Morning brings...

flurries. Again that stick.
Had to brush off the windshield before 8am Mass. Later it melted on the roads and walks, but continued to flurry.

The poor dog got his spring cut on Tuesday. He looks cute, and more comfortable walking. (He's really a little 17-pounder under all that fur.) Plus, no more wiping the belly and legs that used to get soaked when he went out walking.

He shivers a bit now and then, but I know him well: that dog can act, when it's to his advantage...

Make it a great week ahead, all!

Uff Da... *

Minneapolis got about 5 inches of snow starting mid-day Thursday and into the overnight hours. Stuff that sticks.

A Twin Cities radio announcer said during the storm that it was the kind of day -- even if you were ready to wave the white flag to Mother Nature finally surrendering to this ongoing winter... well, she wouldn't have seen it anyway.

I sat in rush-hour traffic on the freeways for close to 3 hours, after a 16-year-old driver crossed the median at approximately 3p.m. and slid under an oncoming semi trailer. Fatality reports require extensive documentation, and extensive documentation takes time ... God help the family.

In other news,
it's cold but sunny here in Rice Lake this Saturday morning. Just signed up for two plots in the summer church gardens. The ground is uncooperative, but the desire is strong to dirty the hands, get the cold crops in, and let the life cycle renew once more.

For everyone complaining about the ballgames being cancelled this spring -- pretty much the full outside spring sports schedules for the high schools -- or the golf courses losing money being closed, there's a bodyshop guy or a plow truck driver making overtime this year.

---------------

* That's Nordic for Oy Vey ...

George Strait -- a Father's Love.

Lyrics:
I got sent home from school one day with a shiner on my eye.
Fighting was against the rules and it didn't matter why.
When Dad got home, I told that story just like I'd rehearsed...
then stood there on those trembling knees and waited for the worst.

He said, let me tell you a secret about a father's love.
A secret that my daddy said was just between us.
He said, daddies don't just love their children every now and then.
It's a love without end, Amen.
It's a love without end, Amen.

When I became a father in the spring of '81,
there was no doubt that stubborn boy was just like my father's son.
And when I thought my patience had been tested to the end...
I took my daddy's secret and I passed it on to him.

I said, let me tell you a secret about a father's love.
A secret that my daddy said was just between us.
I said, daddies dont just love their children every now and then.
It's a love without end, Amen.
its a love without end, Amen.

Last night, I dreamed I'd died and stood outside those Pearly Gates.
When suddenly I realized, there must be some mistake.
If they knew half the things I'd done they'd never let me in.
Then somewhere from the other side, I heard these words again:

He said, let me tell you a secret about a Father's love.
A secret that my daddy said was just between us.
He said, daddies dont just love their children every now and then.
It's a love without end, Amen.
It's a love without end, Amen.

He said, God is my Father.
He said, I am his Son.
He said, We bring the Spirit.
and
He said, these Three are One.

Chicago @ Miami ... LeBRON.

Sit 'im, or play 'im?

YOU make the call...

--------------

*I'd play 'im. Purely from a Heat strategy standpoint too...

Sportswriter Greg Stoda makes the case otherwise.

MIAMI — The Heat have nothing to prove Sunday.

That’s why – discretion being the better part of valor, and all that – they should play Dwyane Wade minimal minutes … and LeBron James and Chris Bosh not at all when the roughneck Chicago Bulls come calling in AmericanAirlines Arena.

The risk/reward scale is too out of balance to do otherwise.

Or don’t you recall the game in Chicago a little more than two weeks ago when the Bulls –in snapping a 27-game Heat winning streak – employed strong-arm tactics that resulted in James complaining about a couple of incidents that, in his opinion, weren’t “basketball plays” in a roughhouse game?

It doesn’t matter that James came across as a whiner.

What matters is that the Heat – with nothing at stake in terms of playoff seeding with the top spot all theirs – don’t need the aggravation the Bulls unfailingly present. Not with the regular season winding down, they don’t, and not with Chicago in a scrum for middle-of-the-pack seeding position in the Eastern Conference. ...

