One of the talking heads on ESPN radio yesterday said he thought the International tournament being played by the women golfers really wasn’t interesting enough that it should be continued in years to come. He must be a golf idiot. The format is interesting to say the least, and the shot-making these ladies displayed was just short of incredible. The pressure of international match play must feel like someone squeezing your neck . . . with both hands. The only problem for the sponsors of this event is that the U.S. squad was unable to get through to the singles matches on Sunday. The rating had to fall off a cliff with them not there. Not that the Sunday matches wouldn’t be interesting; but to keep the American audience tuned in, they really needed our four ladies to make it to Sunday. Tom Fazio’s course at Caves Valley near Baltimore was made to look like a pussy cat, but it still measured over 6600 yards and the greens were lightning fast. It certainly wasn't a pussy cat. Yet the women kept knocking down sticks and making long putts. If this tournament doesn’t do wonders for women’s golf, both amateur as well as professional, I’ll eat my sweaty visor. And the ESPN talking head must not know a bogey from a boogie.
I found a wonderful remedy for dry eyes and I’d like to pass it along. I didn’t really find it; my ophthalmologist gave it to me. I’ve been having a problem with red eyes, teary eyes, irritated eyes, to such an extent that I was squinting all the time, wiping my eyes, feeling like I was partly blind. She told me I was suffering from blepharitis, a condition in which the eyelids become coated with oily particles and bacteria near the base of the eyelashes. Such a simple thing to do: buy some baby shampoo and scrub the eyes with it once or twice a day. Rinse and there you go. Now why didn’t anyone tell me about baby shampoo a long time ago? Why didn’t I think of it myself? All my life I’ve washed my face, splashed my face, but never really scrubbed my eyelids. Who, after all, wants to get soap in the eyes? Well, babies don’t mind.
Because I love Scarlett Johansson, I decided I wanted to see her in
Lucy, her latest film. I and Bill Murray both fell in love with her a long time ago when the two of them met in Japan in
Lost in Translation. And even before that, when she was only twelve in
The Horse Whisperer, I fell in love with her. But then, I’m a dirty old man.
Lucy is science fictiony enough that I knew Rosalie wouldn’t like it, so she stayed home. Apart from my being able to watch Scarlett strut her stuff, I found the movie to be just a tad silly. Just a few years in the future, the plot was built around an artificial hormone called CPH4, looking a lot like blue crystal meth. Lucy is conned into delivering a briefcase to a really nasty Chinese mobster. But he won’t let her go until she opens the case and shows him what is in it, four plastic bags of this blue crystal stuff. Then he makes Lucy become part of his plan to smuggle the bags out of China. It’s not at all clear who sent the stuff to the mobster or what he was going to do with it when he got it out of the country. He was using three young men and Lucy to smuggle it out in their intestines, one to Berlin, one to Paris, and one to Rome. I’m not sure where Lucy was supposed to go. But she manages to struggle with her captor and in doing so the bag in her belly get broken and some of the CPH4 invades her body, morphing her into a super intelligent being whose intelligence, up to 20% of her brain’s capability, makes her able to control people and objects around her. And her brain capacity keeps growing. With the help of a French cop, she sets out to retrieve the other three bags of CPH4, knowing she will need them to keep herself alive. Good sy-fi concept, good action, lots of Scarlett, quite a few bits of silliness, especially in the second half of the movie, such as the obligatory race against on-coming traffic in which cars and trucks go into their obligatory smashes and the oozing stuff that comes out of Lucy to create a super-computer. But, all in all, a nice way to spend an afternoon with some popcorn, alone in a darkened theater with Lucy.
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