foozle

Wordnik Word of the Day for July 01, 2019

foozle

1. transitive verb To do or deal with poorly or clumsily. from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

2. noun The act of bungling, especially a poor stroke in golf. from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

3. undefined To bungle; make a moss of; do clumsily or bunglingly: as, 'to foozle a shot', in golf. from The Century Dictionary.

4. noun In golf, a badly played stroke. from The Century Dictionary.

5. noun A tedious person; a fogy. from The Century Dictionary.

Too many recent sessions have ended with a "kill the foozle" as the solution, and Gini in particular said that it was nice to have an ending that could be resolved via diplomacy. Gamemastering Is An Art, Part VII: Catching Up

There are a frustrating number of mazes with "hunt the foozle" puzzles, wherein you have to find a switch that is wall-colored or walk through every tunnel until you find the one that actually goes somewhere. It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas Is Over....

Not only did he foozle his drive badly, but his face was worried, and his forehead creased in a big frown. Partners In Crime

But with Harleston's entry the affair assumed quite a different aspect; and it is no reflection on you, Marston, that your expedition to his apartment didn't succeed; though somewhat later Crenshaw did act as a semi-reasonable man, and secured the letter -- only to foozle again like an imbecile. The Cab of the Sleeping Horse

'We can hardly be expected to foozle on purpose, just to let Archie show off before his girl.' The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

"I don't think my father would kid us," Paul said slowly, "but I know he would be awfully disappointed that we had made a business foozle." Paul and the Printing Press

There was a rumour running at large in the Academy that the Old Fellow wrote poetry, but he ran the mathematics and didn't make such a foozle of it as you might suppose, either. Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908

The word 'foozle' comes from a German word meaning 'to work badly or slowly'.

Utopia Golf

The Buried Lies Cemetery -- and take a moment to parse the poetic levels of that phrase! -- is next to the golf course in Utopia Tx where the film "Seven Days in Utopia" was filmed . . . golf course seemed flat & uninteresting, really . . . . the best thing about the rather pious film was Robert Duval . . . about a down-on-his-luck pro golfer finding his game again . . . 

Cheater

P.G. Wodehouse wrote that the best way to discover a man’s character is to play golf with him. In his short story “Ordeal by Golf,” the narrator declares, “In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself.” Donald Trump is an avid golfer, of course, as well as the avid proprietor of seventeen golf courses on both sides of the Atlantic. 
New Yorker Article

Jack's Beautiful 2nd shot on Benedictine # 5, par 5, 523 yds.

 THIS -- you may well say -- THIS is a bridge too far: to blog about imaginary golf achievements by an imaginary (cyber, rather than fastasitical, tho' let me be the first to say: Jack Nicklaus is Fantastic, still, if you see how i mean), on an imaginary golf course, built on very old software from a defunct vendor.

I mean, first of all, and no kidding, the Great Singularity is Surely Upon Us, imminently, if not sooner, so when i tell you that Cyber Jack is a clear harbinger of that Great Singularity, and make no mistake. I find that I must keep making the courses more difficult, as he is still improving, even as i have ratcheted-down his skills in the game controls (strictly so that he is not tooo goood, like striping his 3 iron 250 yds stiff to the pin, not so that i can beat him more often than not, certainly not).

And i suspect a certain amount of information sharing (and i say this strictly as an IT professional for-lo-these-40-years) behind the scenes between the game machine and cyber jack -- nothing too heavy handed you understand, just a thumb on the scale of luck, sometimes.

Just a little background: Benedictine is a course i made in response to my own perception that my courses had gotten just too hard. Jack was limping around in the low-80s and myself never broke par,
but i HATE that Driver-Wedge kinduv golf. I still put in MacKenzie-like camouflage, and trees (i am from east texas and i like trees as golf course features), and elevation changes, to keep it all interesting . . . just the length of the course changed . . . .like no 250 yd par 3s.

