The Pros From Dover

I took this picture a few months ago. This is the blossom of the Desert Willow one of our native trees. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you will find that the flowers are quite remarkable.


I was thinking about getting old today because I heard a fellow on the radio talking about the baby boomer generation. He has written a book in which he claims that my generation is not going quietly into retirement, as he says previous generations did. He claims that we will be the first generation to accomplish great things in our old age. Apparently, he has never seen most of us.

I went out this morning with the Seafood King and Some Guy Named Bob to play our regular Thursday golf game at one of the municipal golf courses here in our fair city. There is a meeting facility at the golf course, attached to the club house and there was a meeting in progress there this afternoon.

The attendees seemed to be mostly earnest-looking young guys in white shirts and ties. It looked a bit like a gathering of Mormon missionaries, although it wasn't. While we were having a drink in the clubhouse after our round, a couple of these fellows came in and they seemed quite impressed with their meeting, based upon their chatter about it. The enthusiasm that can only be mustered by the young.

Two guys at a corporate seminar;

Young Guy: I think this program will really help us meet our targets next quarter. I'm excited about this, especially about that form 94703, we've needed that for a long time.

Old Guy: My chair hurts my butt.

Isn't it funny how each generation thinks that the ideas and solutions that they discover are unique to them? When I was at Tedious Systems there was always some young manager who was confident that he had come up with the answer. Mostly it was just a variation on a familiar theme. I was telling the Seafood King that the thought of sitting in a corporate meeting, listening to the Pros from Dover explain how it is, makes my skin crawl. As I said, this crap is for the young.

On the other hand, the thing that I like about golf and bowling is that you can get better as you get older, to a certain point anyway. The ravages of time don't affect you like they do in a lot of activities.

Golf and bowling, my main pastimes, are not sports, they are skill activities. They require a certain skill, but not that much athletic ability, at least for the average schmoe. So they are something that can be played with a feeling of accomplishment for years. Plus, there is little possibility of injury, always a consideration for the older set.

I never mentioned this before, but a couple of years ago I won the State of Arizona bowling championship in the division for bowlers whose league average was between 180 and 200. It wasn't age dependent, there were more than one thousand competitors ranging in age from eighteen to eighty, and I kicked their collective asses.

I have been bowling twice a week for about seven or eight years, although it is something that I have done off and on throughout my life. At fifty-seven years of age, I am a better bowler than I have ever been before. That's pretty cool. I bowled my first 300 game at fifty-seven and last night I bowled my highest three game series ever.

Golf is the same way. Only about 5% of amateur golfers can consistently break a score of 100. I typically play in the middle eighties. My goal is to get to the seventies, at least once. I don't think age will be an impediment, at least for a while. Many times I play golf with young guys I meet at the course. They are full of athletic ability, with strength far greater than me, but they lack skill. Golf is not a game where brute strength is an advantage.

On Monday I played golf with two guys, named Murray and Sy. Murray is eighty-five and Sy is eighty. They only played nine holes because they got tired, but Murray shot a forty-six for the nine holes. Most twenty-five year-old guys couldn't do that.

In other matters, I have watched the first two episodes of the new Fox comedy, Back To You and I have to say I'm disappointed.

I loved Kelsey Grammer as Frazier Crane and Patricia Heaton in Everybody Loves Raymond. Fred Willard always make me laugh, even though he always plays the same character.

If you haven't seen the show, Grammer is still playing Frazier Crane, except this time he is a news anchor. Heaton is Debra Barone at the news desk, smart and witty. Willard is just good old dependable Willard. How this show can be so bad is a mystery to me. It should be a hit.

One problem that the Lovely Mrs. Sneed and I agreed upon is that the writers are tying to do too much, with too many characters. I may not know show biz, but If I had Grammer and Heaton in my cast, I sure wouldn't write long scenes featuring two minor characters, like they did in last night's episode.








Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky