Puns & Other Clever Bits

           I have no idea where these came from (probably from one of my e-mail buddies, most likely you, Jim). And I know I’ve stuck them in one blog or another over the years, but here I go again.

1. Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and says, "I'm sorry, gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

2. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One went to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed behind in the cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one, naturally, became known as the lesser of two weevils.

3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft, it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it, too.

4. A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West. He slides up to the bar and announces: "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."

5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why?" they asked, as they moved off. "Because," he said, "I can't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer."

7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

* * * * * *

I can’t prevent the birds of sorrow from passing over my head, but I can keep them from building a nest in my hair.

Going to a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

The most abundant elements on earth are oxygen and stupidity.
Quondo Omni Flunkus Mortati (When all else fails, play dead.)
I became a teacher for the money. The power and fame were just a bonus.
If it moves, it’s biology. If it stinks, it’s chemistry. If it doesn’t work, it’s physics.
Always remember, you are unique, just like everyone else.

Being a good writer is 5% talent and 95% not being distracted by the internet.
My train of thought just derailed. There are no survivors.
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.
My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.

Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.

Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.

By the time you can make the ends meet, they move the ends.

Tragedy

So much sadness in the news these days, too much tragedy and not enough comedy, too much insanity. Still too much war in the world, too much terrorist activity, too many sad tales of child abuse, too much bullying. Too many shooters in schoolrooms, too many trucks and autos driving full-speed into crowds of people. Too much division . . . too much Trump.

These examples that follow are all taken from the 2013 news, but they could all be duplicated in any year from then to the present. We just don’t seem to run out of tragedy.

When Cory Monteith from Glee died from a drug overdose, either accidental or purposeful, the cast paid tribute to him and I wept along with them as Lea Michele sang “Make You Feel My Love” in memory of his passing, tears simply rolling down her cheeks as she sang, tears rolling down mine as I listened to her.

Then there’s the woman who drowned her three kids and just gave birth to her fourth child in a psychiatric ward. What chance does that poor fourth child have in this world? And why didn’t we as a society require that the woman have her tubes tied? All right, all right, I know we can’t become Big Brother and declare such an edict. But how can we or God allow such tragic insanity to continue?

Adrian Peterson, NFL running back, heard that his two-year-old son had just died from a beating. The boyfriend of Peterson’s ex-girlfriend beat the two-year-old to death. A two-year-old.

A sixteen-year-old in Phoenix recently gave birth to a girl in a public restroom and then threw the baby out the window.

Twenty-seven impoverished migrants, on a boat bound from Africa to Europe, drowned in the Mediterranean.

Joe Bell, father of the Oregon gay teenager who killed himself after being bullied by classmates, was himself killed during his cross-country walk to honor his son, struck by a semi on a Colorado highway.

The list goes on and on, like some kind of bad cosmic joke.

As I approach the end of my life, I realize more and more just how inconsequential all our lives are. It’s not that our lives aren’t worth living. It’s just that the marks we leave behind are so insubstantial, tiny ripples in an eternal sea. We die and the world moves on. I read all the time and I have all these words in my head, other people’s words. I know the lyrics to most of the Great American Songbook and can sing them in my head, word for word, thousands of songs. I’m writing stories and essays and expanding on ideas during most of my waking hours and, I swear, I’m even doing it in my sleep, or that twilight time between waking and sleeping when memory is at its clearest. Why have I spent my whole life stuffing words into my head only to die and have them vanish along with me? All those words seem so unimportant now. I don’t know. But now I think I’m babbling.

Words & Puns

I’m a big fan of words, English words, that is. I guess that goes almost without saying since I chose to teach English all my life. And English words can be so interesting but often so peculiar. For example, “invalid” has two pronunciations and two meanings. When it’s an adjective and pronounced “in-VAL-id,” it describes something no longer valid—having no force, null or void. But when it’s a noun and pronounced “IN-val-id,” it describes a weak, sickly person, especially one who is chronically ill or disabled. What a cruel thing to call a sick or disabled person, suggesting he’s null or void.

Another set of words involves the suffix “-ful,” which derives from Anglo Saxon, and “-ous,” which derives from old French by way of Latin. The both mean “full of” whatever is the root to which it attaches ("harmonious, full of harmony"). We have a small group of words which can take either suffix and mean essentially the same thing: beautiful and beauteous, wonderful and wondrous, plentiful and plenteous, graceful and gracious, pitiful and piteous, bountiful and bounteous, joyful and joyous, rightful and righteous, doubtful and dubious. All of these pairs are nearly synonymous, but not quite. Each one has taken on slightly different hues and one almost has to consult a dictionary to see the proper usage for each. The best example might be graceful and gracious. “Graceful” suggests beauty of form, expression, or movement, especially physical movement. “Gracious” suggests a person showing kindness or courtesy, mercy or compassion. Both describe people who are full of grace, but one a physical grace, the other a mental grace.

But we also have many words ending in “–ful” that don’t have a near synonym ending in “-ous” and many ending in “-ous” that don’t have a brotherly “-ful.” Many of them should, though, with some fanciful (fancifous) or humorous (humorful) results. For example, “sinful” might have “sinuous,” the one meaning full of sin, the other meaning full of twists and turns, like the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve with that tasty, sinful (sinuous) apple. If there’s a “righteous,” why not a “wrongeous?” For every “sorrowful,” there should be a “sorrowous,” a “hateous” for every “hateful,” a “stupendeful” for every “stupendous,” a “malodorful” for every “malodorous,” a “ridicuful” for every “ridiculous.” And to end this discussion, we should have both a “bsifous” as well as a “bsiful.”

And while I’m at it, here are some of the puns I’ve earlier used in one of my blogs, but they’re so very clever regarding words (I borrowed them from t-shirts in the Signals catalogue) they’re worth repeating:

1. Keep clam and proofread. Loose your cool and it’s easy to make misteaks.

2. “I” before “e” except when eight weird, feisty neighbors seize a surfeit of weighty heifers.

3. The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.

4. Seven days without a pun makes one weak.

5. Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.

6. A backward poet writes inverse.

7. Her bootlegging was illegal, but I loved her still.

8. A tardy cannibal gets the cold shoulder.

9. Never play cards in the Serengeti—there are too many cheetahs.

10. I regret not developing my photographic memory.

11. And my favorite of all in this age of talkers: Listen and silent have the same letters. Coincidence?

Blogger's Block

I’m suffering from severe writer’s block, or in my and Danae’s worlds, Blogger’s Block. There just doesn’t seem to be anything worth writing about. “Even if it’s crap, get it on the page,” some writers instruct. But who wants to read crap? Or maybe it’s not only that no one wants to read crap, no one is reading what I have to say, crap or garbage or words of silver and gold. Word crap, verborrhea. I wonder if there’s an antonym for verborrhea. How about verboconstipa? That’s what I’m suffering—verboconstipa. All the words are there, but the linguistic sphincter is squeezed like a fist. In some cases, that’s a better affliction than the opposite. Too many people today are so full of words they just can’t wait to find someone on whom to dump them. Such a nice list of words for this afflication—bombast (suggesting a barrage of words like hand grenades, or mouth grenades), prolixity, verbosity, verbal plethora, verbophilia, euphemism, grandiloquence (these last two suggesting not so much an outpouring of words as a fondness for purple prose, a straining for effect rather than meaning). But enough about verbal colon motion.

What about my lack of ideas? I could write about the weather, the wave of severe storms sweeping across the east coast. But what can I say except that I’m really thankful I live here in Arizona and not back there. I might write about any movies I’ve seen lately, but I’ve either already written about them or I haven’t seen any movies lately. How about books and television? How about plot elements that invite readers and viewers to root for characters who are either evil or appear to be evil? I remember when we began watching FX’s The Americans. How were we supposed to feel about this couple, an empathy for them or an aversion to them because they’re bad people embarked on a bad mission? The main characters are a couple of Russian spies, deeply embedded in cold war America. They’ve been trained to be as American as apple pie, living apple pie lives with two apple pie children, waiting for orders to do whatever spies do. But they both seem to be so normal, such good people. Do we root for them or do we despise them? I’m reminded of other fictional characters with this same double nature. John Sandford, in one of his Prey series, included a hit-person named Clara Rinker, a very likeable young woman who just happened to kill people for money, most of whom probably deserved to die, in some way connected to one mob or another. But still, she was a killer. Do we like her, root for her, or do we despise her? Lawrence Block has a series about a hitman named Keller. Keller kills people for money, and he’s very good at it. And, like Clara Rinker, he disposes of people who probably deserve to die. He, too, is a very likeable character and the reader really does root for him. I remember reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay a few years ago, a novel about a man named Dexter Morgan, whose foster father early on recognized the boy’s psychotic need to kill. So, instead of shipping him off to psychologists, he convinces him to channel his psychosis by killing serial killers. A psycho killer who kills psycho killers. And the reader sympathizes with Dexter. That’s rather creepy, but there you have it. The television series based on Dexter takes it even further, making him a loving husband and father, the flip side of his dark side. Hard to decide these days who are the good guys and who the bad. It’s like the popularity of the Twilight series a decade ago, the many fans of these fanged characters. I mean, they’re vampires, for God’s sake. And the current fans of the walking talking dead. I mean, they’re zombies, for God’s sake. Even Clint Eastwood’s main character in The Unforgiven is duplicitous (I know, I know, it means he’s a liar, but I want it to mean he’s a two-sided character). Is he an evil man who became good and then became evil again when he goes to fight evil and does evil things in his fight? The line between evil and good is no longer as clear as it once was, when good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black. Now, everyone seems to be wearing gray.  And we have a president who should be a white hat and yet seems to be as black as midnight. Whoosh! That’s a lot of words for someone suffering from Blogger’s Block. The sphincter may have loosened.

Oz & Up

Last night I had a linguistic dream in which I was explaining to an old friend how difficult English is for foreign-born people to learn. Just so many anomalies, so many idioms. We like to force words into new meanings that don’t always make much sense. I told him about the first line of the song in The Wizard of Oz, “We’re off to see the wizard.” Odd word, off. “To be off” suggests an actual movement toward something. I can just see Dorothy, the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow skipping through the Oz countryside, the Emerald City in the distance (Oh, and don’t forget Toto). So they’re off to off the wizard. That is, they’re going there to kill the wizard. They aren’t really, but in my proposed sentence above, there’s that second off to explain, the verb to off, which in slang means to kill. The first off simply means that they’re about to begin a journey. Reverse it and you might get, “We’re on to you” (We know all your secrets). Or “We’re onto you” (We’re now sitting on you). And look at going in “We’re going to be going to the Emerald City.” The first going has nothing to do with a physical move forward as in the second going. It means future time, as in “Sometime in the future we’re moving toward the Emerald City.” By this time in my dream, my friend was just shaking his head, moving slowly to the bedroom door.

More linguistic oddities, even though not in my dreams, just in my observations. We love to take adverbs and force them into joining forces with some verb to take on new meanings. Our little two-letter word up is a good example of these strange verbal unions: give up (surrender), suck up (either to renew fortitude or to falsely flatter), take up (begin a new hobby), sign up (join), seize up (piston freezing by friction), shut up (close one’s mouth), chin up (raise one’s chin [a verb], but chin-up [a noun in which one raises one’s body by pulling oneself up to a bar]), shine up (falsely flatter), fix up (repair), show up (appear), slow up (And why does “slow up” mean exactly the same as “slow down?”), stick up (a verb suggesting the act of putting a gun in someone’s face) and stickup (a noun indicating the act of putting a gun in someone’s face), stuck up (nose in the air), and throw up (Do we regurgitate up or down?). You know, all this linguistic consideration is giving me a bellyache. I think I’ll just throw up my hands. Eeeooo, now there’s a disgusting image.

English Grammar Lesson

I’ve been thinking about all those old pedantic rules of English grammar that I used to teach, most of which I told my students to ignore. But I thought they should at least know what they were before they ignored them.

First, don’t split infinitives. That’s when you put some adverbial stuff in between the sign of the infinitive, “to,” and the verbal itself, like “Try to never listen to old English teachers.” Un-split, it becomes, “Try never to listen to old English teachers.” A little awkward but okay. But sometimes there’s no better place to put an adverb than right there between the “to” and the verbal. For example, “Life is too short to totally behave yourself in study hall.” Can “totally” go anywhere else?

Second, don’t end sentences with prepositions. Winston Churchill famously had this to say about that: “This is a form of pedantry up with which I will not put!” When a writer tries too hard to avoid the prepositional ending, the sentence can come out sounding too stuffily formal. For example, “The Red Cross was the charity they chose to give their fortune to.” Switch it to, “The Red Cross was the charity to which they chose to give their fortune.” A little stuffy, right? Now look at this sentence in which there’s no way to avoid the preposition at the end: “The trip committee decided it was the best direction to come in from.” Lousy sentence, yes, but the only way to fix it leaves “The trip committee decided it was the best direction from which to come in.” Okay, okay, maybe it should have been “The trip committee decided it was the best way to enter.” But we still have the American verb “to come in” equal to “to enter.”

Third, there’s the old dictum to never begin a sentence with “and” or “but,” and to always write in complete sentences. But I’ve already broken that one three times thus far. Also, two split infinitives in the sentence above. Also, a sentence fragment in the last sentence. Also this one.

Fourth, don’t let your modifiers dangle or get misplaced. A dangler usually refers to a word group at the beginning of a sentence that should be referring to the subject of the main clause. Such an error can lead to misunderstanding or sometimes even hilarity. For example, “Flying over the African plain, the elephant herd looked majestic.” That would require a very large plane or a bunch of big-eared Dumboes. Another: “Smashed flat by a passing truck, my dog Rowlfie sniffed at what was left of a half-eaten Whopper.” Poor Rowlfie. And one example of a modifier that got misplaced, maybe even lost: “The body was discovered by a hunter with a gunshot wound to the head.”

Fifth, don’t engage in superfluity, excess, repetition, prolixity, wordiness, or redundancy. That sentence is a good example of what not to do. Here are a few much shorter examples: a pair of twins (Does that mean there are four or only two?), surrounded on all sides (Does that include above and below?), consensus of opinion (One of the few things I learned in my high school Latin class was that “consensus” already means “a unity of opinion” and that only dumb dolts would ever say “consensus of opinion.”)

There, that should be enough English lessoning for the day. But one last comment about the vagaries and complexities of the English language. Look at these pairs of words that drive foreigners as well as natives crazy: "discomfit" & "discomfort," "sacrilegious" & "irreligious," "squash" & "quash," "rife" & "ripe," "complimentary" & "complementary," "effect" & "affect," and "slow up" & "slow down." These last two are crazy Americanisms that are but shouldn't be synonymous.

Texting vs Writing

At the Arizona Broadway Theater last week, my wife and I watched a couple a few tables away. They were sitting across from each other, heads down, shoulders hunched, hands in front of them not quite clasping. They looked like two novitiates praying to God, in this case, the almighty Phone God. Their little thumbs were clicking and clacking away at some game app, neither one looking at or talking to the other, neither taking in their surroundings to see what or who was there. They didn’t care. They were lost in their "appiness." I just don’t get it. This last five or six years has seen such an explosion of cell phones and smart phone technology that now almost our entire population has one of these hand-held computers, with constant babbling and texting, so much so that almost everyone has these busy thumbs and fingers and almost no one is saying anything meaningful. I keep asking myself, why is texting so fascinating? How is texting better than phone talk? Why is phone talk better than face-to-face conversation? Texting has also led to the silliness of text shorthand, with the subsequent loss of words and spelling and punctuation, the same kind of abbreviated messages that we now find on Twitter and Facebook. “Tweet” sounds like an adolescent trying to say “treat,” and almost all the tweets I’ve seen are pretty adolescent and certainly no treat to read.

What can one possibly say about writing that hasn’t already been said? We’re now in an age when more people are talking than writing. I guess if you consider texting as writing there are still a bunch of folks who write, but I don’t consider texting as any more than silly teeny tiny talk. Writing is what people used to do in letters and essays and short stories and novels, putting words on paper for other people to read. Most who then wrote did so because they wanted someone to read their words, listen to their ideas, maybe comment on what was written, maybe even pay them for what they wrote.

Did anyone ever write simply for the sake of putting ideas on paper without expecting any audience? Henry David Thoreau could be one, but even he might have thought his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson would give him a look, maybe a few others in their transcendental group. I’m sure there must have been some who wrote in diaries solely for private perusal. Samuel Pepys in the 17th century put his diary entries into a current kind of shorthand called tachygraphy which many later thought may have been his attempt to keep what he said strictly private. Or maybe he really wanted someone someday to translate his words. Which we did, finding it an invaluable picture of life in London in Pepys’ day.

Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of poems, only a few of which she shared with friends and correspondents. Did she never want us to share “Hope is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul” or to puzzle over “Wild Nights—Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!” or to exult in “A word is dead / When it is said / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day” There must be others, but I can’t think of any.

Most of us commit words to paper because we want someone to read them. It’s an egotistical endeavor. We live and then we die, and for most of us the only words that point to our existence are the cryptic words carved on our headstones, as was this one pointing to John Keats: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Keats, who died very young, was probably despondent because he thought no one would ever recognize what he had written. He borrowed these words and personalized them for what his grave would say, and how ironic that his words and his name were written not in water but in books that will be around forever.

Some are driven to write. I include myself in that category. Our lives are shaped by the amount of time we spend with pen and paper, or, much more likely today, sitting with keyboard and word processor, putting thoughts on paper or hard drive. That’s what I’m doing right now. That’s what successful writers (those who actually make money at their craft) do. And some of them who have already made more money than they can ever spend continue to write daily until the day they die. They’re driven to write. In the past it was Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, Agatha Christie, and Barbara Cartland. Today it would be Stephen King and Dean Koontz. These people all wrote and wrote and wrote, with little regard for how much money they could make. They wrote because they had to. And then we have James Patterson, who writes and writes and writes with any number of co-writers for the money. How in hell much money does any writer need? I want him to be driven, as am I and Zane Grey and all the others I mentioned above. Forgive me for having put myself in the same category as those I’ve mentioned above (other than Patterson). But then, maybe no one is reading this.

Writing Style

          Since my pool of suitable blog topics seems to have dried up, I decided to go back to posts from years past that were good enough to repeat. In 2015 I wrote several about writing styles and what makes some better than others. Here’s one that struck my fancy.

As an old English teacher, I often notice a writer’s style, especially when the style is noteworthy for one reason or another. Michael Dirda, in "Style Is the Man," defines it thus: "Beauty, I learned, grows out of nouns and verbs, and personal style derives from close attention to diction and sentence rhythm. When Yeats decided that his poems had become too ornamented and flowery, he took to sleeping on a board. Before long, he’d put the Celtic Twilight far behind and was producing such shockingly blunt lines as 'Nymphs and satyrs copulate in the foam.'" Style is a combination of word choice, sentence type and length, descriptive accuracy, images that either bore us or surprise us, and a few other characteristics that are hard to explain. But I can recognize good style from bad. Most writing doesn’t need to do anything unusual. It simply needs to communicate whatever its message is. That’s what most non-fiction does or should do. I call it an invisible style, just doing its work without bothering or confusing the reader. Maybe the best and best-known American writer who wrote invisibly and yet managed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was John Steinbeck. A good, maybe even a great writer, but not a stylist. Some writers love jargon and obfuscation and don’t want to admit they don’t know what they’re talking about. These are writers one should avoid. They’re bad and their styles are bad. Romance writers often use a purple style, lots of flowery images and sexual innuendo. It’s an easy style to spot and one you would do well to avoid.

Since I’m much fonder of fiction than non-fiction, I’ll stick to writers of fiction. The two I always cited in my English classes were Hemingway and Faulkner, polar opposites stylistically. Hemingway was what I’d call a plodder. His sentences came at you like a somnambulistic heavyweight, one simple sentence after another, sometimes two simple clauses in a compound sentence, the words agonizingly chosen. In real life he exuded machismo, and he wanted his writing to do the same, to be a plodding tough guy. Often he might get only one or two saved pages after a full day at the typewriter. Writers who followed Hemingway and tried to duplicate his style most often fell flat on their faces. It may appear simple but its looks are deceptive.

Then there’s Faulkner, who drives us crazy with his complexity. I’ve often wondered if he was actually aware of how complex his sentences were or if it simply came naturally to his ear. There is that sentence in “The Bear” that goes on and on for several pages, going ever deeper in the layers of subordinate thought, hooking word groups together with colons and dashes and parentheses. And the poor reader is swept along with him, hoping to find shore before drowning. Faulkner is more admired in the writing than in the reading. Most readers just don’t have the patience to figure him out. Of the current writers, James Lee Burke comes closest to Faulkner in both style and Deep South setting.

Some writers caress the reader with their style. Fitzgerald is a good example. Although he wrote many short stories for The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, stories he wrote hurriedly and without much revision, he was still one of the most elegant writers our nation has ever produced. Listen to Nick’s thoughts at the end of The Great Gatsby, thoughts about the dead Jay Gatsby and his dream: “Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Elegant.

The modern writer with an elegant style is Kate Atkinson, who is the most quotable writer today. Nearly every sentence she writes is new and elegant and quotable. Two examples from One Good Turn: “Gloria didn’t believe in heaven, although she did occasionally worry that it was a place that existed only if you did believe in it. She wondered if people would be so keen on the idea of the next life if it was, say, underground. Or full of people like Pam. And relentlessly, tediously boring, like an everlasting Baptist service but without the occasional excitement of a full immersion. . . . He thought he was invincible, but he’d been tagged by death. Graham thought he could buy his way out of anything, but the grim reaper wasn’t going to be paid off with Graham’s baksheesh. The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself. If anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (“Come along now, don’t make such a fuss”).”

Gloria remembers a time when Graham had been stopped for speeding, drunk, speaking on his cell phone while eating a double cheeseburger.

“Gloria could imagine him only too well, one hand on the wheel, his phone tucked into the crook of his neck, the grease from the meat dripping down his chin, his breath rank with whiskey. At the time, Gloria had thought that the only thing lacking in this sordid scenario was a woman in the passenger seat fellating him. Now she thought that that was probably going on as well. Gloria hated the term 'blow job' but she rather liked the word 'fellatio,' it sounded like an Italian musical term—contralto, alto, fellatio—although she found the act itself to be distasteful, in all senses of the word.”

And that leads me to a writer I’m fond of, Lee Child. I and millions of others have read all the books in his Jack Reacher series. I just finished the latest, Make Me. If ever a writer had a distinctive style (without judging it as either good or bad), Lee Child is such a writer. I’d compare his style to a slap in the face, or if Reacher were doing it, a violent head butt. It’s characterized by lengthy descriptions of time and distance and weapon calibers and statistical analyses. The style typifies Reacher more than Lee Child. For example, in Make Me, Reacher is confronting a hit man who has come to take out him and his female companion. The faceoff is in a shabby apartment building hall and lasts from start to finish about three minutes, but it takes ten pages for Reacher/Child to explain exactly what will take place—the moves, the countermoves, the kind of blows he will need to deliver to foil the shooter. Reacher is obsessed with facts and details, and the style shows it. And as I earlier said, it’s neither good nor bad, just distinctive.

Masters 2019

          What a weekend in Georgia. That roar we all heard was the sound of a Bengal tiger who had just made another trophy kill, and most who heard it were delighted, excited, and deliriously joyful. Some, however, were not so full of joy, still thinking of Tiger Woods as just another lucky, cocky, uppity black (fill in the “n-word” here). We may have come a long way in race relations, but there are still too many old fogies with red necks (fill in “retirees” here) who actively dislike Tiger Woods. Young people of all ages, but especially pre-teen boys and girls, are now embracing him as he was never embraced during the glory years from 1997 to 2005. Too bad for all the non-embracing old folks, though. They missed out on the celebration that followed Tiger’s fifth win at the Masters. It was good for him; it was good for the game; it was good for a world that’s grown weary of WH ego tweets. If Tiger can come back from his physical, mental, and emotional problems over the last decade, then maybe we as a nation can come back to political sanity in 2020.

          More Augusta observations: The golf course was even more gorgeous than ever before. It looked like they’d hired thousands of tiny gardeners with tiny scissors to hand-trim every blade of grass, kneeling in worship as they clipped each hole to resplendent beauty. There was a fear that thunderstorms would have the audacity to rain on Augusta National’s parade, but even the rain gods realized what a mistake that would be and stayed away for most of the four days.

What was the pivotal hole on Sunday? It was that little dream-killer the par-3 12^th. Jordan Spieth, in 2017 found out about what pressure can do, dumping two shots in Rae’s Creek to lose what should have been a walk-in win. And Francesco Molinari felt the tightening collar when he got there with a two-stroke lead and hit it in the water. All along, I’d thought of him as the Italian assassin because he seemingly never made a mistake, making only his second bogey of the first three and a half rounds. Until he got to number 12 and double bogeyed it. From there to fifteen, he and Tiger were tied until Molinari dumped another in the water on the par-5 15^th for another double bogey. Goodbye, Francesco. The Tiger pressure and the pressure of the second nine on Sunday finally assassinated the assassin.

This was Tiger’s 5^th green jacket and his 15^th major. The Masters, because of its extremely limited field, was probably the most likely place for him to win another major. But, guess what? Who do you suppose will be favored to win next month’s PGA at Beth Page or the US Open at Pebblebeach or the Open in Northern Ireland? Yep, probably Tiger. But that may not hold true if he doesn’t play well in May at Beth Page. Will the Comeback continue or will this 15^th win be his swan song? We’ll see.

          Now that Johnny Miller is gone as golf’s premier analyst, who’s left to call it like it is or make any controversial and astute comments about the game and those who play it? Paul Azinger was supposed to be his replacement but he hasn’t given any indication that he can do it. Curtis Strange, although he’s finally seen the wisdom of getting rid of his Southern drawl, is still pretty stupid. CBS’s go-to guy Peter Kostis, in his annoying soft-speak, makes too many too obvious comments about the action. And one of the Golf Channel’s spokespeople, Brandel Chamblee, tries to sound all-knowing by making controversial comments but comes off as seeking attention only by controversy. Brooks Koepka called him out when he said that Koepka’s rapid weight loss was the stupidest thing he might have done. I guess that the one I’d most like to see as golf guru on regular telecasting would be David Feherty, who is as funny as he is insightful.

          Now, to beat on this not-yet-dead horse, I must comment on the debate about leaving the flagstick in or taking it out when one is putting. No one has yet mentioned that much of this decision should rest on what kind of flagstick is being used. The lighter the stick the more one should use it. In the very old days, a bamboo flagstick was very lightweight and most receptive to a ball hitting it. Then came the fiberglass sticks which were also light and receptive. All studies showed that more chips were made with it in than with it out. Dave Pelz, an old-time putting guru, has done several studies that showed statistically that more shots were made with the flagstick in than with it out. However, that was when fiberglass was still being used. Now that it’s legal to leave it in when putting, what do the studies show? I noticed that the ones being used at the Masters were the new metal sticks, narrow at the bottom but much wider up from there, much heavier and less receptive to balls striking them. These heavier flagsticks will make it a more difficult decision about leaving it or taking it out. The debate will continue throughout the rest of this season. I’m guessing that by then, about half the professional players will leave it in, half will take it out. But amateurs should leave it in all the time.