed to be avoided. So it also exists to not have balls land in it. This is the beauty of golf. The game of golf is a Zen koan in action.

Bagger Vance: Don't make no sense is all... Man say he don't play no golf when he out here this shade of night hittin balls off in the dark where he can't even see 'em... Rannulph Junuh: Yep... Well, I've done things that have made less sense... Bagger Vance: As we all have...

[I] threw open the door to find Rob sit­ting on the low stool in front of my book­case, sur­round­ed by card­board box­es. He was seal­ing the last one up with tape and string. There were eight box­es - eight box­es of my books bound up and ready for the base­ment! "He looked up and said, 'Hel­lo, dar­ling. Don't mind the mess, the care­tak­er said he'd help me car­ry these down to the base­ment.' He nod­ded to­wards my book­shelves and said, 'Don't they look won­der­ful?' "Well, there were no words! I was too ap­palled to speak. Sid­ney, ev­ery sin­gle shelf - where my books had stood - was filled with ath­let­ic tro­phies: sil­ver cups, gold cups, blue rosettes, red rib­bons. There were awards for ev­ery game that could pos­si­bly be played with a wood­en ob­ject: crick­et bats, squash rac­quets, ten­nis rac­quets, oars, golf clubs, ping-​pong bats, bows and ar­rows, snook­er cues, lacrosse sticks, hock­ey sticks and po­lo mal­lets. There were stat­ues for ev­ery­thing a man could jump over, ei­ther by him­self or on a horse. Next came the framed cer­tificates - for shoot­ing the most birds on such and such a date, for First Place in run­ning races, for Last Man Stand­ing in some filthy tug of war against Scot­land. "All I could do was scream, 'How dare you! What have you DONE?! Put my books back!' "Well, that's how it start­ed. Even­tu­al­ly, I said some­thing to the ef­fect that I could nev­er mar­ry a man whose idea of bliss was to strike out at lit­tle balls and lit­tle birds. Rob coun­tered with re­marks about damned blue­stock­ings and shrews. And it all de­gen­er­at­ed from there - the on­ly thought we prob­ably had in com­mon was, What the hell have we talked about for the last four months? What, in­deed? He huffed and puffed and snort­ed and left. And I un­packed my books.

Unrequited love is no more or less than a kidney stone. The size of a grain of sand, a pea, a marble or a golf ball -- a crystallized chemical substance likely to cause a sharp, indeed unbearable, pain. But which always goes in the end.

A mosquito. Up here, once the bloodthirsty insects got a bead on you, they came in like a squadron of fighter planes. They made a noise like an incoming missile, had the sting of a harpoon, and their bite left a lump the size of a golf ball. Here

Since the lunchroom does no significant harm to the caverns' ecology, I'd like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don't have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoying a goof. I look up at the ceiling of the lunchroom, which is, of course, the ceiling of the cave. It looks so lunar I can't help but think of a certain astronaut. In 1971, Apollo 14's Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon. Gearing up to face the profundity of the universe, this man brought sporting goods with him into space. Who can blame him? That's what we Americans do when we find a place that's really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.

Scott goes to the computer and loads a chart that says something about global warming. Scott says, "See?" Judy says, "I don't think global warming is important, people shouldn't need to use global warming as an excuse to stop being wasteful." Scott says, "How can you not believe this?" Judy says, "There has been golf ball-sized hail storms and hurricanes for a long time, it didn't just start all of the sudden. In the movie Al Gore drives in an SUV." Scott leaves to have a cigarette. Cory says, "Al Gore owns his own farm." Judy stares at the TV. Judy thinks, "No one in this room cares about global warming, this is ridiculous, we are all smoking cigarettes and eating cheese, how can any one of us care about voting? No one in this room cares about anything.

The cup is only one inch wide for a putt that is struck too hard. The cup is four inches wide for a ball that dies at the hole.

…golf was no longer the most popular sport among the corporate czars because they found playing with natural balls much more satisfying.

The two golf balls that Alan Shephard hit on the moon with a six-iron are still there.

Imagine giant trapdoor spiders hopped up on golf ball-sized amphetamines.

A golf course can be a very risky place in the early evening for those who aren't aware of the dangers. Who knows when a golf ball might come flying out of nowhere?

His penis is small," she says. "Seriously, like a golf ball." And then she starts laughing . "Oh, it feels so good to admit that. I don't have to keep pretending his penis isn't small.

Tucker Case did not play golf. He’d tried it once, and although he’d enjoyed the drinking and driving the little electric car into the lake, he just didn’t get the appeal. It seemed—and he’d examined the game closely because his father had loved it—an awful lot like a bunch of rich white guys in goofy clothing walking around on an absurdly large lawn hitting absurdly small white balls with crooked sticks.

Inside every human being is an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness. When you “transcend” in Transcendental Meditation, you dive down into that ocean of pure consciousness. You splash into it. And it’s bliss. You can vibrate with this bliss. Experiencing pure consciousness enlivens it, expands it. It starts to unfold and grow. If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you’ll have a golf-ball-sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball-sized awareness; when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball-sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball-sized inner happiness. But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read that book, you’ll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; and as you go about your day, more inner happiness. You can catch ideas at a deeper level. And creativity really flows. It makes life more like a fantastic game.

