Seaside Golf

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This shows you how far gone I am — the game’s even seeping into my bookly side, lol

Of course that may have something to do with the fact that I took another lesson yesterday, during which the pro who’s coaching me completely changed my swing. No threes for me again for awhile, I’m afraid!

Seaside Golf

by John Betjamin

How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It cleared the rutty track
And soaring disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker’s back –
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive

And down the fairway, far along
It glowed a lonely white;
I played an iron sure and strong
And clipped it out of sight,
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I’d find it on the green

And so I did, it lay content
Two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most securely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.

Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.

I love this

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“I ONCE HAD A GIRLFRIEND WHO QUIT JOURNALISM and went into P.R. because she said public-relations work was ‘more ethical.'”

lol

That’s an Instapundit lead-in to a link to this piece, about journalists cheating on an online poll.

As a PR professional, I will say this — about my firm, anyway.

First, our advocacy, when we go to work for our clients, is at least out in the open.

And second, we take credibility seriously, because we have to — if we lose it, our clients get upset with us and we stop making money.

Journalists, otoh — the bad eggs, anyway — seem to think more short term. “If I write a good fake story it will get me a full-time gig at this magazine/win me a Pulitzer/save me having to run around doing actual research.” Forgetting that, ultimately, their shenanigans paint everything it touches with a big ol’ tarnish brush.

Posted in PR

I was just on the radio!

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That was awesome — I just did a radio interview about Outwitting Dogs for WBER, Rochester’s alt music radio station. What a kick. Thanks Joey & Sgt. Pepper!

Anybody who stops by, the book is available on Amazon.

Other resources I mentioned on the interview. If you’re looking for a Rochester area trainer, Cindy Harrison at SeeSpotThink is terrific. (Many of the photos in 101 Dog Training Tips were taken during classes at her training facility here in Roch.)

Terry Ryan, the trainer who was the real brains behind Outwitting Dogs, is online at Legacy Canine.

Dog day cicadas

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CicadaMy daughter & nephew found this cicada on my parents’ pool deck this morning. It was sluggish from the cold so I was able to hold it for quite awhile to photograph it, until it got warm enough from the sun to fly off.

I’ve been fascinated by cicadas since I was a kid. Those wings — aren’t those amazing wings? And the huge sound they make — you can’t help but know they’re all around — yet you hardly ever see them, they hide so far up in the trees.

(Although you can easily find the husks of the nymphs. Here’s a pic of a husk my daughter found a few weeks ago — not a great pic because I took it tonight, so the flash is going off.)

cicada nymph husk

As I started this post, I thought maybe I could figure out what species of cicada I’d photographed today, but no luck — it doesn’t look much like the photos I found of various species online. It also turns out there are a loooot of different kinds of cicadas — 100 species in North America alone, 2500 worldwide. About all I can figure is that it’s probably a dog day or annual cicada, not a periodic cicada.

I thought this was interesting, too:

Cicadas are unique in sound-producing insects in that they have a musical drum in their abdomen. The organs that produce sound are ‘tymbales’ ~ paired membranes that are ribbed and located at the abdominal base. Contracting the internal tymbal muscles yield a pulse of sound as the tymbals buckle inwards. As these muscles relax, the tymbals return to their original position. The interior of the male abdomen is substantially hollow to amplify the resonance of the sound. The song intensity of the louder cicadas acts as an effective bird repellent. Males of many species tend to gather which creates a greater sound intensity and engenders protection from avian predators.

In addition to the mating song, many species also have a distinct distress call, usually a somewhat broken and erratic sound emitted when an individual is seized.

One summer –it must have been in the 70s — while we were visiting my paternal grandparents in Germantown, New York, I happened to be out in the yard when I heard a racket in the air — a cicada killer wasp had attacked a cicada; they were grappling midair like two monsters in a Godzilla movie, the cicada buzzing noisily — the sound was recognizable as a cicada buzz but at the same time it didn’t sound at all like when they call from the trees. “Broken and erratic” for sure.

I guessed what was going on — I’d probably read about cicada wasps in Ranger Rick or someplace.

It’s one of the pleasures of summer vacation for a kid though, isn’t it? To spend all that time hanging around “not doing anything,” and as a consequence catching things like that — like a cicada wasp seizing a cicada. It’s not even that such things are so uncommon, either, just that you have to be in the proverbial right place/right time.