Women on Course -- Why It Matters.

NYTimes sportswriter Karen Crouse has another better golf story up today:

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- The ladies issue, as Billy Payne, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, described it, did not end last August with the admission of the club’s first two female members: Condoleezza Rice, the former United States secretary of state, and Darla Moore, a South Carolina financier.

Their inclusion has been described as symbolic. It is not. It is significant, and here is why: the relationship-building qualities that make golf a popular hobby for many men are lost on a lot of high-powered businesswomen who have been too intimidated to give the game a try. Maybe if they see Rice, resplendent in her green jacket, showing guests around the clubhouse, as she has done during this tournament, white-collar women will feel welcome at their local courses. ...

Playing by the Rules -- part 2.

When a newspaper publishes a story online that others rely on for their analysis, it ought to be noted when a correction is appended.

Here, this

On the hole in question, a 530-yard par 5, Woods laid up. His approach clanked off the flagstick and caromed into the water. He took a drop two yards behind his original divot and hit his approach to inside three feet. In his comments after his round, he seemed to incriminate himself when he explained his thought process on the drop.

The rules state that a golfer should play his ball “as nearly as possible” at the spot from which the original ball was played. Woods did not sound like someone who was making the drop as close to the original spot as possible when he said: “Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn’t going to be a good spot, because obviously it’s into the grain, it’s really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but two yards further back, and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit.”

becomes this

On the hole in question, a 530-yard par 5, Woods laid up. His approach shot clanked off the flagstick and caromed into the water. After taking a one-stroke penalty, Woods dropped his ball in the fairway, a few feet behind his original divot, and hit a wedge shot to within three feet and made the putt for a bogey 6. After the ruling, his score was changed to an 8.

When choosing to drop near one’s divot, a golfer should play his ball “as nearly as possible” at the spot from which the original ball was last played. After his round, Woods said he purposely dropped the ball two yards from his first divot.

He said: “Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn’t going to be a good spot, because obviously it’s into the grain, it’s really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but two yards further back, and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit.”

The committee’s decision not to disqualify Woods, a 77-time winner on the PGA Tour, reinforced how the rules of golf, once clear, have grown blurry.

which invalidates this

Tiger Woods incriminates himself: "Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn’t going to be a good spot..."

"... because obviously it’s into the grain, it’s really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but two yards further back, and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit. And that should land me short of the flag and not have it either hit the flag or skip over the back.... I felt that that was going to be the right decision to take off four right there. And I did. It worked out perfectly."

Penalized 2 strokes for breaking a rule. Ironically, he had just yesterday opined "Well, rules are rules" when asked about the 1-stroke penalty given to Guan Tianlang — the 14-year-old who made the cut at the Masters — for slow play.
Posted by Ann Althouse.

which led to this

AllenS said...
He cannot be disqualified because he's half black. Those are the rules.
4/13/13, 11:20 AM

Slow down and get it right the first time, people... or note your corrections.

Something about trying to put a horse back in the barn...

Playing by the Rules.

Yesterday at the Masters, it was the Chinese teen who had a stroke added to his score for playing too slow. Today, the rules enforcers assessed Tiger Woods a two-stroke penalty for incorrectly placing his ball yesterday, after it hit the flag and jumped back into the water.

Karen Crouse, formerly of the PBPost now with the NYTimes, makes it sound a bit worse than it was. Here's her description:

On the hole in question, a 530-yard par 5, Woods laid up. His approach clanked off the flagstick and caromed into the water. He took a drop two yards behind his original divot and hit his approach to inside three feet. In his comments after his round, he seemed to incriminate himself when he explained his thought process on the drop.

The rules state that a golfer should play his ball “as nearly as possible” at the spot from which the original ball was played. Woods did not sound like someone who was making the drop as close to the original spot as possible when he said: “Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn’t going to be a good spot, because obviously it’s into the grain, it’s really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but two yards further back, and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit.”

Here's another at the Sporting News :

The possible violation involves Woods' play on the par-5 15th hole. He dropped a ball in the fairway after his approach shot on 15 hit the flagstick and rolled into a water hazard. By rule, Woods should have either dropped the ball in a designated drop area near the green; on a line between the flag and where the ball entered the water; or as close to the spot of the initial shot as possible.

Woods chose the third option, but he admitted after the round that he dropped the ball about two yards behind the original spot. Woods also appeared to drop the ball to the left.

"I went down to the drop area, that wasn't going to be a good spot, because obviously it's into the grain and it was a little bit wet," he said, according to a transcript published by ASAPsports.com. "So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but I went two yards farther back and I tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit."

According to The Golf Channel's Jason Sobel on Twitter, playing pros told him that Woods violated the rule, but that rules officials (Sobel didn't say whether they were Masters officials) said Woods didn't.

If Masters officials determine today that Woods did break the rule, he would be assesessed the penalty and his second-round score would change to 73. Because Woods claimed a 71 after his round Friday, he would be DQ'd for signing for the wrong score.

Woods' former swing coach Hank Haney said via Twitter that he doesn't believe Woods knowingly violated the rule, but he added that it's very possible that Woods is in trouble. "When he said he dropped 2 yards back i thought he had a problem," Haney wrote.

So in rejecting the drop area as being too muddy to play, he wasn't rejecting the two-yard forward spot where he had originally played it from, but the official designated drop area near the green. Instead he went back and simply was two yards off the spot, which also violates the rules as Haney noted...

Crouse explains why Woods signing the score card with the wrong score, before the penalty was assessed, was not an automatic disqualification:

Woods, 37, could have been disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. But after reviewing the incident with Woods, the rules committee at Augusta National chose to add two strokes to Woods’s score and allow him to play the weekend. The ruling was first reported by Golf Channel’s Steve Sands.

The committee invoked a rule, 33-7, which allows a penalty of disqualification to be waived or modified in exceptional cases. The rule was added in 2011 to address the issue of armchair rules officials calling in or posting to Twitter violations that were clearly inadvertent.

Having Woods continue to compete this weekend is defintely an exceptional case, one could argue -- especially when it was such a great shot to begin with (hockey's equivalent of hitting the pipes...) and the placement was a bit more benign than Crouse's description perhaps suggests.

------
* I am curious to see if with the penalty, Tiger now tees off earlier today than originally scheduled with the lower score...


ADDED: I hope the NYTimes clarifies Crouse's language, as the way she led into the quote leads readers to possible misinterpretation...

WaPo's Barry Svrluga is clearer about what Tiger was talking about:

After his ball entered the water at the 15th, Woods could have played his next shot from a designated “drop zone,” a circular area from which players who hit shots into the water may continue play. Woods, though, said in remarks that were later televised that the drop area was “a little bit wet, so it was muddy and not a good spot to drop.”

In such an instance, according to Rule 26-1 in the “Rules of Golf,” he had two remaining options. He could have dropped a new ball “as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played.” Or he could have dropped “keeping the point at which the original ball last crossed the margin of the water hazard directly between the hole and the spot on which the ball is dropped, with no limit to how far behind the water hazard the ball may be dropped.”

Rand Paul 'Drops In' at Howard University...*

Props to him for doing the necessary outreach to extend his message of freedom to the masses.

Toni Morrison said, “If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I can recite books that have been written, or I can plunge into the arena and stumble and maybe fall but at least I will have striven. What I am about is a philosophy that leaves YOU to fill in the blanks. I am not black. I am not Latino. I am not Asian American. I am like many Americans, not definably of any one origin.
...
“No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act. The dispute, if there is one, has always been about how much of the remedy should come under federal or state or private purview.”
...
Our federal mandatory minimum sentences are simply heavy-handed and arbitrary. They can affect anyone at any time, though they disproportionately affect those without the means to fight them. We should stand and loudly proclaim enough is enough. We should not have laws that ruin the lives of young men and women who have committed no violence. That’s why I have introduced a bill to repeal federal mandatory minimum sentences. We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

Let's see if the hostility towards the white messenger blunts the impact of his message...

---------------
*... beats dropping out.

