Daisuke Takahashi Breaks 95 in Short Program at Japanese Nationals

Unlike in golf, breaking 95 is a very rare achievement in figure skating when it comes to the score for your short program.  Well, that's what Daisuke Takahashi just did at the Japanese nationals:


He wasn't satisfied with his step sequence, he said in interviews afterward, but he nailed his quad (in a quad-triple combo!) and was awesome on his other jumps, as well.  Ended up earning himself a 96.05, over 10 points ahead of his nearest pursuer (Kozuka) and over 20 points ahead of his next-closest competitor (Hanyu)!

I'm hoping Takahashi skates great in his long program, because I'd love to see him eclipse the hyper-inflated score Patrick Chan beat him with at the ISU Grand Prix, where Chan actually extended his lead on Dai-chan despite bringing his C-game to the free skate.  Everyone watching thought that Dai-chan completed outskated Chan when the chips were down and that the only question was whether Chan's huge lead from the short program would hold up against Dai-chan's onslaught.  Instead....  Well, just watch.  I still can't write about it....

First, Dai-chan's challenge:


Then, Chan's response:


Dai-chan wuz robbed, I tellz yuh!

Now let's hear the commentary in English, first for Takahashi:


Then, for Chan:


What do you think?

RIP Satoshi Kon

Just heard the news of Satoshi Kon's passing. After Hayao Miyazaki, he was probably my favorite anime director. From his contribution to the animated sf anthology Memories (1995) to his first feature film Perfect Blue (1997), to his 2 best movies, Millennium Actress (2001) and Tokyo Godfathers (2003), to the tv series Paranoia Agent (2004) and his last film Paprika (2006), he was nearly always pitch-perfect, mystifying, engrossing. He will be missed.

We Interrupt This U.S. Women's Open Week with...

...a boring update on my own game. Skip this if you want, but maybe checking my patterns will help you notice and analyze yours.

With onechan finally old enough to start playing a few holes with me several times this summer already (and more when she gets back from Japan), I'm trying to make a comeback to competitive golf. I'm playing the Utica City Amateur next week and trying to qualify for the New York State Men's Mid-Amateur in late August, both for the 1st time since 2004. So it'll be the 1st time I'm playing Utica's Valley View and Colgate University's Seven Oaks in the last 6 years, 2 courses I like a whole lot. Plus I'll be playing a Western NY NYSGA eClub event at Cornell University's course in mid-August (like Colgate's, a great Robert Trent Jones track!), which I haven't played since my college (DIII) golfing days.

In about a week, I'll have played more rounds this year than the previous 5 combined. I haven't been playing regularly enough to develop any consistency in any part of my game--I'm making fairly solid contact on most swings, but there are still more terrible ones than there oughtta be; I'm either on or off with my pitches and chips; and my putting still isn't where I want it to be--but I have played just often enough to spot some trends and compare my stats this season to those from the last decade and over my adult career.

Before I go further, though, I should mention that I'm a pretty small guy--5'6" and getting back under 150 this summer or bust!--so I don't hit the ball very far. With a lot of roll and the wind behind me, my longest drive this season has been maybe 275 and I've more typically been in the 245-260 range off the tee. I used to go to a 6-iron when I needed to carry the ball 150 yards and a pitching wedge for a 100-yard carry, but with the temperature changes and getting used to playing regularly again, I'm not as sure of my distances as I need to be. It doesn't really matter right now, as the course I play regularly--the Easiest Course in the World (tECitW)--is so hard (the ground, that is) and the wind is usually so up that it's like Oakmont or British Open conditions, where you're usually picking a landing spot well short of the green and trying to bounce/run it ionto the right half of the green with some kind of punch shot. But maybe I hit my 6-iron 155 now and my wedge 110. I think.

Anyway, with that brief background on what kind of player I am--a wannabe precision player, in my taxonomy--let me walk you through some of my key performance stats.

Greens in Regulation (GIR)
Last decade, I averaged 7.67 greens in regulation per round, which raised my career average (since 1994, when I started keeping this stat) to 7.36. This season I'm already averaging 8.35 GIR; I've already had several rounds with my GIR in the double digits. Turn those into percentages and compare them to the LPGA stats page for GIR rate, and you'll see why they're pros and I'm a barely-mediocre amateur, but that's still a big improvement for me and one I intend to focus on this season. That's partly because I can't count on my short game to save me yet when I miss greens, but mostly because I'm putting so well this season.

Putts per Green in Regulation (PPGIR)
Last decade, I averaged 1.936 putts per green in regulation, which actually brought my career average (since 1994, when I started keeping this stat) down to 1.946 PPGIR. Translation: I've been 1-putting barely more often than I've been 3-putting when I've hit greens in regulation in my last 13 seasons. Well, I'm happy to report that my PPGIR rate has already gone down to around 1.83 already this season. That's by far the lowest rate of my career, although in my 3 rounds last season I averaged 1.86 PPGIR and in my 9.5 in 1994 I averaged around 1.89. Looking back, I'm amazed at how bad this stat is, particularly because I consider myself to be a very good putter. My goal this season is to get my PPGIR rate down where the good LPGA touring pros are--somewhere below 1.80 (the great ones are trying to stay under 1.75 over the course of a season). Heck, all I need to do is avoid 3-putts and make my share of birdies, right?

Birdies per Round (BPR)
Well, there's the rub. My birdies per round rate has been simply horrible over my career (1.31) and last decade wasn't much better (1.39). My BPR rate is up to around 1.65 so far this season, but that's still ridiculously low for how many chances I've been giving myself. The Easiest Course in the World has very small greens, so you can pretty much hit them anywhere and have a good birdie chance--plus if you miss them in the right places, chip-ins or putts from the fringe aren't that hard to sink (or rather, they shouldn't be). This is the 1st week I've been something other than a once-a-week golfer, and I've been averaging 2 birdies per round in it (along with my 1st eagle since 2004!). That's still not so hot, as tECitW now has 3 very short par 5s (reachable in 2 shots even for me most days), 3 birdieable par 4s, and 1 short par 3 (of course my only hole in 1 in my life came with a 3-wood on the long 1!). Sure, it's a par-37 from the back tees that plays around 3325 yards, the fairways have been narrowed, the rough is actually a bit of a penalty for the 1st time since I've been playing there, and there's actually a pond now to the right of the 2nd reachable par 5's green. But let's face it: it's still super-easy, except when the wind gets strong (which is about half the time; we're not quite on Lake Erie, but we're still close). Bottom line: I should be able to put up respectable LPGA #s--approaching 3.00 BPR--on a course like that. And since I can't afford to play much away from tECitW, my overall BPR should still be well above 2.50 by the end of the season.

Scoring Average
Surprisingly, even with pretty much the best performance stats of my career in all these categories, my scoring average is significantly up this season (81.06 compared to 78.59 last decade and 79.68 over my career). The culprit is the usual gremlin that dogs weekend golfers: too many big numbers! The long par-4 7th--which doglegs gently left, tilting left to right a bit after the corner, with an elevated green surrounded by trees and protected by a monster that overhangs its entire left-front quadrant--is a typical trouble spot. The long par-3 9th is also traditionally a difficult par, as I'm hitting a 3-wood virtually all the time into a relatively small green that's exposed to the wind.

But the biggest difference this season has been on the 1st hole, which went from being a tough, long par 4 to a frustratingly difficult short par 5 from the blues because it narrows so tightly in the last 100 yards, with overhanging trees on the right and a new creek extension that gets in your head on the left. In the mid-summer in most seasons, I'd usually have a mid- or short-iron in my hands, and would even birdie the hole once in a while. Now, it's just long enough to make me have to go after my 1st drive of the day to have a chance of reaching it in 2 and just tight enough to give my normally-reliable fairway woods the hiccups when I do actually hit a good drive. When I don't, I haven't yet figured out what distance I like to lay up to, because the green has been getting harder and harder as the summer gets hotter and drier, so it's hard to keep the ball anywhere near a front pin (and it's always been a front pin this season!), no matter what club you have in your hands, particularly from bad lies in burned-out fairways. What I need to do is just play the 1st safe and hit all my approach shots to the middle of the green, but that's easier said than done on your 1st full swings of the day on a course without a driving range!