So #5, par 5, 523 yds, is no particular challenge to Big Cyber Jack, especially downwind. All the things that would flummox a duffer faze him not: not the water not really in play, tho' visible; not the tree-lined, sloping-to-the-water narrow fairway; not the contortured green that challenges even jack to hold . . . 

But look at this shot! Jack has played conservatively on his t-shot, away from the water, but behind this row of trees that hangs out in the short rough that intrudes into the fairway. This 1iron from about 250 yds has a slight fade off an uneven lie, that jack got over the first small trees, then under the loblolly-canopy. That first bounce is amazing to watch (I saved the shot 8^D . . . ) . . . 5 yds shorter or longer and he misses the green by a long shot, but that big bounce took all the starch out of the ball, then it trickles across the elevated corner of the green and back down to hole-high, stopping short of the sand trap . . . I . . . with my architects knowledge of the course, hooked my drive a little so it landed on the front of the green, and rolled down into the trap. That shot trace wasn't near so interesting.

The Woman Who Invented Augusta

Augusta National was a men-only club until 2012, when it admitted its first two women members, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a businesswoman from South Carolina. (Since then, it has admitted at least two more.) Surprisingly, given both its history and the history of golf, the club actually owes much of its original conception to a woman: Marion Hollins, who in the late nineteen-twenties created a golf club that the founders of Augusta National initially treated almost as a blueprint.

New Yorker Article

Samuel F. B. Morse, a distant cousin of the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had acquired an enormous piece of property on the Monterey Peninsula, a hundred and twenty miles south of San Francisco, and Hollins helped him develop it. The centerpiece of Morse’s project was the golf course known today as Pebble Beach—but Hollins built him an even better one: the Cypress Point Club, two miles to the north. When Morse’s chosen golf architect, Seth Raynor, died shortly after beginning work on Cypress Point, Hollins replaced him with Alister MacKenzie, a British physician, who had collaborated on several courses in the United Kingdom but was barely known in the United States. MacKenzie credited Hollins—in a memoir that wasn’t published until many years after his death—with the design of Cypress Point’s most famous hole: the sixteenth, a par three, on which the ideal tee shot has to carry two hundred yards over an ocean inlet, from the top of one cliff to the top of another. Raynor had said that the shot was too difficult, MacKenzie wrote, so Hollins dropped a ball to the ground and showed him that it wasn’t. Cypress Point is currently No. 3 on Golf Digest’s biennial list of the hundred greatest courses in the United States; Pebble Beach is No. 7.

kondo komono golf

even before she'd heard of marie kondo

mrs ragged me about the too-many-golf-clubs in the garage

so this weekend i sorted them out

i was kinda rueful, 

by the time i got the clubs sorted out of 2 bags into 4 sets, plus strays

i found 5 broken clubs 

you'd think one would not hang on to something so shameful

as a broken golf club

but i also sorted out my tees (only wooden, from now on (freezer bag full)

my ball-mark fixers (mostly az resort courses), ball-markers (cz coins only)

pencils (those with erasers, ONLY!)

 this first set is the first set i bought for myself (1986)

to replace my daddy's 1960s vintage set

cavity back Cactus Irons (ping clones), heavy heads, gooseneck shaft, metal shafts

parts are loaned out, or lost forever 

my daddy's 60s vintage Walter Hagens. 

some rust on the irons, 

the plate on the driver is not loose, but not set well

(between the screws) 

missing my daddy's blade putter

i kept the head for years 

after i broke it (and my 7iron)

after a 3putt bogey at TPC Woodlands

#2, i think, a short par 4 dogleg right over water

to a very elevated green with large fringe areas

i can't find it now

 mine & mrs current sets

(I have two sets of cobra irons, 

that i have intermingled

as events have dictated 

(say a club was lost or broken)

jack nicklaus Golden Bear MacGregor irons and 'woods', 

that is

i *think* that's wood under the heavy epoxy finish

5 iron is some cheap substitute

i didn't remember that

i thought the set was complete

what i hope is 

to get the Nicklaus and my Daddy's sets complete and 

competition ready

so that if i have a golf guest 

who entertains the same idylls as i

we can play a friendly game from the gold tees

if you see how i mean  . . .  

