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The Swinger

“The Swinger” is a novel about a very famous golfer who has an amazing career record, a slew of endorsement deals, a gorgeous wife and a squeaky-clean reputation — until his extracurricular kinks become a huge public embarrassment and spoil everything. The authors, Michael Bamberger (“This Golfing Life”) and Alan Shipnuck (“Bud, Sweat and Tees”), call this golfer Herbert X. Tremont, known as Tree, and his wife, Belinda. But they don’t insult the reader’s intelligence by claiming that these characters bear no resemblance to persons living or dead.

They don’t embroider the facts much, either. Sure, Tree lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., whereas Tiger Woods lived near Orlando. Tree has ankle surgery, but Mr. Woods had surgery on his knee. Tree’s wife comes from Italy, but Mr. Woods married Elin Nordegren, who was born in Sweden. When Tree’s raunchy correspondence with his many girlfriends is exposed, Belinda beats him up with a 5 iron. Ms. Nordegren may not have whacked Mr. Woods with a 5 iron at all.

Why read a novel that hews so close to glorified gossip? Why read any fiction about celebrities, even if the famous person (like Diana, Princess of Wales, in Monica Ali’s “Untold Story”) has been laboriously renamed, reimagined and packed off to the American Midwest? The answer, in the case of “The Swinger,” is that the authors know their man and know their game.

There’s a fair amount of golf in “The Swinger.” But the game that really shapes this funny, fast-moving book is the one played by the press and the public. Mr. Bamberger and Mr. Shipnuck, senior writers at Sports Illustrated, understand the trade-offs that were part of Mr. Woods’s predebacle career and that are essential to keeping any star athlete out of trouble. Tree’s public and private personae may be very different (“He was often playfully profane unless he was in public or his mother was around”), but if reporters want to get anywhere near him, they’d better not say so. When a sports prodigy who is this two-faced proclaims publicly that “family is everything to me,” no eyebrows had better be raised.

But Tree Tremont’s hubris leads him to forget these ground rules. While certain athletes — the book mentions Derek Jeter — have the humility to keep their private exploits reasonably private, Tree pushes his privilege to the breaking point. “Tree wanted everything,” the authors write. “He wanted the hot nightlife and the kiddie-soccer home life and the glamorous wife and the get-rich-now corporate life that was the foundation of the P.G.A. Tour. To keep it all going, he had to wallpaper his life with lies.”

Watermelon and Tomato Salad

In some ways, this dish owes its provenance to a classic Turkish breakfast dish of watermelon, feta and sometimes mint, but little else. After tasting that, I began to see watermelon in a new light. By itself, watermelon is simply and appealingly sweet. With savory ingredients, the flavor is softer and more complex — sugariness is no longer its main quality.
 

Tomato and watermelon are both fruits, and they’re obviously somewhat similar in appearance, but it when it comes to flavor and texture, they’re opposites. I fell in love with the combination of sweet and savory, tender and crunchy. The addition of vinaigrette, scallions, blue cheese and a tiny sprinkle of cayenne pepper turns the pairing into a salad that satisfies every taste bud, and is pretty refreshing on a hot summer day.

 

Watermelon and Tomato Salad

Yield 4 servings

Time 15 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups seedless watermelon, in 1-inch cubes or balls (cut over a bowl to catch the juice and reserve it)
• 1 1/2 cups cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half
• 1/2 cup finely diced or crumbled Stilton, Gorgonzola, Roquefort or Maytag blue cheese
• 1/2 cup minced scallions
• Salt
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
• Pinch cayenne
• 1/2 cup parsley, roughly chopped

Method

• 1. Combine the watermelon, tomato, cheese, scallions and salt in a bowl.
• 2. Whisk or blend together about 2 tablespoons of the watermelon juice, oil, vinegar and cayenne. To serve, dress the salad with this mixture and garnish with parsley. Do not refrigerate and serve within 30 minutes.

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Tools of Entry, No Need for a Key Chain

[ed.  Guess it's inevitable, I need to get a cell phone one of these days.]

Front pockets and purses are slowly being emptied of one of civilization’s most basic and enduring tools: the key. It’s being swallowed by the cellphone.

New technology lets smartphones unlock hotel, office and house doors and open garages and even car doors.

It’s a not-too-distant cousin of the technology that allows key fobs to remotely unlock automobiles or key cards to be waved beside electronic pads at office entrances. What’s new is that it is on the device more people are using as the Swiss Army knife of electronics — in equal parts phone, memo pad, stereo, map, GPS unit, camera and game machine.