Still, it's not my long game that's caused most of my big numbers this season. It's my wedges. I've either been hitting them just as I envisioned them (about a third of the time) or I've been skulling them, hitting them thin, fluffing them, chunking them, misjudging them, and so on (for what feels like much more than 2/3 of the time!). This is a common problem for me early in the season, but it's only this week that I've had time to practice them. No real progress to report on that front, but I'm bound to improve. In mid-season form, my wedges are one of the real strengths of my game.

The other area I really need to improve on is to bring my practice-green run shots to actual course conditions. The only thing that kept me from breaking 80 today was a mental block on my chipping (combined with several awful lies from hardpan and such, greens that were like rocks and so burned out in places they were more like cement, and several approach shots that left me short-sided or in some other kind of compromised position). I'm pretty disappointed with my inability to hit any kind of recovery shot with any kind of consistency. If I miss the green in regulation, I'm feeling like anything can happen, rather than confident that I'll give myself a good chance to save par most of the time.

Putts per 9 Holes (PP9H)
And yet, what gives me some hope for the rest of the season is that even with all these short game woes, my putts per round rate is the best in my career (down to around 15.59 putts per 9 holes, .03 better than my best season, 2002, when I played 82 rounds!). My overall PP9H rates aren't at all representative of how good a putter I am--15.81 for the last decade and 15.87 for my career--which leads me to believe that the other parts of my short game have never been as good as I've believed them to be. Again, the comparison to the LPGA is telling: those with average short games or who hit a heck of a lot of greens in regulation there average around 15 PP9H; the really good ones (often those who are having trouble hitting greens by tour standards, but not always) get it down close to 14 PP9H.

The long and the short of it is that my short game is letting me down, my approach shots are nowhere near as accurate as they need to be, and my driver is too inconsistent to allow me to attack the holes that need attacking on any kind of regular basis. The end result is that I can play great for a stretch--like when I went eagle-birdie-par-par-birdie midway through my first 9 yesterday--or play truly awful golf--like the +5 I was on the surrounding 4 holes that side.

So that's where my game stands in week 1 of my 6-week experiment as to how good a golfer I can make myself into while my wife and girls are in Japan. I'd love to hear if you're going through anything similar to what I'm going through--and what you're doing to address your own issues on the course!

William Benzon, 1912-1998: He Went Out Swinging and Smooth Shaven

My father, William Benzon, was born on Jan. 31, 1912 in Baltimore, MD, and died November 21, 1998 in Allentown PA. His parents were Danish immigrants. For about the first sic years of his life he lived with his parents and two older sisters, Karen and Signe, on Curtis Bay in Baltimore in a house which had formerly been a yacht club. The family then moved to Longwood St. He attended Boy's Latin School and, according to his high school year book, was regarded as an intellectual and as the 2nd brightest in his class. He was on the boxing, fencing, and football teams and his favorite expression was "Well blow me down."

He did two years at the University of Virginia, where he managed to run up gambling debts that his father had to satisfy. He completed his college education at Johns Hopkins, graduating in 1934 with a degree in chemical engineering. He then went to work for Bethlehem Steel (initially at Sparrows Point) where he spent his entire career. He entered their "loop" program which was for hotshot college graduates they wanted to nurture. I don't what his initial duties were or how he ended up in the mining division of the company (Bethlehem Mines Corp.). He spent most of his career there and rose to Superintendent of Coal Preparation, a position that was created for him. He stayed in that post until his retirement in 1974. He continued to consult on coal preparation after retirement.

Early in his career he moved to Johnstown Pa. where Bethlehem Mines had its headquarters. There he met my mother, Elizabeth Tredennick, and married her in 1940. I was born in 1947 and my sister in 1951.