I have to admit," I said when he finished a lengthy discussion on the types of drivers, "I've been golfing and it's about the most boring thing I've ever done. Old men drive around in golf carts pretending they're sporty and getting grouchy if there's any noise. It's like the nursing-home Olympics." Nick's mouth dropped open. "It takes great athletic ability to know how to aim and drive the ball that far." "I get more exercise shopping at the mall," I joked. "I don't come home and tell everyone I won at shopping." Although those red shoes I got on sale the other day felt like a win.

NASA officials did not know that commander Alan Shepard had secretly smuggled a six-iron golf club into the space capsule. They were surprised when he proceeded to take out the club and hit a golf ball two hundred yards on the lunar surface.

Socially, too, we have seen a defiant Promethianism that is basically innocuous: the confident power that can catapult man to the moon and free him somewhat of his complete dependence and confinement on earth-at least in his imagination. The ugly side of this Promethianism is that it, too, is thoughtless, an empty-headed immersion in the delights of technics with not thought to goals or meaning; so man performs on the moon by hitting golf balls that do not swerve in the lack of atmosphere. The technical triumph of a versatile ape, as the makers of the film 2001 so chillingly conveyed to us. On more ominous levels, as we shall develop later on, modern man's defiance of accident, evil, and death takes the form of sky-rocketing production of consumer and military goods. Carried to its demonic extreme this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don't have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods.

Planting his foot firmly on a golf-ball which the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, who had been practising putting in the corridor before retiring to bed, had left in his casual fashion just where the steps began, he took the entire staircase in one majestic, volplaning sweep. There were eleven stairs in all separating his landing from the landing below, and the only ones he hit were the third and tenth.

I don't get it. Basketball is so supremely boring. I can't understand the point of watching ten giants running from one end of the field--court--to the other throwing an orange ball through a hoop in the air. I guess it's better than golf, but so is watching paint dry.

I watch people play golf in silence. Even after they hit I remain quiet, because my commentary won't help the ball roll into the hole, but it will saturate the air with unwanted pressure. Spoken words are like direct energy weapons, and I don't deploy them at an unarmed target.

Beaner Weens, head cook at the Vicar’s Knickers, verbal dueling partner of Ann Tenna, and infamous character known for collecting bottles, cans, and golf balls while disguised as a moose, had by some unknown manner transformed himself into a popular guest on various paranormal podcasts. It earned him dozens of dollars.

I learned that a stiff test for friendship is: “Would she be pleasant to have t.b. with?” Unfortunately, too many people, when you try separating them from their material possessions and any and all activity, turn out to be like cheap golf balls. You unwind and unwind and unwind but you never get to the pure rubber core because there isn’t any.

lives of a number of English citizens. Churchill told the story, possibly apocryphal, of an ill-starred golfer who managed to direct a golf ball onto an adjacent beach. Colville summarized the denouement in his diary: “He took his niblick down to the beach, played the ball, and all that remained afterward was the ball, which returned safely to the green.

Yesterday I played a round of golf. And by a round I mean I kept hitting the ball in circles, never once hitting the ball in the circles called holes.

Yesterday I played a round of golf. I just kept hitting the ball in circles, but never getting it in the circles they call holes.

be a mind beater-not a ball beater.

Golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adopted to the purpose.

Hell, they’d say in the country club locker room, you know how Milt’s getting his. Everybody knew, bearing testimony to the fact that suburban vice, like a peeling nose, is almost impossible to conceal. It went all over town, this talk, like a swarm of bees, settling down lazily on polite afternoon sun porches to rise once more and settle down again with a busy murmur among cautious ladylike foursomes on the golf course, buzzing pleasurably there amid ladylike whacks of the golf ball and cautious pullings-down of panties which bound too tightly. Everybody knew about their affair and everybody talked about it, and because of some haunting inborn squeamishness it would not have relieved Loftis to know that nobody particularly cared.

There was still a line, but a bit of waiting was a good thing; you need time to choose between pink grapefruit and raspberry sorbet or cinnamon and honey nougat ice cream. They serve golf ball-sized scoops, so you have to be a real purist to walk away with just one boule. Courtney and I both got doubles- pear and cacao amer (bitter chocolate) for her, peach and rhubarb for me.

I think having faith and believing that things are ultimately in God’s hands is very close to trusting your ability in sports such as golf. When a golfer is in the right frame of mind, he’s confident that he can produce the shot he sees with his mind’s eye. He trusts that the skills he has ingrained through practice are going to work for him if he just lets them and doesn’t try to guide or steer the ball. But at the same time, part of his thinking is acceptance of whatever happens to the golf ball once he hits it. He knows that because he’s a human being, not every shot will come off the way he intends it. He knows that because golf can be a capricious game, his ball is sometimes going to take a weird hop into the woods. He knows he can only do his best and wait to see what the outcome is.

I'm like an old golf-ball—I've had all the white paint knocked off me long ago. Life can whack me about now, and it can't leave a mark. But a sportin' risk, young fellah, that's the salt of existence.