The phone simply sends a signal through the Internet and a converter box to a deadbolt or door knob. Other systems use internal company networks, like General Motors’ OnStar system, to unlock car doors.

Because nearly everyone has a cellphone, a number of start-ups, lock companies and carmakers are betting on broad acceptance of the technology.

Schlage, a major lock maker, markets a system that lets homeowners use their mobile phones to unlock their doors from miles away, and manage their home heating and air-conditioning, lights and security cameras. Customers buy locks that are controlled by wireless radio signals sent from an Internet-connected box in their home.

Recently, Dwight Gibson, vice president for connected home solutions at Ingersoll Rand, Schlage’s parent, said that he used the system to let a friend into his house while he was sitting at his desk at work. “She thought it was magic,” he said.

Big Data

[ed.  Fascinating article with wide-ranging implications.  I found the part about health care reform particularly intriguing.]

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.

Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. “How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry,” he says.

“We are at a different period because of so much information,” says James Cortada of IBM, who has written a couple of dozen books on the history of information in society. Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it “the industrial revolution of data”. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”.

Bill Evans

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Rachael Yamagata

Gil Scott-Heron

[ed.  Still can't believe he's gone.]

Mother Nature's Sons

For the last few years I’ve been seeing woodsmen on my city’s streets. They wear long beards and long hair, or long beards and no hair. They favor beat-up leather boots and wool beanies and jobs involving wood. At Best Made Co., a downtown boutique, they purchase hand-painted axes and canvas portage packs. At French atelier APC, they try on pieces by Carhartt, a manufacturer of blue-collar outdoor wear, that have been recut for slimmer legs and thicker wallets. Until recently, they were able to hone their bow-hunting skills in the basement archery range of clothier/barbershop Freeman’s Sporting Club.These urban dwellers seem to be getting ready for a long camping trip that never takes place; their flannel grows tatty and their boots scuffed, but they are never stained with real dirt.

Actual lumberjacks, of course, no longer wear flannel. They wear polyester fleeces and CAT boots and wraparound sunglasses and XXL T-shirts. Professional explorers (mountaineers, polar researchers) now wear outfits—often puffy down or synthetic loft in a breathable waterproof shell—that resemble spacesuits. Turn on the Discovery Channel or NatGeo, and you’ll see both types of outdoorsman within two hours: the blue-collar workers emptying our forests of trees, our oceans of crabs, and our rivers of gold; and the explorers, Gore-Tex clad, embarking on extravagant, high-risk vacations. But in order to find Brooklyn’s noveaux voyeageurs, you’ll need to flip over to FashionTV, because they do not exist in the wild.

In any era since the invention of polyester fleece, flannel is a patently absurd choice for outdoor work: when woven from wool it is too heavy; when woven from cotton it fails to retain heat once wet. But the fashion industry, in its ongoing campaign to dust off bygone archetypes of masculinity, has revived the fabric. Along with waxed canvas and leather, flannel plays an important role in repackaging the sex appeal of the vintage outdoorsman while sidestepping both the flimsy artificiality of petroleum-spun fabrics and also the earnestness of organic cloth, which carries with it a whiff of environmentalism—a supposedly emasculating ethos that prudishly promotes the suppression of desire.

Basic physics dictate that, in order to become more sustainable, technology must become ever lighter, quieter, and less hungry. Is it merely a coincidence that these engineering constraints also mirror our favored model of femininity? In a recent study, pollsters found that 82 percent of respondents felt that going green is “more feminine than masculine.” The risk of feminine contamination, the researchers concluded, “holds men back from visible green behavior like using reusable grocery bags or carrying around reusable water bottles.” Add to that the reproachful tone that environmentalists often resort to in their attempts to spread the gospel of Deep Ecology—which stresses the rights of the ecosystem over those of man—and you glimpse how environmentalists came to be miscast as sanctimonious nags.

To expiate their green guilt, tough guys go to extreme lengths: they live in unheated houses, fuel their trucks with rancid cooking oil, subsist on other people’s trash. The tension emerges most clearly with regards to food. Many progressives would like to eat local and organic but don’t want to be seen as either pampering or depriving themselves (or both pampering and depriving themselves, like the diners in Portlandia who must personally visit a chicken on its farm before they can feel sure of its free-range pedigree). In an attempt to live more naturally, a few dozen men in New York City, along with one woman, have reportedly committed themselves to a so-called caveman diet. The diet’s strictures allow them to eat only meat and vegetables—no grains, sugar, dairy, or oil—and requires days of fasting between meals. “I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” one of the dieters told the New York Times.