What was he like?

He was a brilliant man, attaining an international reputation in his field, coal preparation. He was also a loving father, expressing his love in various ways, including making some very fine things for me and my sister. He made furniture for my sister’s dolls, a high chair, and a very elegant play pen with the letters of the alphabet cut into the slats. He made me a gorgeous Indian headress – feathers of various kinds, ermine tails, abalone shell ornament, a beaded head band – and various swords and knives etc. as appropriate for various Halloween costumes. He encouraged my sister and me in whatever we wanted to do. When I went off to Hopkins and grew long hair, a beard and mustache, that was OK. And so was going to graduate school in something as impractical as English literature. When, as an adult I needed to borrow money from him because I was out of work, he loaned me money (even after he had retired and was obviously living on a fixed income). He never ever suggested that I "face reality" and move into the corporate world, etc. He knew my intellectual work was important and helped me pursue that, as he has helped my sister pursue her interest in poetry.

He was an intellectual and books were important to him; he had many of them, including many he inherited from his father. I remember a number of Christmas seasons where he read Dickens' A Christmas Carol to the family after dinner on a number of evenings. And he certainly read stories to me before bed as a child – I remember him reading me from Mark Twain, Rafael Sabatini, and others. I was particularly struck by his ability to read dialog so naturally, with expression, like people would actually have said it. He spent a great deal of time helping me and my sister with our homework. He never just told me answers or worked problems. He always asked questions designed to lead me to the answers myself.

My father had an excellent sense of humor, which he slyly attributed to his Danish heritage. He loved Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and one Jerome K. Jerome, and the Marx Brothers. He was also quite fond for Victor Borge. For one thing, Borge was from Denmark, where his parents were born and raised. Borge's humor was often of a linguistic nature, and my father was interested in language (he owned books by Otto Jesperson, the Danish scholar of the English language, and H. L. Mencken). Borge was a musician and much of his humor involved committing mayhem on various pieces of classical and not-so-classical music.

An Athlete - Golf

He was a good and dedicated athlete. Beyond his high-school sports he was also an excellent swimmer and loved the sea. As an adult he was a cyclist (mostly in his youth, in Baltimore and in his early days in Johnstown) and, above all, golf. 

He took up the sport as an adult and pursued it passionately. During his prime – say from 30 though 55 – he had a single digit handicap, even as low as two or three. He kept systematic notes about his game throughout his entire golfing career. One winter he painted golf balls in red nail polish and golfed in the snow. He experimented with putters he either built himself or modified from putters he'd bought. He also had ideas about custom golf shoes which he half-way finished (my sister and I found the half-completed shoes in the basement).

One of the highlights of his life was playing golf at St. Andrews in Scotland (he shot 81 on one round). He read a great deal about the sport, knew its history backwards and forwards, and had a good collection of golf books, including a classic written by a relative of Charles Darwin. It is absolutely clear to me that, as I use music to balance out my intellectuality, so my father used golf to achieve balance in his life.

Stamps

My father was an avid stamp collector, with particular interests in Canada, Liberia, Germany, and China. He loved the look of stamps, their design (line, color, shape, form, etc.), but also what they told about history and society. Stamps were his vehicle for encountering and organizing human history. Stamps commemorate individuals, events, ideas, and so forth, and thus tell the history of the nations that issue them. All of that was important to my father.

As was the craft of collecting itself. Used stamps are, of course, stuck on envelopes. They have to be separated from the envelope before they can be mounted in books. So my rather spend hours doing that. He had special chemicals, magnifying glasses, balances, tweezers, hinges etc. all relevant to the physical preparation of the stamps. He had books about stamps, and catalogues. He engaged in extensive correspondence with various stamp dealers, some he had come to know on an all but personal basis, even though he'd never met them. Over the years he'd developed relationships with them though the simple and cumulative acts of buying stamps.