The summer stretch had come into the evenings: it was gone seven, but the sky was a soft clear blue and the light flooding through the open windows was pale gold. All around us the Place was humming like a beehive, shimmering with a hundred different stories unfurling. Next door Mad Johnny Malone was singing to himself, in a cheerful cracked baritone: “Where the Strawberry Beds sweep down to the Liffey, you’ll kiss away the worries from my brow . . .” Downstairs Mandy shrieked delightedly, there was a tumble of thumping noises and then an explosion of laughter; farther down, in the basement, someone yelled in pain and Shay and his mates sent up a savage cheer. In the street, two of Sallie Hearne’s young fellas were teaching themselves to ride a robbed bike and giving each other hassle—“No, you golf ball, you’ve to go fast or you’ll fall off, who cares if you hit things?”—and someone was whistling on his way home from work, putting in all the fancy, happy little trills. The smell of fish and chips came in at the windows, along with smart-arse comments from a blackbird on a rooftop and the voices of women swapping the day’s gossip while they brought in their washing from the back gardens. I knew every voice and every door-slam; I even knew the determined rhythm of Mary Halley scrubbing her front steps. If I had listened hard I could have picked out every single person woven into that summer-evening air, and told you every story.

It was a morning when all nature shouted "Fore!" The breeze, as it blew gently up from the valley, seemed to bring a message of hope and cheer, whispering of chip-shots holed and brassies landing squarely on the meat. The fairway, as yet unscarred by the irons of a hundred dubs, smiled greenly up at the azure sky; and the sun, peeping above the trees, looked like a giant golf-ball perfectly lofted by the mashie of some unseen god and about to drop dead by the pin of the eighteenth.

Ultimately, Zeiss created mirrors that were the smoothest objects ever made, with impurities that were almost imperceptibly small. If the mirrors in an EUV system were scaled to the size of Germany, the company said, their biggest irregularities would be a tenth of a millimeter. To direct EUV light with precision, they must be held perfectly still, requiring mechanics and sensors so exact that Zeiss boasted they could be used to aim a laser to hit a golf ball as far away as the moon.

we keep on going, he continued, fostering all kinds of crazy hopes. To redeem the lost, some sliver of personal revelation. It’s an addiction, like playing the slots, or a game of golf. —It’s a lot easier to talk about nothing, I said. He didn’t outright ignore my presence, but he did fail to respond. —Well, anyway, that’s my two cents. —You’re just about to pack it in, toss the clubs in a river, when you hit your stride, the ball rolls straight in the cup, and the coins fill your inverted cap.

Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

The technological audacity of the Apollo program, with it's largely symbolic payload, was also sinking into the trivialisation that Guy Debord had identified the decade before as the underside of media spectacle. When Commander Alan Shepard strapped a six iron to a lunar excavation tool and whacked two golf balls across the Fra Mauro Highlands, he became, for a spell, nothing more than a tourist, that agent of commodification whose freedom of movement, as Debord had written, is "nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

The course was packed with silent fans, though fan didn’t exactly feel like the right word to Myron. Parishioners was a hell of a lot closer. There was a constant reverie on a golf course, a hushed, wide-eyed respect. Every time the ball was hit, the crowd release was nearly orgasmic.

Some settlers began with no implements but an ax. In conversation, the subject of axes--their ideal weight, their proper helves--was more popular than politics or religion. A man who made good axes, who knew the secrets of tempering the steel and getting the center of gravity right, received the celebrity of an artist and might act accordingly. The best ax maker in southern Indiana was "a dissolute, drunken genius, named Richardson." Men who really knew how to chop became famous, too. An ax blow requires the same timing of weight shift and wrist action as a golf swing, and as in golf those who where good at it taught others; sometimes all the men in one district learned their stroke from the same axman extraordinaire. A good stroke had a "sweetness" similar to the sound of a well-struck golf or tennis ball, and gave a satisfaction which moved the work along.

You don't need to be 100 percent better to see a 100 percent improvement. You just need to be a little better. There's a concept in play here called the winning edge. It means that a small change in the right place makes a huge difference in the end result. In golf, a 1-mm difference in the angle of the club head means the difference between “middle of the fairway” and “you can't find your ball.” In a horse race, the winning horse often wins “by a nose,” but that split second is usually a fourfold increase in prize money. In sales, the tiniest perceived difference between competitors can mean the difference between receiving all of the business or none.

Of all the recreational activities of man, golf had to be the stupidest. The massive effort to beat nature into submission--daily moving, watering, and dousing of chemicals--so a man could pay ninety thousand dollars to push a ball into a hole. It was like they'd deliberately dreamed up the most expensive and ecologically damaging way to enjoy a day in the sun.

You may be asking yourself at this very moment, Why isn’t Stormie’s husband writing this book? The answer is simple. He’s just like you. He is a busy man, with places to go, people to see, work to do, a family to support, food to eat, a life to live, golf to play, ball games to watch, channels to flip, and a chronic lack of patience when it comes to writing. It’s not that he doesn’t pray.

if it's a trail we can hike it if it has two wheels we can bike it if it's an allergy we can sneeze it if it's a pimple we can squeeze it if it's dew it 'covers Dixie' if it's Tinker Bell it's a pixie if it's a breeze it can blow us if it's the sun it can know us if it's a song we can sing it if it flies we can wing it if it's soda pop then it's drinkable it might be X-Rated but that's unthinkable if it's a boat we can sail it if it's a letter we can mail it if it's a star we can let it shine if it's the moon it can make you mine if it's grass we can rake it if it's free why not take it if it's a tide it can ebb if it's a spider it can web if it's chocolate we can dip it if it's golf ball we can chip it if it's gum we can chew it I hope it's love so we can do it

Each human is unique. Each human has unlimited potential. Distinguish between who you are and what you do. Golf is a game to be played. Developing balance is essential. Performance is about getting the ball in the hole. No one is broken. Every human being can develop. The physical, technical, mental, emotional, and social parts of golf and life are integrated. Learning is a lifetime process.