Like many Americans, the cave people seem distrustful, even contemptuous, of vegan asceticism. Abstaining from animal byproducts is considered difficult, but not tough: your kid sister might gladly survive on barbecued seitan and cartons of Rice Dream. Even as progressive men renounce the traditional notion of subordinated femininity, many still harbor conflicted notions about manhood. They want to feel individually reckless, but not socially irresponsible. They want to minimize carbon emissions, but not to scold, scrimp, or carry tote bags. They want to be pure of deed but wild at heart. So they dig ever deeper into the past, searching for a way of life that existed before “real” men and their ecological consciences parted ways.

Sam Cooke

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Florence + The Machine

Relieve Itchy Mosquito and Wasp Bites with Vick’s Vapo Rub

[ed.  This is not an endorsement - I've never tried Vicks for this purpose, but it might be worth investigating.]  

It's finally Summer but that brings one of the year's most annoying problems: bug bites. If you do fall victim to a bee sting or mosquito bite, you can easily relieve the itching and redness with the help of Vick's Vapo Rub.

This tip comes from The People's Pharmacy:

For more years than I can remember, I've had an allergy to mosquito bites. Now I don't suffer long. With a touch of Vicks the itching and redness are gone.

It seems to work for the same reasons as toothpaste, since both use menthol and menthol is a local anesthetic, but a Vick's has the distinct advantage of being made for skin application and won't show as a white splotch while you're enjoying the upcoming fourth of July weekend.

Graedon's Guide to Unique Uses for Vicks (PDF)

by Adam Dachis
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Gearing Up for a Fireworks Extravaganza

When the sun goes down on July 4, Americans in more than a hundred cities will see the latest combustible pageantry from Fireworks by Grucci. The 160-year-old pyrotechnics firm has produced eye-popping explosions for everything from The Bachelor (a Las Vegas extravaganza in season 15) to the opening of Dubai's Palm Jumeirah artificial islands (the largest fireworks show in history). But for all the computers and wireless launching systems on hand at events, many of Grucci's most important tools are in its facility on the grounds of an Army ammunition plant in Radford, Virginia. Safety is paramount to executive VP Phil Grucci, who lost his father and a cousin in an explosion in 1983. We asked him to tell us about his tools.

Fireworks and Production Instruments
Safe-T-Ohm Shoe Tester
Conductive footwear and antistatic coveralls are de rigueur at Grucci, where a static shock can have terrible consequences. This meter sends a current through the foot to make sure workers aren't building up a charge. $920

Patterson-Kelley V Blender
Fireworks usually contain an oxidizer and a coloring agent (copper burns blue, for example). These ingredients are mixed in this giant V blender. It can also be used to coat rice hulls with black powder to create a bursting charge. $35,000

Baseball in the Last Frontier

On a summer afternoon in Anchorage, tourists who stumble across Mulcahy Stadium -- a decades-old structure with the picturesque Chugach Mountains to the east, an orange-and-green artificial turf infield that creeps onto the browning grass of the outfield behind second base, and rickety stands that could seat a few thousand but are more likely to hold a number of fans closer to a few dozen -- have at least one of the following reactions: There's baseball in Alaska? Of course. Are these guys professional, or what? Eventually. How much does the beer cost? Not much.

Yes, there's baseball in Alaska

The baseball history of the (very) far north reaches back to at least March of 1894, according to Albert Spalding's "America's National Game." The founder of the sporting goods manufacturing firm that bears his name, Spalding describes a story from Gen. Frederick Funston. Funston was part of a few baseball games between military officers and Native Alaskan guides that had led the group of American soldiers on a 20-day snowshoeing trip to the Yukon's Herschel Island while they waited for ice drifts to clear so they could return home. The participants wore comically thick fur coats and crafted balls and bats out of anything they could find, and the game was played on an ice sheet.

That's the first record of America's pastime reaching the Arctic, at least the first that Lew Freedman was able to track down for his excellent book about Alaska baseball, "Diamonds in the Rough."*

One of the early baseball names to help the cause for a more organized incarnation of baseball in Alaska is the all-time great Satchel Paige, who spent most of his career barnstorming around the United States and pitching around the world in various Negro leagues. Satch participated in an exhibition series against local Alaskans in 1965. By the time Paige arrived at Anchorage International Airport, he was already 59 years old, but he looked many years younger and was enough of a generational icon that he caused a significant local stir over the course of four games.

Those are some of the early, informal bouts with baseball, but thanks to H.A. "Red" Boucher and others, there eventually came into being a full-fledged Alaska Baseball League, which locals and tourists can watch in stadiums like Mulcahy around the state during the summer months. The old stadiums and the laid-back attitude of everyone around the game might distort the fact that the league has grown into one of the elite programs for college baseball players that hope are working on mechanics and staying in shape during the summer, enough so that it is often mentioned in the same breath as the storied Cape Cod League.