Professional Life

In his professional life by father was awareded three patents for ideas he came up with about coal preparation. Bethlehem Steel used coal as fuel in smelting the iron out of iron ore. However, coal typically is laced with impurities, generally rock and sulfur compounds. It was my father's job to design the plants that separated coal from these various impurities. He traveled to Holland to learn techniques the Dutch had invented and introduced these techniques into this country.

His job required him to go into coal mines, where he developed sympathy with the coal miners. He came to feel that anyone with responsibility for making decisions about the operation of coal mines needs experience in working in coal mines in some way in order to understand what was at stake. (How many BP managers have worked on off-shore oil rigs?) Though he spent his professional life among managers, he was unsympathetic to managers who didn't understand how brutal manual labor could be.

Politically he was a Democrat when most of his professional colleagues were Republican. I can remember him telling me about how he and his colleagues were under pressure from the company to contribute to the Republican party and how Bethlehem discouraged its employees from buying foreign cars (he bought a Volkswagen in the mid-sixties because it was a good and economical car). I suspect this is why he was sympathetic to my anti-war activities.

Back to his professional life, he spent good deal of time explaining his work to me, which I enjoyed a great deal. I am proud of what he did and feel that he never got the credit he deserved.

He Went Out Swinging

And so we are brought to his death. He died in style.

He had gone into the hospital to have his bladder removed as treatment for cancer. The surgery went well, but he got blood poisoning afterward and that resulted in a badly swollen colon. A gastroenterologist attempted to scope out his colon and to relieve some of the gas that had built up. The colon was so badly inflamed, however, that they couldn't insert the endoscope deeply enough to relieve any gas; there was a threat that attempting to do so would perforate the colon. The gastroenterologist thought there was little chance that even the aggressive antibiotic therapy they were using would be successful; the colon was too badly inflamed. My father’s only hope was to remove the colon. He decided against the surgery.

I don't really know why he decided against the surgery. By that time his lungs were so burdened with water that he could talk only with great difficulty. When asked, for the 3rd, 4th, or 5th time in a period of several hours, whether or not he wanted surgery or whether he wanted to die he said, in a commanding tone, "I want to go." When a young pastoral intern came by to talk he asked her to "pray for my family" – he was clearly thinking of my mother, for he was not himself a religious man. When I asked, with very practical and mundane considerations on my mind, whether there was anyone he wanted to handle the liquidation of his stamp collection he was able to tell me "William Weiss, he's in the phone book." That's all he was able to say, so there was no possibility of extended discussion about why he preferred to die.

When he went in for the bladder surgery he knew that, when it was over, he would have to have a bag attached to his abdomen and empty it on a regular basis. My sister tells me that he had a great deal of difficulty facing up to this prospect but he decided to undergo the surgery. A successful colonoscopy would required at least three months for recovery, a difficult three months, after which he would be able to return to an almost normal life. He wouldn't have been able to lift anything over 20 pounds and, of course, he would have another bag, this one for feces. He decided, somewhat to my sister's surprise, that he didn't want the surgery.

My guess, then, is that he didn’t want the reduced quality of life he would have had, nor did he want to impose a burden on my mother that she could not handle (she had Alzhimer’s). He had lead a rich, full life, and was going to die some day. Why not now?

Given that there was to be no surgery, one more decision had to be made. Dad was on very aggressive medication, perhaps six IV drips of one sort or another. Did it make any sense to continue this therapy in the unlikely hope that a miracle would happen and the infection would clear up? Or would it be better to stop the medication and allow him to die with less fuss and clutter? We discussed this with the surgical resident on duty and decided to stop all the medication except the antibiotics and to allow him a morphine drip to make him more comfortable.

And it was done.

When, later that day, my sister, my mother, and me returned to the hospital, Dad was restless and tossed and turned quite a bit. Both my sister and I asked him whether or not he was uncomfortable and he indicated that he was not. One time when I asked him how he felt he just shrugged his shoulders and looked at me as if to say, "How should I know how I feel, I've never done this before." One thing he did, and it was quite striking, was to clasp his hands together and move them together over his right shoulder and then down to his waist. He seemed to be practicing his golf swing.

