ATTENTION GOLFERS

From bunkershot.com:

The USGA Would Like To Inform All Golfers of a major rule changes to the game of golf, that will go into effect after November 4, 2008.

This is only a preview as the complete rule book is being written now.

Here are a couple of basic changes.
Golfers with handicaps:
- below 10 will have their green fees increased by 35%
- between 11 and 18 will see no increase in green fees
- above 18 will play for free and even get a check from the club/course played.

The dollar amount put in for bets will be as follows:
-for handicaps below 10 an additional $10
-between 11 and 18 no additional amount
-above 18 you will receive the total amount in the pot and you do not even have to play.

The term "gimme putt" will be changed to "entitlement"
and will be used as follows:
-handicaps below 10, no entitlements
-handicaps above 11 to 17, entitlements for putter length putts
-handicaps above 18, if on green, no need to ever putt, just pick it up

These entitlements are intended to bring about fairness in scoring so that the final scores of all players will be about the same.

In addition, a Player will be limited to a max of one birdie and/or six pars, any excess must be given to those fellow players who have not yet scored a birdie or par. Only after all players have received a birdie or par from the player making the birdie or par, can that Player begin to count his score again.

The current USGA handicap system will be used for the above purposes but the term "net score" will be available only for scoring those players with handicaps 18 and above. This is intended to "redistribute" the success of winning by making sure that in every competition the above 18 handicap players will post only "net score" against every other player's gross score.

These new Rules are intended to CHANGE the game of golf. Golf must be about Fairness Only, it should have nothing to do with Ability.

RIGHT DOWN PEACHTREE

It is so much fun to get on the road at 4:30 in the morning. Ate nothing solid, drank my usual 1/5 coffee, 4/5 skim milk on ice jumbo to give me a kick-start. Decided to park near the finish this time because it was so screwed up, and almost another mile down the road from Piedmont Park. Think they wanted everyone to rendezvous at the civic center. Did anyone actually go there? Parked car near 14th Street and caught MARTA at the Art Center. Had to switch trains at Lindbergh station. Some runners did not get off? Were they going to another race? Got off at Lenox. Still had to walk a good distance to the start, about the same as walking from Piedmont where I have parked for about 10 years. Will probably go back to the old way next time. Too many goofs riding MARTA. First stop is the port-a-johns which became a problem because many of them still had nylon ties to keep them shut. Had to wait for people to get desperate enough to rip them open by any means necessary before they became available. It was good entertainment watching innovative people in shorts with their legs crossed. Next stop is hydration. There is plenty of water around, but I bring my own. Don't know what else is in those cups. I sip my water,making it where I run out just before the start. Otherwise, another pit stop would be necessary when everyone is trying to get some relief. There is a bench around the corner from the thongs of people that I sit on and view the runners pouring in from MARTA. People come in the oddest shapes and sizes. Big and ugly is by far the most prominent breed of man. You would think the pretty ones would have an easier time finding a mate. At 7am I made my way to the 20,000 area and made myself comfortable, sitting in the middle of Peachtree. Taking a look around you wonder if you look as bad as the people around. I do, but without mirrors it is only an unproven theory. As the clock ticks closer to 7:30, the runners start to get antsy as if they could somehow manage to get a head start on the rest of us. Our time comes soon enough and we are headed down Peachtree for the 31st time. When I first started running there only 6,500 participants. That is still around the number that can actually run the race. The others are out here just to say that they did it. Some will jump in along the way. Even at the 5 mile mark you will see parents jump in with their 10 year old to get a photo of their kid finishing the Peachtree Road Race. Who knows what they did to get a valid number for the kid. the minimum age is 12. Nothing like teaching your kids to lie and cheat in order to get what you want. The first 3 miles are more downhill than uphill. The last 3 are just the opposite, more up than down. That's the way I ran the race, clocking 28 for the first half, then wilting to a 40 for the remaining 3.2 which was longer by more than a tenth according to my GPS sources. That's what happens when you move the finish line. They made us run longer to fit their own vision of how a finish should be. My vision certainly did not include being corralled like cattle into a fenced corridor which immediately brought the word "stampede" into my head. The way people watching the race were screaming at us, maybe we needed the security of the fence between us and them. Everyone nowadays seems to have an agenda and they are not happy unless they can persuade you to think like them. Several of these a "poco locos" were on the sidelines with banners telling me everything I needed to know about saving the planet, who to vote for, how fast I ought to drive, how many dogs I should own, and how to tie my shoelaces. I needed a notepad to get it all down. The finish had a major logistics problem this year. The water, T-shirt, locate friends, etc. areas all led you away from the MARTA station where I was parked near 14th Street. As soon as I got my T-shirt, I found a hole in the fence to escape the prison compound and head back to my car. Along the way I enjoyed watching the mass of runners still coming down Peachtree in a seemingly endless stream. My favorite was the boom-box guy who was sporting a huge Afro wig. People get weird when they get sweaty!