Salo had a skin with the texture and color of the skin of an Earthling tangerine. Salo had three light deer-like legs. His feet were of an extraordinarily interesting design, each being an inflatable sphere. By inflating these spheres to the size of German batballs, Salo could walk on water. By reducing them to the size of golf balls, Salo could bound over hard surfaces at high speeds. When he deflated the spheres entirely, his feet became suction cups. Salo could walk up walls. Salo had no arms. Salo had three eyes, and his eyes could perceive not only the so-called visible spectrum, but infrared and ultraviolet and X-rays as well. Salo was punctual—that is, he lived one moment at a time—and he liked to tell Rumfoord that he would rather see the wonderful colors at the far ends of the spectrum than either the past or the future. This was something of a weasel, since Salo had seen, living a moment at a time, far more of the past and far more of the Universe than Rumfoord had. He remembered more of what he had seen, too. Salo’s head was round and hung on gimbals.

All of this could fall flat, feel too much like a caricature of a Sicilian trattoria, if the food itself weren't so damn good: arancini, saffron-scented rice fried into crunchy, greaseless golf balls; polpette di pesce spada, swordfish meatballs with a taste so deep and savory they might as well be made of dry-aged beef; and a superlative version of caponata di melanzane, that ubiquitous Sicilian starter of eggplant, capers, and various other vegetation, stewed into a sweet and savory jam that you will want to smear on everything. Everything around you screams Italy, but those flavors on the end of the fork? The sweet-and-sour tandem, the stain of saffron, the grains of rice: pure Africa. The pasta: even better. Chewy noodles tinted jet black with squid ink and tossed with sautéed rings and crispy legs of calamari- a sort of nose-to-tail homage to the island's cherished cephalopod. And Palermo's most famous dish, pasta con le sarde, a bulge of thick spaghetti strewn with wild fennel, capers, raisins, and, most critically, a half dozen plump sardines slow cooked until they melt into a briny ocean ragù. Sweet, salty, fatty, funky- Palermo in a single bite.

The current implicit ideology that dominates the world, especially in the West, still continues to profess, officially, the utopia inherited from the egalitarian philosophy of the Enlightenment (Eighteenth century), positivism and scientism (Nineteenth century): to create a situation where, in a few decades, some eight billion people will live on the planet with a good standard of living and democracy for all. All this resembles the billiard player who imagines that after four or five rebounds his ball will automatically fall into the hole. These professors of ballistics are playing golf, but they do not know it.

People who don’t play golf pro to envy their golfing neighbors, admiring it as a nifty game you can play to a ripe old age. What they don’t understand is that we don’t keep playing because we can; we play because we don’t know how to stop. It lands in our hands for just a moment before slipping through our fingers, and we grab for it again and again. It’s a shell game, a music man, a three-card monte from which we can’t walk away. Once in a while it glances back at us, and it’s achingly beautiful. A siren? Perhaps. But those sailors at least got the closure of wrecking on the rocks. Golfers find the rocks and just drop another ball.

A story told me by Michael Barrie: Jesus and the Blessed Virgin go out to play golf. The Blessed Virgin is at the top of her form, drives and lands on the green. Jesus slices and lands in the bushes. A squirrel picks up the ball and runs off with it. A dog grab the squirrel, which still holds the ball in its mouth. An eagle swoops down, picks up the dog, squirrel and ball, and soars into the air. Out of a clear sky, lightning strikes the eagle, which drops the dog which drops the squirrel which drops the ball, right into the hole. The Blessed Virgin throws down her driver and exclaims indignantly, ‘Look, are you going to play golf or just fuck around?

P.S.” Kimmie continues, nodding toward my sculptor of Adam’s lips, the assignment was to sculpt something exotic, not erotic. Are you sure you weren’t so busy wishing me dead that you just didn’t hear right? Plus, if it was eroticism you were going for, how come there’s no tongue wagging out of his mouth?” “And what’s exotic about your piece?” “Seriously, it doesn’t get more exotic than leopard, particularly if that leopard is in the form of a swanky pair of kitten heels . . . but I thought I’d start out small.” “Right,” I say, looking at her oblong ball of clay with what appears to be four legs, a golf-ball-sized head, and a long, skinny tail attached. “And, from the looks of your sculpture,” she continues, adjusting the lace bandana in her pixie-cut dark hair, “I presume your hankering for a Ben Burger right about now. The question is, will that burger come with a pickle on the side or between the buns?” “You’re so sick,” I say, failing to mention that my sculptor isn’t of Ben’s mouth at all. “Seriously? You’re the one who’s wishing me dead whilst fantasizing about your boyfriend’s mouth. Tell me that doesn’t rank high up on the sik-o-meter.” “I have to go,” I say, throwing a plastic tarp over my work board. “Should I be worried?” “About what?” “Acting manic and chanting about death?” “I didn’t chant.” “Are you kidding? For a second there I thought you were singing the jingle to a commercial for roach killer: You deserve to die! You deserve to die! You deserve to die!

I rest my elbows on my knees, watching Paco make a complete fool of himself. Paco takes a little white golf ball and places it on top of a rubber circle inserted into the fake grass. When he swings the golf club, I wince. The club misses the ball and connects with the fake grass instead. Paco swears. The guy next to Paco takes one look at him and moves to another section. Paco tries again. This time the club connects, but his ball only rolls along the grass in front of him. He keeps trying, but each time Paco swings, he makes a complete ass out of himself. Does he think he’s hitting a hockey puck? “You done?” I ask once he’s gone through half the basket. “Alex,” Paco says, leaning on the golf club like it’s a cane. “Do ya think I was meant to play golf?” Looking Paco straight in the eye, I answer, “No.” “I heard you talkin’ to Hector. I don’t think you were mean to deal, either.” “Is that why we’re here? You’re tryin’ to make a point?” “Hear me out,” Paco insists. “I’ve got the keys to the car in my pocket and I’m not goin’ nowhere until I finish hittin’ all of these bulls, so you might as well listen. I’m not smart like you. I don’t have choices in life, but you, you’re smart enough to go to college and be a doctor or computer geek or somethin’ like that. Just like I wasn’t meant to hit golf balls, you weren’t meant to deal drugs. Let me do the drop for you.” “No way, man. I appreciate you makin’ an ass out of yourself to prove a point, but I know what I need to do,” I tell him.

Cela faisait un maintenant trente secondes qu'Arthur essayait, sans succès de dire "Où avez-vous trouvé ça ?" d'un ton brusque et légèrement interloqué. Finalement, l'instant se présenta mais il le rata d'une milliseconde. "Où avez-vous trouvez ça ?" dit Fenchurch d'un ton brusque et légèrement interloqué. Arthur jeta sur Fenchurch un regarde brusque et légèrement interloqué et lança "Quoi ? Tu as déjà vu des trucs comme ça ? -Oui. J'en ai un. Ou plutôt, j'en ai eu un. Russell me l'a piqué pour y mettre ses balles de golf. Je ne sais pas d'où il venait , ce que je sais, c'est que j'étais en rogne après Russell pour me l'avoir piqué. Pourquoi, tu en as un, toi aussi ? -Oui, il était..." Ils se rendirent compte l'un et l'autre que le regard de Wonko le Sain passait brusquement de l'un à l'autre, tout en essayant dans l'intervalle de paraître interloqué. "Vous aussi, vous en avez un ?

what is known as a neutron moderator, which, in an RBMK reactor, is comprised of vertical graphite blocks surrounding the fuel channels. Each RBMK contains 1850 tons of graphite. This graphite slows - moderates - the speed of neutrons moving in the fuel, because slowed neutrons are far more likely collide with uranium235 nuclei and split. When playing golf, for example, if your ball is a few centimeters from the hole, you don’t hit it as hard as you possibly can, you give it a slow tap to the target. It’s the same principle with neutrons in a reactor. The more often the resulting atomic split occurs, the more the chain reaction sustains itself and the more energy is produced. In other words, the graphite moderator creates the right environment for a chain reaction. Think of it as oxygen in a conventional fire: even with all the fuel in the world, there will be no flame without oxygen.

We have been taught that we are justified by faith, not works, and, somehow, the very idea of being a Christian for what we will get out of it is distasteful. But the image of reward in the New Testament doesn’t work like that. It isn’t a matter of calculation, of doing a difficult job in order to be paid a wage. It is much more like working at a friendship or a marriage in order to enjoy the other person’s company more fully. It is more like practicing golf in order that we can go out on the course and hit the ball in the right direction. It is more like learning German or Greek so that we can read some of the great poets and philosophers who wrote in those languages. The “reward” is organically connected to the activity, not some kind of arbitrary pat on the back, otherwise unrelated to the work that was done. And it is always far in abundance beyond any sense of direct or equivalent payment.

Even when you're keeping score, golf is all about focusing on the shot at hand, the total score being a sum of those shots. On magic mushrooms, each shot was an act of self-expression - a karate kick, a pirouette, a paintbrush stroke. The course was an aren, a stage, and a canvas. That's the way it felt playing in the backcountry, too. Going beyond the simple visual appreciation of a landscape and interacting with it beyond the reach of the physical body. Launching shots across canyons and rivers and down mountainsides and beaches. The motion of the body determining the motion of the ball - its flight an extension of the body like a spider riding the wind on a silken thread or a perfectly cast fly arcing down onto the surface of the water. This is the part of the game that is hard for nongolfers to see. You have to play to feel it. It isn't visible through the TV screen or from outside the picket fences and privet hedges. The forest gets lost in tress of tartan and argyle, visors and V-necks. Golf seems to be one thing but is very much another, and backcountry golf and mushroom night golf are as true to the nature of the game as any stuffy country club championship or Saturday Nassau or fourball.

Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power process is through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs 38-40, a surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way. It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity.

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

So now I was a beauty editor. In some ways, I looked the part of Condé Nast hotshot—or at least I tried to. I wore fab Dior slap bracelets and yellow plastic Marni dresses, and I carried a three-thousand-dollar black patent leather Lanvin tote that Jean had plunked down on my desk one afternoon. (“This is . . . too shiny for me,” she’d explained.) My highlights were by Marie Robinson at Sally Hershberger Salon in the Meatpacking District; I had a chic lavender pedicure—Versace Heat Nail Lacquer V2008—and I smelled obscure and expensive, like Susanne Lang Midnight Orchid and Colette Black Musk Oil. But look closer. I was five-four and ninety-seven pounds. The aforementioned Lanvin tote was full of orange plastic bottles from Rite Aid; if you looked at my hands digging for them, you’d see that my fingernails were dirty, and that the knuckle on my right hand was split from scraping against my front teeth. My chin was broken out from the vomiting. My self-tanner was uneven because I always applied it when I was strung out and exhausted—to conceal the exhaustion, you see—and my skin underneath the faux-glow was full-on Corpse Bride. A stylist had snipped out golf-ball-size knots that had formed at the back of my neck when I was blotto on tranquilizers for months and stopped combing my hair. My under-eye bags were big enough to send down the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: I hadn’t slept in days. I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours at a time in months. And I hadn’t slept without pills in years. So even though I wrote articles about how to take care of yourself—your hair, your skin, your nails—I was falling apart.

Golf is a “sport” that became popular in Scotland in the fifteenth century. Players stalk about a predetermined course, driving small balls into holes in the ground with specially shaped sticks known as clubs. Devotees, of which there are many, claim it is one of the “purest” sports, as it develops nothing in the player that could be useful in the mundane world.

I’d rather be attacked by ants than by a golden poison dart frog. It has enough poison in it to kill ten grown men. In that case, I’m glad I’m not a grown man yet. But I bet a golden poison dart frog wouldn’t want to get into a fight with a blue-ringed octopus. It’s only the size of a golf ball, but it has enough venom to kill twenty-six people.

The Answer by Maisie Aletha Smikle What's the question They ain’t got none What's the answer There is but one The answer is quick The answer is fast The answer is the remedy The answer is the solution for the unask question What's the answer Tax it What's the answer Tax it There goes a ghost Is it walking? Yes Tax it There is a stone Formed from limestone Cost it and ahh... ahh.. Tax it Cost all rocks, stones and pebbles From North to South From East to West Not a grain of pebble must be left Rain snow or hail Any buyers Yes Tax it We want more We must store We must take Even the dirt Ocean front Ocean back Ocean side All sides Lake front Lake back Lake side Every side Beach side Beach back Beach front Beach rear we don't care Water back Water front Water side River side Gully side Any side Cost it We must tax it Oh look. .the desert The forest What's the cost For us it's nil For them it's a mil Tax on nil is a nil But a mil We shan't be still Ours is nil Theirs' is a mil It's a thrill Tax the ant on the mill So we can get our mil For we shan't get rich taxing nil The cost of land must never fall It must grow tree tall Or else We shan't be able to have a Ball Rocky smooth soggy or muddy If only we could tax the sea and ocean too Ahh...ahh.. .who owns it For us it's nil for them it's a mil We shall tax the animals and fishes too All that are kept in the zoo When the zoo is full Our pockets are full Enact a fee just to look at the zoo The circus cinema or fair To hunt or fish Whether you caught or miss Add a fee for every flush Number one or number two For every act you do We must make a buck or two Anyone who protests And put our pockets to the test We shall arrest For unlawful unrest We go to the moon but . What we really want is heaven To cost it And tax it Then we'd go Sailing on cloud nine Skiing on cloud ten Golfing on cloud eleven Foreclose on cloud twelve For the owner we can't find Aha Parachute off cloud thirteen Practice Yoga and Ballet on cloud fourteen On cloud fifteen we’d parade Impromptu Balls We’ll call a piece of land a Park So we can tax the trees and tax the plants We’ll tax all creation visible and invisible and call it a Tax Revolution

The first sign that something had gone wrong manifested itself while he was playing golf. Or rather it was the first time he admitted to himself that something might be wrong. For some time he had been feeling depressed without knowing why. In fact, he didn't even realize he was depressed. Rather it was the world and his life around him which seemed to grow more senseless and farcical with each passing day. Then two odd incidents occurred on the golf course. Once he fell down in a bunker. There was no discernable reason for his falling. One moment he was standing in the bunker with his sand-iron appraising the lie of his ball. The next he was lying flat on the ground. Lying there, cheek pressed against the earth, he noticed that thinks looked different from this unaccustomed position. A strange bird flew past. A cumulus cloud went towering thousands of feet into the air. Ordinarily he would not have given the cloud a second glance. But as he gazed at it from the bunker, it seemed to turn purple and gold at the bottom while the top went boiling up higher and higher like the cloud over Hiroshima. Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that had happened a long time ago. It was the most important event of his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it. Shortly afterwards, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head and, smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me. Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself. First, it was only a thought which popped into his head. Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically. Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out. The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's lives were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn't decide. What is one to make of such a person? To begin with: though it was probably the case that he was ill and that it was his illness - depression - which made the world seem farcical, it is impossible to prove the case. On the one hand, he was depressed. On the other hand, the world is in fact farcical. Or at least it is possible to make the case that for some time now life has seemed to become more senseless, even demented, with each passing year. True, most people he knew seemed reasonably sane and happy. They played golf, kept busy, drank, talked, laughed, went to church, appeared to enjoy themselves, and in general were both successful and generous. Their talk made a sort of sense. They cracked jokes. On the other hand, perhaps it is possible, especially in strange times such as these, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.

Hey,” Alexander said, his chloroform haze finally dissipating. “Those people were trying to kill us! This isn’t fun at all!” “Nice of you to join us.” Cyrus turned toward the pier in New Jersey, where we’d started out that night, but now saw there were reinforcements coming from that direction. A lot of reinforcements. Twelve boats in all. Alexander’s eyes grew as big as golf balls with fear. “They’ve cut off our escape route!” “I noticed.” Cyrus cursed under his breath and reoriented us toward the tip of Manhattan. All the other boats slewed in the water a bit as they changed course behind us, then revved their engines and rejoined the chase. “Without an escape route, we can’t escape!” Alexander babbled. “What do we do now?

Porter knew little about golf. The idea of hitting a little white ball, then chasing after it for hours on end, did not appeal to him. While he understood it was challenging, he did not consider it a sport. Baseball was a sport. Football was a sport. Anything you could play at eighty years old while toting your oxygen tank and wearing pastel slacks would never be a sport in his book.

-Play to your basic shot shape and don’t try to “fix” your swing during a round -Off the tee, play to the open side of the fairway and away from hazards -Consider hitting a 3-wood or hybrid or even an iron off the tee if hazards lurk in your driver landing area -Play to the fat part of the green and away from hazards -Play your approach shots away from a tucked pin in order to avoid “short-siding” yourself -Try to keep the ball below the hole in order to leave easier chips and putts -If you get into trouble, your first priority is to get out of trouble, even if it means pitching back into the fairway or bailing out to the middle of the green -Always think ahead while on the tee of the ideal angle you would like to approach your next shot from, and plan your shot accordingly while considering the hazards that lurk nearby The above are just a few of the general strategy rules you can follow on any course in order to maximize your likelihood of shooting a good score. Conservative

positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked another podcast guest, Rhonda Patrick. Her response is on page 7. * Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”?

on a seagull poo–like texture when mixed into cold water. Amelia saved my palate and joints by introducing me to the Great Lakes hydrolyzed version (green label), which blends easily and smoothly. Add a tablespoon of beet root powder like BeetElite to stave off any cow-hoof flavor, and it’s a whole new game. Amelia uses BeetElite pre-race and pre-training for its endurance benefits, but I’m much harder-core: I use it to make tart, low-carb gummy bears when fat Tim has carb cravings. RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire. Foam rollers have historically done very little for me, but this torture device had an immediate positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked

As a result, I would not try to copy the left heal motion of Jack Nicklaus.  If your body flexibility does not allow you to make a full rotation on your backswing without raising your left heal, then by all means, raise your left heal a little.  If you make this small adjustment, be careful not to allow your heal raise to change your spine angle.  What I mean by this clarification is you cannot allow raising your left heal to force your left shoulder higher in relation to your right shoulder.  This changes the angle of your spine during the swing, which is absolutely something you want to avoid.  Not only do you want to avoid changing your spine angle from a ball striking consistency stand point, you also want to avoid changing your spine angle to keep yourself from injuring your back.  Your body has no trouble rotating around the axis the spine creates.  If you start changing this spine angle as you swing, you begin to put pressure on different parts of your spine.  The changing angle redirects the motion around your spine from a circular motion that is free of compression to a motion driving the force of your rotation into compressing your discs.  Do yourself and your body a favor, and do not try and change your spine angle throughout your swing.  Golf should be enjoyed and be pain-free.  Tiger Woods is the most glaring example of this problem.  Tiger always dropped his head as he rotated into his downswing.  Effectively, Tiger was changing his spine angle during the second part of his swing.  Over time, this changing spine angle and the force with which Tiger rotated into his golf shots created a tremendous amount of pressure on his back.  Four back surgeries later, he has been forced to change his swing to keep his spine angle neutral.  Fortunately, if you are using your body to create the rotational movement of your swing and your arms to create the vertical motion of your swing, you will not need to think about your spine angle.

Many years ago the legendary golf pro Gary Player was hitting balls off the practice tee one morning, and the first ball he hit went 280 yards straight as a bullet. A guy in the gallery just within earshot said, ‘Man, I’d give anything to be able to hit a golf ball like you.’ Gary walked over to the guy and said, ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ The guy said, ‘Yes, I would. I’d give anything to hit like that,’ Gary said, ‘No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t be willing to do what it takes. You have to rise early in the morning and hit five hundred balls until your hands bleed. Then you stop, tape your hands, and hit five hundred more balls. The next morning you’re out there again with hands so raw you can barely hold your club, but you do it all over again. If you do that through enough years of pain, then you can hit a ball like that.

Instead of trying to break par, a result we cannot control, we concentrate on putting a good swing on the ball, an action we can control. The distinction is crystal clear, surely, but it never ceases to amaze me that the same folks in my workshops who nod their heads in agreement with the golf analogy turn right around and announce that their goal in this negotiation is to sign the deal and collect the money. So I ask you again: Is this signing and collecting something you can actually control? What you can control is behavior and activity, what you cannot control is the result of this behavior and activity. “Think behavior, forget result.

Berthillon's ice cream is dense and creamy--- served, in keeping with French rules of moderation, in golf-ball-size scoops. You have to be a real purist to order a simple (pronounced samp-le"). I usually ordered a double (doob-le"). Menthe (fresh mint), Créole (rum raisin), and nougat-miel (honey-nougat) are at the top of my list. But as good as the ice cream is, it's the sorbets that are Berthillon's real standouts. I almost always order cacao amer, a bitter chocolate sorbet so dark it's closing in on black. My second scoop depends on the season: pear, melon, rhubarb, or framboise à la rose (raspberry with a hint of rose). But habit often sets in and I go back to my old favorite: fraise des bois (wild strawberry). These tiny gem-like fruits are the equivalent of strawberry grenades, releasing a tart, concentrated flavor that downgrades every other strawberry I've tasted to the level of Bubblicious.