By this time the the morphine drip had began to relax him. Figuring we might have to be here all night, my sister, mother, and I went to the waiting room to rest. When we returned the nurse to his room, Gino, a nurse, was shaving him. Gino told us that he'd asked Dad if he wanted a shave and Dad indicated that he did. Dad had enough presence of mind to move his chin and cheeks to cooperate with the shave. Then he simply went to rest. About 10 minutes or so after that he'd died.

He went out swinging and smooth shaven.

Free Fall

Episode 3 of 2001 Redux: A Toy Odyssey

In the last episode Kongsan and Jumpsan had gone into space to investigate the Green Box over Citytown. At the end they were watching the mysterious box change colors.

“Hey, look,” said Jump, “now it’s beginning to twist and spin.”

“It sure is,” said Kong. “I wonder what it’s up to.”



“Now it’s changing color, again,” said Jump.

“Yeah, it’s blue and purple.”



“And it’s spinning faster and faster. It doesn’t look like a box at all.”

“No, it’s all twirly and swirly,” said Kong.

“And whirly too! And now it’s green!”



“I wonder if it’s going to do all the colors of the rainbow?” asked Jump.

“I don’t know,” said Kong, “but it’s going faster and faster and faster and now it’s yellow.”



“Wow, this sure is interesting. I wonder what’s going to happen next?”

No sooner did Jumpsan ask the question, than a mysterious force began to draw her and Kong out of their spaceship and into deepest space. The deepest and coldest space ever! Brrrrrr!



“What’s going on?” asked Kong. “What’s happening to us?”

“I don’t know, but it sure is scary,” said Jumper. And Jumper was right. It was scary. And now they began to spin too.



And so Jumpsan and Kong began spinning and tumbling in space. Down and down and around and around and over and under and sideways, glideways, rideways, always. All ways they went, tumble tumble tumble.



They kept falling and falling. They were both scared. Their hearts were beating thumpa thumpa thumpa thump thump thump, thumpa thumpa thumpa thump thump thump, thumpa thumpa thumpa thump thump thump . . . But they didn’t give up. They thought about each other and all their friends and they even thought about Coco and Nila, the brave little girls who saved Gojochan and Sparkychan. Pretty soon they saw a strange planet.



And still, they kept falling. “It’s a pretty planet,” thought Kong. “It’s a pretty planet,” thought Jump. And still they fell. And then they got separated. Kong couldn’t see Jumper, and Jumper couldn’t see Kong.

Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear! Pretty soon Kong heard a little voice: “Kong, this is Nila, friend of Gojochan and Sparkychan. Be brave and you’ll be OK.”

So Kong was brave and he kept falling. It was scary. But it was good, too. It felt all light and tingly.



Oh me! Oh my! Oh me! Oh my! Jumper heard a little voice at the very same time: “Kong, this is Coco, friend of Gojochan and Sparkychan. Be brave and you’ll be OK.”

And Jumper was brave, very brave. It was scary. But it was good and tingly too.



And pretty soon Jumpsan landed in the woods near a patch of berries.



“Hmmm, I feel OK. Two legs, two arms, yes, got those,” said Jump as she counted her arms and legs. “Got my tail, got my eyes, got my nose and ears and mouth and tummy and . . . I got everything. I’m OK. But where’s Kong? I hope he’s OK.”

Pretty soon Kong landed in the woods on a green leafy plant.



Plop! Just so, it was a soft landing. “Got my legs, and arms, and toes and nose.” Said Kong. “Got my tummy and my eyes and my ears and my tail and . . . . I got everything. I’m OK. But where’s Jumper? I hope she’s OK.”

And so there they were, Jumper and Kong, on a strange planet. Both were OK. They listened to Coco and Nila and were brave. But they were also lost. Kong didn’t know where Jumper was, and Jumper didn’t know where Kong was. How would they find each other?

Kids Rock

In the second half he plays the blues:



A little country blues:



Connie faces the judges with "Over the Rainbow" – get out the facial tissue:



A little piano for you: