US Open, Pebble Beach

The USGA has received many black eyes in the past over their choices of venues for this hallowed event and their setups regarding fairway widths and rough depths. Finally, though, they got it right last weekend at Pebble Beach. This time the setup was US Open tough without having to resort to any tricks. Pebble Beach has enough tricks of its own. Normally, there'd be varying wind speeds of ten to as much as forty mph blowing in off the Pacific to give players new gray hairs and enough sunshine to make the greens mean-ass hard. But neither happened . . . which should have turned Pebble Beach into a pussy cat . . . which it wasn't. The USGA has always been accused of trying too hard to protect the sanctity of par golf. Its goal, apparently, was to have winners shoot around even par. This year, at a very benign Pebble Beach, Gary Woodland won at minus 13 with another thirty who were also under par, but the USGA didn’t need to feel that they’d been too easy in their setup. They weren’t. The under-par players all played quality golf on a course that still managed to bare its teeth despite the soft greens and calm breezes. The rough was so rough that we saw Ian Poulter actually stub a chip from just above a greenside bunker, sort of a reverse whiff. And his next shot went only a foot. Rory tried to smash one out of some waist-high fescue that nearly ripped the club from his hands, the ball going about ten feet. But it seemed like for every example of ugly results there were an equal number of magic chip-ins and hole-outs from the fairways. This Open was one of the best, most exciting ever contested on one of the best, most picturesque golf courses in the world.

I and many other golf fans were rooting for Tiger to produce another of his magic moments, but it never happened. Well, it didn’t happen for the first sixty holes, with a Tiger who hit more bad shots and bad putts than any of us could believe. It was like he was totally indifferent to what he was doing, nothing very bad but also nothing very good, pretty pedestrian, in fact. But on Sunday, he birdied six of the last twelve holes to shoot a respectable 69 for a T-21, and show me and the other Tiger fans that the old Tiger could still growl. It gave us something to hope for in July’s Open in Northern Ireland.

 Other observations?

That really heart-warming clip of Woodland and Amy, the young lady with Down syndrome who, in January, played the sixteenth hole in a practice round in the Waste Management with Gary Woodland. She hit the tee shot, the chip onto the green, and when Gary asked her if she wanted to putt it, she said, “I got this, Gary,” and knocked it in. What a really neat story.

More about the pins, leave it in or take it out when putting. Fewer and fewer are opting to leave it in, with Bryson DeChambeau and Adam Scott the main ones to leave it in. I also noticed that the USGA doesn’t seem to have a policy about what is or isn’t a standard pin. In some tournaments, the old lightweight pins are used; in others, the new fat heavyweights are used. In this Open, the fat one was there, but in last weekend’s Canadian Open, the skinny one was used. If you can’t tell the difference on tv coverage, the heavy one is black and white with the bottom foot or so a skinny black; the light pin is usually all white, the same diameter from top to bottom. I’ve said before, the light pin can be more help than hindrance, but the heavy pin the opposite.

Am I the only viewer who’s offended by all the spitting that so many of the young players do? It’s not the little shot you see coming from baseball players; that’s what I call spitting and I can sort of live with it. The young golfing gunslingers like Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Kevin Kisner, Tiger Woods, and even Gary Woodland will often and too often on camera let a long drippy gob go, and I just shudder at the sight. If they all want to be gunslingers from the past, they should all carry a spittoon in their golf bags. In the ancient days of baseball, many players kept a big wad of snuff in the cheek and would periodically emit a nasty, brown string of tobacco juice and spittle, but back in those ancient days, we didn’t have tv cameras with extreme facial close-ups, so we were spared most of these yucky sights. I still like to think of golf as one of the last of the gentlemen’s sports. Not so much now with all the slobbering going on.

The prodigious distances these young bucks now hit it also amazes me.

We can account for it by better equipment and better physical condition. Almost the top half of touring pros now average over 300 yards off the tee. The old unreachable 600-yard par-5s are now being reached with drive and in some cases short irons. What!? A 240-yard par-3 now requires as little as a 7- or 8-iron. What!? Golf, like every other sport keeps evolving. Someday, just like Annika Sorenstam has often said, somebody will birdie all eighteen holes for a 54. What!?

I Am Mother

          The faster we move exponentially in technological advances, the more likely it will be that artificial intelligence becomes the main blessing or potential ruination of life as we know it. Even before Leonardo da Vinci created his early mechanical knight in 1495, man has considered the potential for building machines to take on the drudgery of mankind’s tasks—robots of one kind or another. But we’ve also considered the possibility that our creations might try to eliminate their creators.

          And here we are now with drones that can drop our bombs on our enemies or deliver packages from Amazon or Walmart, with cars and planes that can drive themselves more safely than we can drive ourselves, with smartphones that can tell us practically anything we want to know, direct us to destinations, give us instructions on how to build or operate almost anything. We also have films and novels that have explored what AI can do for us or to us—most recently Blade Runner 2049, Ex Machina, Her, and the Star Trek series with their C-3PO and R2-D2. Best known of the literary examinations of robotics are Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, written almost eighty years ago. It was Asimov who introduced the threat of malevolent robots by formulating what he called the Three Laws of Robotics (to be built in to the artificial psyches): 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

          Netflix has a new movie, I Am Mother, that asks most of the old questions about robots and their possible malevolence or benevolence. What I have to say about this movie is loaded with spoilers, so if you ever want to see it, you should stop reading here. But if you’ve already seen it or don’t want to see it, you might find what it was trying to say entertaining or even enlightening. Or not. Some of you might have already decided the film simply leaves too any questions either unanswered or too poorly explained or is just too hokey simply for the sake of dramatic effect.

          Short plot summary: Sometime in the future, mankind has poisoned the atmosphere so that all of mankind has been killed. The opening scene shows a sign that 63,000 embryos are being kept in a safe bunker presided over by an android called Mother, who will allow embryos to be born in artificial wombs when she (it?) decides it is safe to do so. The first embryo she brings to life is a female named Daughter (Clara Rugaard-Larsen). Mother raises her for fourteen years, teaching her about man and the earth and giving her mental skills involving philosophy and ethics, with periodic tests to see how she is advancing. Daughter is brilliant and lovely and seems to be happy and content in her enclosed environment, and appears to love Mother just as a human mother. But she also wants to know when she can go outside the bunker to see what the planet is like. Mother warns her that it is still too toxic to leave their safe haven.

          Shortly after that, Daughter hears a voice calling to her from outside the airlock. It is a seriously wounded human woman (Hillary Swank) who wants medical treatment. She opens the air lock and lets the woman in, angering Mother with her act of defiance. Mother, however, relents and decides to treat the woman’s wound. The woman then convinces Daughter that it is now safe for her to leave the bunker and join her and her band of other survivors. They leave, walking through a devastated landscape, taking shelter in a tall field of corn when flying drones try to capture them. The woman explains that the atmosphere has been restored by these huge, cultivated corn fields, planted all over the planet by the androids. That raises the first question about the robots and their motives regarding the human race: Are they trying to save or eliminate mankind? The corn fields suggest their benevolence. But some of Mother’s actions seem to be malevolent, her anger when the survivor refuses to tell her where she and the other survivors are located, even going so far as pressing her finger into the woman’s wound to force her to say where they are. Later, after Daughter has been returned to the bunker, Mother goes to the Survivor’s home on the beach, where the woman is living alone in a rusting shipping container. When Mother enters and slams the door behind her, the audience is almost certain that nothing good is going to happen for the survivor’s survival. No benevolence there in those androidal eyes. Meanwhile, back in the bunker, Daughter has been given the responsibility of becoming the mother of the remaining 62,999 embryos, who will then become the next race of man, a much better man than the one that nearly destroyed themselves and the planet.

         Too many questions go unanswered, though, All right, the woman had been shot in the side and needed to have the bullet removed. Who shot her and why? If Daughter ever failed one of the tests she must take periodically, what happens to her? Does Mother destroy her and start over with a different embryo? If Mother is actually the "leader" of the androids and can appear anywhere inside or outside the bunker, why does she need to pretend that the world is still too toxic for Daughter? Why does Mother need to leave Daughter alone to care for and raise the other embryos?

          I’d give this movie two and a half stars out of five for its entertainment and dramatic storyline, and four stars for the philosophical precepts it raises.