What makes the Alaska summer league special is something of a recurring storyline that crops up every year: players with raw talent and endless potential that grow into themselves during a summer in Alaska. That's a well-documented phenomena, but few of those players stand out more than a lanky pitcher from the University of Southern California that played for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots in 1982.

That kid, who intended to work on his pitching form for a few months, was tossed into a position at first base for opening day because of an injury-depleted lineup. It turned out that he did a better job hitting and fielding than he ever would have imagined: he hit .404 with 10 home runs and 44 RBIs that summer in Alaska. It comes as a surprise to many that that kid from SoCal was Mark McGwire.

Joining McGwire is a laundry list of hall-of-fame caliber players that have spent a summer or two in Alaska: Barry Bonds, Tom Seaver, Dave Winfield, Randy Johnson and Jason Giambi, to name a few. Obviously, not everyone that plays in the summer league goes on to that level of success, but it's a safe bet that you'll see a few future major leaguers if you watch a couple of games.

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Whoa

*Def: Ritardando (or rit.) an indication to gradually decrease the tempo of the music (opposite of accelerando).

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What's Eating You?

Bugs have always been in our houses and on our persons.

Truly, the arthropods shall inherit the earth. Or they would if they weren’t already running the show: Insects outnumber us 200 million to 1. Ants alone may account for as much as one-third of all animal biomass on earth, according to an estimate by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. But in the summer of 2010 bedbugs seemed to be on our minds more than usual.

New York, and therefore a large portion of American news consumers, were terrorized by bedbugs. But so what? There’s a story like that almost every summer, because reporters have less news to cover yet just as many pages and broadcast hours to fill.

So bedbugs are no big deal and you should sleep easy, America. Bedbugs are not as bad as you’ve heard. Right?

Actually, they are much worse than you have heard, says Gail Getty, a leading bedbug expert and entomologist at the University of California–Berkeley’s Urban Pest Management Center. “I don’t think people should necessarily panic at this point, but everything we know in the scientific community suggests this is going to get worse,” Getty says.

Bedbugs were a common household pest in America up through the 1930s, but after the massive DDT fumigation campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, only small pockets of the insects remained. Their resurgence in the past decade probably has a number of causes, Getty says. The bedbugs that survived fumigations grew increasingly resistant to existing pesticides. Insect control became more targeted toward specific pests, meaning that if you call an exterminator for cockroaches, he’s just going to kill your cockroaches. Finally, bedbugs were never comparably reduced in the rest of the world, and international travel has become more common.

If these trends aren’t creepy enough, consider how bedbugs’ disturbing sex lives—which make even rape-happy otters seem like models of enlightened gender relations—influence their migration patterns.

Field of Plundered Dreams

The city of Los Angeles is emphatically out of love. In fact it is aghast – appalled, disgusted – with one of its most revered institutions, the Dodgers baseball team.

The problem is not with the team's performance. True, the Dodgers are having a stinker of a season, but the city sees only extenuating circumstances as the cause. The real problem is with their out-of-town owner, an erstwhile car park magnate from Boston called Frank McCourt, who has managed in a few short years to run the team's finances into the ground while constructing a life of unabashed luxury for himself and his fractious family.

It is not a sporting scandal so much as a financial one. Multimillion-dollar homes have been bought, refurbished and discarded, the proceeds of the deal which allowed McCourt to purchase the Dodgers; family members have been added to the payroll whether or not they work at the stadium; money and debt have been shuffled around a series of shell companies and subsidiaries, while the team – the beefy sportsmen whose job it is to thwack baseballs into the stands so that the fans keep buying tickets and beers and hot dogs – have been left almost entirely in the lurch.

Many of the story's more extraordinary details have spilled out since Frank and his wife Jamie, who served as the team's chief executive, filed for divorce a year-and-a-half ago and began to savage each other like bloodhounds in open court. Both appear to have regarded the Dodgers as the source of wildly extravagent spending. One senior team executive characterised Jamie's attitude in court as "Why have a family business, but to support the family lifestyle?"

If that sounds like a plotline from Arrested Development, the quirky TV comedy about a family of dysfunctional property developers from the LA suburbs, it is only one way in which reality is proving as strange as fiction.

Among the people found to have been on the Dodgers' payroll is a Russian-born psychic whose sole job was to watch games on his television in the Boston suburbs and send out positive vibes so that they would win more often. In years when the Dodgers made the end-of-season playoffs – which they did in 2008 and 2009 – he was promised a six-figure payoff.