Effor.com

Just read this in the NY Times.  Pretty good - at least I got a chuckle out of it.  I especially like the sarcasm in the Q&A part, such as:

So what can the average golfer do differently?

“Take your driver to the driveway outside your house, lay it down and run over it with your car a few times,” Hardy said. “That club is killing you. Use your 3-wood off the tee, and you’ll feel better.”

Good stuff - I’d give it a shot, except I’m lucky to hit the ball 200 yards with my driver.  My 3 wood might go 200 - if it’s downhill, downwind, and happens to get a lucky bounce off of a cart path!

Watching the final round of the Masters today, I actually felt good when someone plunked it into the creek, or had to hit their second shot out of the pine straw in the trees.  Welcome to my world!

Since I’ve only played 5 rounds of golf in my life, and my best score is a 118, I’m definitely qualified to give out golf tips.  So I think I’ll start doing that - at least one tip per week, free of charge. 

This weeks’ tip is to ignore any tips you read in the NY Times.  NYC doesn’t have enough room for a decent golf course, so why listen to them? 

Bonus tip: If you don’t drink at least a 6 pack in 18 holes, then you’re either way too good to be reading this (because if you make too many good shots you don’t have time to drink beer while looking for your ball), or you’re really bad and you’re trying too hard.  Lighten up, loosen up, have a brew, and have some fun!

gk

Damn, there go my aspirations of being a well published scientist.  According to a story in the NY Times today anyway. 

Of course, that’s assuming that I had earned any credentials as a scientist, and that I had any aspirations to publish whatever scientific work I was doing at the time.   Since I am (at best) a layman who is familiar with mainstream scientific thought (and the scientific process) I don’t think this applies to me.

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

It’s important to note that the study doesn’t blame beer drinking for not being published in scientific journals.  In fact it says:

More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining why they are correlated. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.

Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”

In spite of his study, Dr. Grim, who said he would on occasion enjoy more than 12 beers in a night, is not on a campaign to decrease beer drinking among scientists. Why not? His answer: “I like it.”

I’m with you Dr. Grim, so I think I’ll have another beer and look for another story that irks me tonight.  If I don’t write about it, you can blame the beer.

gk

Ok, things are getting bad in the economy - sub-prime, housing, credit, Social Security and Medicare crisis’ - all sorts of problems that we’ll work through eventually.  But this could cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down.

According to the story there’s a severe shortage of hops, an essential ingredient in the making of the drink that makes civilization possible - beer.

What happens when brokers and traders can’t relax with a beer (or 6) at the end of a long day?  How long will workers continue to work if they can’t unwind with a brew with their buddies? 

This calls for government intervention in order to prevent our whole civilization from disappearing.  I bet something like this happened to the Assyrians and Egyptians….  They invented beer and rose to greatness, but if they ran out of hops, they would have sunk faster than Atlantis.

I haven’t heard a speech by any of the presidential candidates explaining how they’d handle this calamity.  Why the silence?

gk