2 wooden-shaft clubs i have always meant to use in some golfy-wall installation

Kroydon Hardened Sole clubs (40s vintage)

valued at around $75 on ebay, cleaned up

these have gotta go,

no value sentimental or otherwise

Mrs Old Ram Putter - home set is out on loan

a putter i won in a tournament but never use anymore

a stray / extra cobra 7 iron . . . 

god, i love 7 irons, may favorite club

must be,

it's the one i have had to fix the most

if you see how i mean . . . 

i have one other set out on loan
a 90s vintage cobra clone
but i think now i will let it go
i still have the 1 & 2 irons from that set
that i used to hit the heck out of
i may reshaft them 
(my grandson educated me 
that you HAVE to swing HARDER
with the metal shafts they have
which i was more-than-happy to do
that many years ago, 
but now i spend all my time 
trying to smooth out and slow down my swing)

I want to give away my extra set of cobras
i'll have to fix the 6 iron again
(I love the 6 almost as much as the 7)
and put wedges in there, 
but sure there's at least 4 putters 
that can go with the set
and two different drivers:
and 'adjustable' cobra
and the biggest cobra headed driver
i've ever seen that CLOUTS 
like a hammer banging on a shipping container
i mean Hilariously LOUD
rather than extra forceful --
it SOUNDS like it's going 40 yds further than it does. 

MY Eagle # 5 on Scot Schreiner # 1, Kerrville

yes, it's only 477 from the whites, 
but there was wind in our face, 
gusting up to 3-club wind. 

I hit one of my patented wind-cheater drives, 
maybe 30 ft up in the air was all, 
with just a touch of fade 
to fight against the wind 
quartering against us from the right . . . 
I'd guess 260 with the roll down a couple of tiers, 
next to the giant old native pecan tree 
that guards the inside of the dogleg . . . 
those trees are common on this course -- 
bushy as shrubs, 
you got to go around, over, or under 'em, you can't go thru 'em. . . 

then off a down-hill, side-hill, hanging lie, 
busted my 7wood, pushed just a smidge, 
but my natural-hook, hook-lie, hook-wind 
all guided it away from the copse of trees 
that guard the green on the right, 
so that my ball rolled all the away across the green, 
front-to-back, 
to 15 ft from the back pin,
just off the fringe in the patchy rough
between two mounds.

I could see the line like it was stenciled in the grass,
it broke 3 feet left-to-right
then swerved back left at the cup
-- nothing but cup --    
i didn't make another putt all day
7 3-jacks, plus another 2 missed-birdies

 so here is the latest tally,
with my marker, Mr Science still setting the pace.

i *say* that my only goal in life left now is to shoot my age,
but an albatross would be nice, too.
but as i also say,
i thought trying for more eagles would get me more birdies,
but instead i get more double-bogeys . . . 
i'm not sure what would happen 
if i tried for albatrossi . . . 8^D . . . 

New Yorker New Golf Rules

The tour player who has taken the greatest advantage, so far, is Bryson DeChambeau, who has said that putting with the flagstick in the hole is “statistically proven to be a benefit in 99 per cent of situations.” He won last weekend, in Dubai.

New Yorker: New Golf Rules

Houston Memorial Update / Houston Open 2020
memorial is a classic design, by Bredemus, who also did the Colonial CC, and a list of his courses is a thing to inspire wonder & delight (including the late, lamented, z-boaz in Ft Worth), but the layout does not easily allow for expansion to modern pro distances, IMVHO, so with all the issues over and above that . . . 

IMVHO, again, 

a return to the TPC Woodlands, a von Hagge / Devlin design, would be better.