Anyway. A few more weeks of cicadas singing yet, before the summer’s done. Happy dog days. Good night.

cicada face

Books that are really ideas

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Via a comment on Ann Althouse’s blog, I skipped over today to this review in the London Times of an essay titled Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus (How to discuss books that one hasn’t read), which was written by one Pierre Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. And also (writes the reviewer, Adrian Tahourdin) a “practising psychoanalyst.” How beautifully French.

Bayard’s droll conceit includes a description of the four categories into which he places books:

“LI” is livres inconnus (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” livres parcourus (books glanced at); “LE” livres dont jai entendu parler  (books he has heard discussed) and LO les livres que jai oubli (books he has read but forgotten).

Tahourdin next recounts that James Joyce’s Ulysses falls into the category LE.

[Bayard] claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

I suppose we should delight in his honesty.

I also wonder . . . hmmmm . . . what do his students think?

I’m afraid I can’t relate. Having attended a modest state college, I’m reasonable certain that my lit professors had actually taken the trouble to read the books to which they had the habit of making “frequent and unflinching references.” An alarming lack of pretension, I agree. But I forgive them.

Another thought also occurs to me. What does it say about a literary novel when People Who Read Serious Books can sum it up in a single sentence — sum it up as an idea — without even having to read it — and then discuss it, as that idea, amongst themselves?

Where are its roots?

Michael Blowhard wrote this, a couple of days ago, in a post about mystery writer Elizabeth George:

When you pull an artform out of the earth it grows from, even if you do so with the best or the loftiest of intentions, it’s likely to whither and then die.

I’m not sure we can accuse Joyce of yanking literature out of the earth — I think he was just marchin’ to the beat of his own drunken Irish drummer — but in the end he didn’t need to even if he’d wanted — he has the Bayards of the world to do it for him . . .

“Don’t blog if you’re boring”

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That’s been my motto lately. Because I’ve felt like I’ve been pretty boring. At least on the outside, lol

It’s not that I haven’t been busy. I’ve been reading a ton of books — all kinds of interesting books — like I just finished-but-one-story “The New York Stories of Henry James” — which I picked up while in NYC of course. Only I haven’t felt inspired to blog about it — more fun to immerse myself and not assume the arm’s-length relationship that writing about it would require.

I’ve been working on revising my last-novel-but-one, which like my most recent novel got some passing interest from agents but wasn’t good enough to get anything more.

It’s been a painful process, the revision, because I’ve been confronting my own . . . naivete, if I want to be nice about it — incompetence, I think to myself in my less rosy moods. How could I have written so stupidly and not realized it? Sigh. Writing novels is without question the most difficult thing I’ve done, ever. Having to do major surgery well after I’d hoped The Thing Was Done only brings that point home all the harder.

I’ve been golfing a bit more lately, which has been nice. Will blog about that some more in the next few days.

And I’ve been writing for another site I’ve launched, WomenGolfApparel.com. I undertook this venture as an experiment: can I monetize my writing by creating a content-rich site and then run Adsense ads? I’m happy to say results so far are promising, although it has nowhere near the traffic I’d need to, you know, buy that nouveau-Italian palazzo-style McMansion with the the spinning hot tub in the back yard that I’ve had my eye on. ha ha ha

But it’s been fun, and IMO satisfies a real need, also. Especially if you don’t live in a major market, finding fun, stylish golf apparel — if you’re a woman — can be a pain. Many pro shops don’t carry much women’s clothing (due in part to their general focus on male golfers, but also because women’s shopping habits are different, according to an acquaintance who ran a pro shop with her husband for awhile. Men do things like notice it’s raining and buy a raincoat on their way out to the first tee. Women want to shop shop — and don’t combine that with their trips to the course to play.)

Even general sporting goods stores like Dick’s shortchange the women in their golf apparel sections — at least that’s been my experience. You might find one or two racks of women’s golf clothing. And it gets picked over fast, so you finding your style can be a problem.

Another major hole: it’s really really hard to find out what, exactly, the LPGA pros are wearing. I’ve been trying to hunt that info down, and it’s not easy. In some cases, it’s probably because they aren’t wearing endorsement-deal stuff. But as I wrote here, I think it’s also because the media is hesitant about covering what pros are wearing. We don’t interview Tiger about how cute his shorts look — wouldn’t it be insulting to focus on a woman pro’s clothes instead of her game?

But the fact is, when women see a golfer on t.v. and like what she’s wearing, they want to know how to buy that piece for themselves. At least according to the anecdotal evidence I’ve encountered.