He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn't really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Then he turned to Rosemary Barr. “Meanwhile we’ll put you somewhere safe,” he told her. “Your tutorials will start as soon as the soldier is buried.” The outer western suburbs were bedroom communities for people who worked in the city, so the traffic stayed bad all the way out. The houses were much grander than in the east. They were all two-story, all varied, all well maintained. They all had big lots and pools and ambitious evergreen landscaping. With the last of the sunset behind them they looked like pictures in a brochure. “Tight-ass middle class,” Reacher said. “What we all aspire to,” Yanni said. “They won’t want to talk,” Reacher said. “Not their style.” “They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks to me.” They drove past the Archer place slowly. There was a cast-metal sign on thin chains under the mailbox: Ted and Oline Archer. Beyond it, across a broad open lawn, the house looked closed-up and dark and silent. It was a big Tudor place. Dull brown beams, cream stucco. Three-car garage. Nobody home, Reacher thought. The neighbor they were looking for lived across the street and one lot to the north. Hers was a place about the same size as the Archers’ but done in an Italianate style. Stone accents, little crenellated towers, dark green sun awnings on the south-facing ground-floor windows. The evening light was fading away to darkness and lamps were coming on behind draped windows. The whole street looked warm and rested and quiet and very satisfied with itself. Reacher said, “They sleep safely in their beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do them harm.” “You know George Orwell?” Yanni asked. “I went to college,” Reacher said. “West Point is technically a college.” Yanni said, “The existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.” “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it,” Reacher said. “I’m sure these are perfectly nice people,” Helen said. “But will they talk to us?” “They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks.” Helen pulled into a long limestone driveway and parked about twenty feet behind an imported SUV that had big chrome wheels. The front door of the house was made of ancient gray weathered oak with iron banding that had nail heads as big as golf balls. It felt like you could step through it straight into the Renaissance. “Property is theft,” Reacher said. “Proudhon,” Yanni said. “Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world.” “Abraham Lincoln,” Reacher said. “In his first State of the Union.” There was an iron knocker shaped like

A holed ball was beautiful and final. All it left you were the stories of how it arrived there, powerless I change that plot.

By Donald, August 9, 2013 I ordered the Zorb ball and was excited to have it delivered. I have to admit my disappointment as there was no giant-sized golf club to go with it. Will there be one added soon? Also, I need someone to let me know of the location of any oversized golf courses in the Western United States.

Unfortunately, Beck and Adrian weren’t allowed to sleep, either. Maybe two minutes after they’d snuggled into each other, and Adrian was about to get his nap on, there was a relentless pounding on Beck’s door. Beck grabbed something and threw it at the door. Not the lube, Adrian hoped. Whatever it was made a satisfactory thud. “Go the fuck away," Beck bellowed. “What the hell is going on in there? Half the frat is complaining you woke them up. The other half is bitching that you’re having way too much fun and it’s rude to not share with everyone.” Adrian recognized the voice. It was Travis, the frat President, and he sounded super butthurt. “No sharing,” Beck bellowed. “Get your own twink.” “What?” Travis yelled back. Beck got out of bed and flung open the door. On the other side was Travis, and behind him was an assortment of other brothers. Most of them Adrian knew by sight but couldn’t put names to the faces. “Go away,” Beck snarled at Travis. “You’re harshing my afterglow.” “You’re naked,” Travis pointed out. He seemed confused as he looked over Beck’s shoulder and saw Adrian in Beck’s bed. Adrian gave Travis a little wave with his fingers. “And there’s a dude in your bed.” “Thank you, Captain Observation. Go. Away.” “But you’re not gay.” Travis glanced at some of the brothers who stood behind him like he was searching for moral support. “Right?” “None of your fucking business. In future, we’ll try to keep down the noise. I think I need to muzzle the kid. Or maybe just keep my dick in his mouth.” Adrian grinned. He had no idea how long Beck’s attraction would last, but he decided he was gonna ride that gravy train as long as possible. “But then you couldn’t fuck my tight ass, Daddy,” he called out. The brothers outside the room looked shocked, like they were a bunch of middle-aged white women who’d been shown porn for the first time. It was fucking hilarious and Adrian couldn’t help but giggle. Beck turned back to him. “This is true, and your ass is very fine. Ball gag it is.” He turned back to Travis. “Does a ball gag work for you?” “I… what?” Travis’ voice had gone weak and plaintive. It was clear he no longer wished to be a part of the conversation. “A. Ball. Gag. Used for stifling the noises made by twinks who are apparently screamers. I had no idea the kid was gonna be a screamer, Travis. Hell, I had no idea he was hiding in my bathroom, spying on me. But thanks to that glory hole bullshit, I did know that the kid could suck a golf ball through a garden hose and that’s not a skill I think should go to waste. So he’s mine now. He’s gonna move his shit out of the basement and into my room. And he’s mine, you get me? No one lays even the tiniest finger on him. Fuck. Don’t even look at him cross-eyed. Mine. Get your own twinks.

which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of “virtual keyboards”—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian. As the term implied, the user’s view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user’s personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system’s object-oriented software, the Star’s user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically “knew” that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star’s set of generic commands, in which “move,” “copy,” and “delete” performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications. The Star was the epitome of PARC’s user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: “When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen,” wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, “the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display.

Tyleek smiled. “There’s a time and place for everything, Prynce Masters.” “I swear to God there is.” Prynce grinned, taking a step back and tapping Tyleek on the chest. My eyes grew to the size of golf balls and I gasped when I noticed there was a red dot in the center of Tyleek’s chest. I couldn’t believe nobody had called the police. “Don’t cause your time to come sooner than it should, my nigga.