Gheorghasbord

Checking in on a few of the things I've done while sucking on the teat of the state, or something. 

I mentioned in a previous comment thread that I played a mediocre round at the Old Course. Which is sorta true, 'cept that I did it from Leesburg. A joint called Tap In just opened in my town, and I went with a buddy yesterday evening to try it out. 

The concept is simple, and neat. They've got seven bays where patrons use golf simulators to play a round from any number of courses around the world. Players hit a ball against a screen, and a couple of cameras in the bay calculate the speed and spin of the ball and generate a result that's shown on the screen. 

One could quibble a little bit about the accuracy of the calculations, but only a little - the tech is amazing. If you're in the rough, your distance and control is compromised, which is particularly challenging in the gorse that's all over the Old Course. Chipping takes some getting used to, and once you reach the green, you get the algorithmic average of a tour pro's results from your location - if you're 15 feet below the hole and a tour pro would make that putt 39 percent of the time, so would you. My friend got a much better tour putter than I did yesterday - he made a couple of 18-footers while I "missed" from six, nine, and 10 feet. In fairness, he's a much better player than I (one over on the back for an 83 - stout), so he deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Before the round, I was required to complete a liability waiver, which struck me as odd. Right up until it didn't. Somewhere around the turn I pulled a three-wood and teed it up. Got under the ball quite a bit, and smashed it towards and over the screen (see the black area above the image in the photo below). It hit the wall behind the screen and rocketed directly back at me, missing my head by inches - I felt it before my brain processed that I'd seen it. My friend, who's an attorney, told me he thought he could beat the waiver in court if necessary, and that he'd see to it that my family was taken care of, so we kept playing. 

We managed to get through 18 holes in just under two hours while drinking beers from a well-appointed bar. It was a fun experience, though I'll probably bring a helmet next time. 

The view from the tee box at The Road Hole. I hit it into the
hotel. Waaaay into the hotel.

Those of you that subscribe to SiriusXM radio know that the company frequently stands up specialty channels. Sometimes they're devoted to a single band or artist. Other times they celebrate a certain type of music. This month, those beautiful radio nerds dropped one that's right in my wheelhouse. Entitled Y'allternative and located at channel 55, it's dedicated to alt-country tunes. 

My experience thus far has been a little bit mixed. It seems to me to lean more to the y'all and less to the ternative. And there have been bands like Black Pumas, Pinegrove, and Bright Eyes that seem to stretch the definition, even as I dig 'em. But they've programmed a bunch of Drive-By Truckers, Jason Isbell, and Wilco, and I've been exposed to artists I didn't know before, so two paws up from this kid. Just hope they decide to make it permanent.

Since I have free time, I've tried to do at least a little bit of self-improvement. (I know what you're thinking - hard to improve on me, but I feel like I should at least make an effort.) I've read several interesting business books, as well as some recreational reading. I'm currently working through Roman Mars' and Kurt Kohlstedt's The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, which is a really interesting compilation of vignettes about the things we may not notice in the built world around us and how/why they came to be. I'm also reading Cormac McCarthy's newest, The Passenger, which is predictably impenetrable, spare, and riveting.

Given that it's Black History Month, I've decided that I'm long overdue for learning more about that history. And Open Culture has a really interesting course from Yale entitled African American History: Emancipation to the Present, taught ten years ago by Jonathan Holloway, who's now the President of Rutgers University.

I hope I'm not graded. But I am paying attention.