So the site will, I hope, help women in a couple of ways — it will help them find opportunities to buy golf apparel online (I try to find news about deals!) and it will help them track down what the pros are wearing.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a women golf apparel newsletter now as well, which features an interview with Geoff Tait, one of the founders of Quagmire Golf. The interview discusses how golf styles are changing, partly because LPGA pros are breaking old style conventions. I plan to send the newsletter out within a few days — if you want to be on that mailing list, drop me a note or sign up here. If you’d rather just read the interview online, it’ll be published on the main site sometime later in August.

So yeah, I’ve been busy. Just not blogging. But that’s one of the nice things about having a blog, if I don’t post, what does it matter! I have only myself to please ;-)

Swallowtail

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A friend was here for a visit (the reason I haven’t been blogging much!) and we spent a couple of hours last weekend at Mendon Ponds Park, a 2500-acre county park south of Rochester.

Here’s a pic.

Tiger swallowtail butterfly

Isn’t he gorgeous?

Probably a “he” since the females usually have more blue on their hindwings, according to my butterfly field guide, Butterflies of North America by Jim Brock and Kenn Kaufman.

What’s really interesting, though, is that if you went by the top of the wings (along with the range) you’d assume this is an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus). But if you look at the underside of his wings . . .

Underside of swallowtail wing

. . . it’s not so clear cut.

You see, there’s a Canadian Tiger Swallowtail too (Papilio canadensis), and it has a range that happens to overlap the northern part of New York State.

Marginal band of Canadian tiger swallowtail wing
The two species of butterflies are very similar, but on the Canadian, the yellow marginal band underneath the fore wing is continuous. Like this.

On an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, that band would be broken — it would look like a series of dots.

But even that’s not the answer. My butterfly was big. Canadian Swallowtails are usually quite a bit smaller than Easterns. And the black stripe on the underside of the butterfly’s hind wing, closest to his body, would be a lot thicker if he were a Canadian.

As it turns out, the guide says differentiating between the two species “can be difficult along the lengthy, narrow strip where their ranges meet . . .” and to make it even more interesting, “some individuals appear intermediate.”

I’d say this is one of those individuals, wouldn’t you?

We saw several other species of butterfly while we were there — it’s a fantastic spot for butterfly watching, since there’s a terrific mix of wetlands and woodlands — but I wasn’t able to get nice photographs of the others.

Unidentified skipper This was the best shot I got of this little guy, which is too bad, because the focus isn’t clear enough and I can’t ID him. I’m guessing it’s some kind of Skipper, but the closest in the guide is a Chisos Banded-Skipper, and they’re described as “rare, found in our area only in oak woodlands of Big Bend National Park, Texas.”

Maybe I’ll try to go back and get another pic. There were two or three of them around. It’s a small butterfly but the banding on the wings was pretty striking.

Yellow-collared Scape Moth This isn’t a butterfly, but a Yellow-collared Scape Moth, Cisseps fulvicollis. He’s hit some hard times, judging by how raggedy the back edges of his wings are. These are really common moths around here — you see them all the time on flowers during the day. For some reason I find them just a touch creepy. They look like they’re up to something.

Chipmunk at Mendon Ponds ParkThe park has other critters besides Lepidoptera. There are about a billion chipmunks.

And of course, the requisite Canadian Geese. I liked this shot, only I wish the camera had captured a bit more detail on the head and neck of the goose in the foreground. The shots where I did get more detail, the goose wasn’t posing quite as nicely. Didn’t she know she was supposed to copy the arc of the log in the water? :-)

Canadian Geese at Mondon Ponds Park

Rain, at last

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May was the driest month on record, ever, here in Rochester New York.

Only a quarter of an inch.

The average for May is nearly three.

Lawns were looking burnt and yellow. It was like we went from April to August. And a river birch I’ve got in my yard started dropping leaves, something it’s never done in spring before. I figure it was probably stressed from being so dry.

Then finally yesterday we got a brief thunderstorm, followed by light rain on & off overnight. My gauge showed 0.85 inches this morning. We could use a bit more, I’m thinking, but at least it’s something.

If you want to polish those dog training skills

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Terry Ryan, the most excellent professional dog training who I collaborated with on Outwitting Dogs, has asked me to help spread the word that she’s got openings in a couple of the courses she teaches.

She writes that there are a few openings in her two-day survey courses in June.

She’s also got openings in August in a couple of courses she teaches with Bob Bailey. These are the famous “chicken training” courses that Bob ran with his late wife for years. Terry’s got some background on them on her website here.

Bob’s the person who introduced me to Terry as well :-)

[tags] dog training, Bob Bailey, chicken training [/tags]