GREAT TO BE A FATHER ON MOTHER'S DAY

Oliver Martin Johnston, Jr. (October 31, 1912 – April 14, 2008) was an American motion picture animator. He was one of Disney's Nine Old Men, and the last living member. His work was recognized with the National Medal of Arts in 2005. He was a directing animator at Walt Disney Studios from 1935 to 1978. He contributed to many films including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Bambi and Pinocchio. His last full work for Disney came with The Rescuers, in which he was caricatured as one of the film's characters, the cat Rufus. The the knowledge and techniques that were developed at the Disney studio in his time are priceless.

When I was young, everyone thought I would grow up to be an artist. I drew on everything. I enjoyed creating the captions almost as much as drawing the characters. Peas-NO-Nuts, The King Wizard of Mad Mumblings, Whombie of the Desert, and Frothy Froth kept me as busy as any homework assignment in high school.Working my way through college became a slow and tedious process. I decided to delay my cartoon career and set out on my own to discover the world. I joined the Air Force. They had no need for a cartoonist, but computer geeks were practically non-existent and the need for them was growing. They put me in electronics school. A year later the USAF decided I had enough electronics background, so they sent me to computer classes. Six months later I emerged as a Control System computer technician in the Strategic Air Command. Most of my cartoons were now done on computer paper. The Air Force frowns on perpetrators of unauthorized writing or drawing on a government surface I found out, but they never caught me. After the Air Force, I joined AT&T and they sent me to school to get a First Class Radio License, a requirement for repairing and tuning microwave generators and radio transmitters carrying thousands of phone messages across the airways of the USA. Then I got married, had two of the most unique children imaginable, and spent years of coaching youth soccer. By 1975, AT&T had discovered my background in computers and sent me to school to introduce me to computer software,somewhat akin to Luke going over to the dark side, being a hardware geek until this point. I found this niche satisfied my creative cravings (so what if it was in a computer language that nobody ever read as long as it worked) and it was rewarding when my 50 lines of novel coding did the job of a 1000 lines of esoteric criteria. When the kids went off to college, I thought about my deviation from the original course of my life. AT&T would not pay for me to become an cartoonist, abstract or otherwise, so I changed my major to Computer Information Systems (CIS) and got my BBA degree. I did manage to get Frothy Froth published for a couple of years in a local AT&T newsletter, circulation 900.

Fast-forward now to that night when Ward and I were in line to meet Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, the last two of Disney's famed Nine Old Men, in town to promote a collection of limited edition sericels and prints from THE JUNGLE BOOK.I knew that at this moment we were in was a time-lock, where the control of time is being handled by those in charge of it. I could see the admiration in my son's eyes as the line moved closer to these animation giants. At last we were standing in front of them. Frank was doing most of the talking as Ollie was a bit under the weather. Ward gathered the courage to speak to Frank, "Very nice to finally meet you. You know, I'm an artist and I want to become an animator. What advice do you have to give to someone just starting out?" Frank's eyebrows went up slightly when Ward mentioned that he wanted to become an animator. He leaned in closer and said these three things to Ward:

OBSERVE EVERYTHING
COMMUNICATE WELL
DRAW, DRAW, DRAW

It was quite the definition of satisfaction for me to witness this event. Ward still displays this quote on his drawing board for inspiration.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!