Tennessee Coates today:

One of the problems with the idea that America needs a "Conversation On Race" is that it presumes that "America" has something intelligent to say about race. All you need do is look at how American history is taught in this country to realize that that is basically impossible.
...
So we retreat to mushy, moist talk about who "feelings," "intentions," "good people" and "loving fathers." The great Jay Smooth once said that we need to move from a "what you are" conversation ("you are a racist") to a "what you are doing" conversation. Unfortunately this presumes a groundwork of honesty and good faith. No such good faith exists because we are ignorant, and deep down inside, we know it and are ashamed of it.

Even within those confines, it did not have to be this way. Paisley could have reached out and had a conversation with an artist who might actually challenge his worldview. He could have engaged Mos Def and walked through Brooklyn. He might have engaged Common, walked the South Side and read about the forces that made it so. He might have talked to Kendrick Lamar and walked through Compton. He could have visited the jails and thought about why they are heaving with black men, and wondered what connections that heaving has with the past.

So, American history as seen through the eyes of 'rappers'...

No thanks.
Signed,
American Bitch/Ho.

Bubba.

“From what I’ve seen of him, he’s long, and a lot of times it doesn’t have a zip code on it.”

With last night's excitement behind us,
PBPost sportswriter Brian Biggane looks ahead to the Masters, and how last year's champion Bubba Watson beat Louis Oosthuizen.
------------------------

... On the second hole of a playoff with Oosthuizen after both had finished at 10-under-par 278, Watson put his drive into a thicket of trees. The left-hander then miraculously hooked a wedge shot over a sand trap and onto the green before two-putting for a par and the title.

“I hit my gap wedge, hooked it about 40 yards, hit it about 15 feet off the ground until it got under the tree and started rising,” Watson said later. “Pretty easy.”

A self-described country boy from the Florida Panhandle who enjoys video games and wakeboarding, Watson, 34, returns to this year’s Masters as one of the most unlikely champions in recent years. But for all the struggles the four-time winner has endured in his eight years on the PGA Tour, he shouldn’t be crossed off the list of contenders when the tournament begins Thursday at Augusta National.

“He’s a great fit to play well around this place,” said Matt Kuchar, who finished in a tie for third last year. “As far as he hits it, as high as he hits it … he’s a good fit, and a guy who, if you’re in a pool, you’d be glad to have him as your guy with a chance to win.”

Added Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee: “Looking back on it now, it’s not as big of a shock that he won. He’s the type of player who does well at Augusta: His swing is upright, he hits the ball high and long, and can shape it in both directions. He can do things nobody else in this field can do.”

During his early years on tour, Watson wasn’t known for much more than his prodigious drives. As Arnold Palmer put it at Bay Hill last month,
“From what I’ve seen of him, he’s long, and a lot of times it doesn’t have a zip code on it.”
While Watson’s driving average of 301.5 yards ranks seventh on tour, his driving accuracy of 53.9 percent fairways hit is 155th.

But Augusta’s wide, forgiving fairways last year offered Watson the opportunity to play aggressively, and his length put him in position to make birdies. Chamblee said it was on the par-5 13th hole on Saturday that he began to see the potential for Watson to make the Masters his first major win.

“He drove it to an area that I thought was inaccessible,” he said. “I can never remember seeing anybody get to where he was, partly because if you’re right-handed it would be so hard to hook a ball down to where he got it, which was around the corner on the flat.

“From there he had an 8-iron to a front pin. It was close enough to where he could stop it, and he did. He got it to 8 feet for an easy birdie.

“The old Tiger (Woods) could do that, but Tiger’s not that long anymore and he probably wouldn’t take that risk anymore. Nobody else could do what he did.”

Getting in Deep, but Leashed.

 or, "Don't Wake the Bears, Buddy..."

Do not walk in front of me...

I might not follow.

Do not walk behind me...
I might not lead..

Walk beside me,
and be my Buddy...


ADDED: Over the Hills and Far Away...

Oh DarlingDarlingDarling
walk a while with me...
you've got so much.

Winter: the End is Near...

You Are Here ...

"Whose Glove?"

"Whose Glove?" prelude.