Dis- Words & Mayor Pete

Another of those mid-night moments of dream/awake musing, this time on the word "dismember." All of a sudden, around 4:00 am, it popped in my head like an unwelcome flashbulb. Actually, I was thinking about forgetting something and I used the slangy "disremember." Naturally, that led me to "dismember" and the apparent connection between the two meanings of "-member." In "dismember" it suggests a human or animal limb, and in "disremember" it seems to be about cutting off a thought or memory. The prefix -dis means "without," as in "without a limb" and "without a thought or memory." That thought then led me to other -dis prefix words, like disbelieve, disable, disguise, discover, disillusion, disaster (interesting image there?), discomfort (and discomfit—another interesting pair), and disorder, all of which have sensible meanings when you take them to mean "without whatever is the meaning of the root word." But what about these? Distinct (?), distort (?), disdain (?), dishabille, and, especially, discombobulate? I wasn't sure of any of the root meanings so I gave it up until morning when I could do some etymological digging.  I seem to spend too many sleep hours chasing words around in my head. Only after I'd already posted this did I remember that -dis word that actually became its own new word, the verb "to diss." It has become the most toxic word anyone of color can accuse someone else of doing to them, to disrespect them. How could I have disremembered that word?

Last night we watched Chris Matthews on Hardball in a Q & A with the young mayor of South Bend, Pete Buttigieg. They were in California with Mayor Pete fielding questions from the audience and Mathews, and I now know why the young man is so popular with voters, especially young voters. He is remarkably well-spoken--clear and quick and despite his youth (37), seems to be politically astute. In that way he’s much like AOC on the distaff side. Although we’ve moved ahead on issues of sexuality in the past year or two, we still have a long way to go, and his being openly gay right now would make it impossible for him to win the Democratic nomination and run for president. Maybe in 2028, but not now. I can, though, certainly see him as being successful as a vice presidential candidate on a Biden/Buttigieg ticket. He’d have my vote and that of most of the LGBTQ community as well as many women of all colors. Whatever it takes to get Trump out of here would be wonderful. So, let’s go, Joe and Pete. Make us all proud.

Abortion Debate

We’re in the middle of a battle between the anti-abortionists and the Roe vs Wade supporters, with more and more states passing laws prohibiting almost all abortions. I’m pretty much on the Roe/Wade side and am offended by the other side referring to their view as pro-life, implying that the other view is anti-life, a group made up of baby killers.

I’ve been gathering notes on thoughts as they pop in my head but I haven’t yet made sense of them. So I’m offering them up to see if they come together in some sort of coherence.

Miscarriage usually happens within the first twenty weeks of pregnancy and is sometimes referred to as “spontaneous abortion.” If Missouri’s new law says that anyone performing an abortion is guilty of murder, does that suggest that any woman who has a miscarriage is guilty of murder because her body has chosen to abort?

Is motion one of the determinants of lividity, and if so, then is a moving sperm, tadpoling its way up the uterine canal a life form? We even have a means of birth control called “spermicide,” which suggests that we actually do “kill” sperm with it. Is an egg swimming down to meet the sperm also a life form? Is a miscarriage Nature’s way of saying a fetus should not be born? What about a fetus that can be medically determined to be defective, that if allowed to be born would be a life-long burden medically, emotionally, and financially for the parents? What kinds of defect might be considered as justifying abortion? Deaf and dumb? Pre-natal genetic disorder that would cause death after only one or two years? Mental retardation? Spinal defect that would cause life-long quadriplegia? Defective heart valve? Down syndrome? Also, who would decide—the courts, the parents, or the woman?

Why do the courts and theologians all say that life is determined by the presence of a heart beat? The heart is only one of our organs, so why zero in on only the heart? The debate about when life begins—at moment of conception or at time of birth? Now, that’s a real philosophical conundrum. If one believes it’s at the moment of conception, then any douching by the woman after a successful (conceptive) sexual encounter would be considered murder. Isn’t an abortion simply a somewhat later method of douching? How much later would be too long—4weeks, 8 weeks, 16 weeks, beyond 16 weeks?

If our present methods of birth control aren’t working in some parts of the world, what about aborting the millions of children born into extreme poverty in communities without knowledge of or means for birth control, in places where children starve to death in childhood? 

If the earth is approaching its maximum capacity for sustaining mankind, why do various religions continue to say that we should “go forth and multiply?” There may have once been an ancient reason for multiplying to preserve the species, but that is no longer necessary. Shouldn’t we be striving to achieve zero population growth? If Nature considered all life to be sacred, then why does Nature have nearly all species produce more eggs or babies than can survive? If every baby sea turtle made it from sandy nest to the ocean, wouldn’t the seas soon be filled to the brim with sea turtles? Or the earth with rabbits, or quail, . . . or people?