Guccifer 2.0 Google Search Result Weirdnesses

How is it possible that a few posts scattered here at Mostly Harmless and on some of my other blogs last night led to their being more easily findable on google than anything Studio Dongo has posted on Guccifer 2.0 over the last several weeks?  Anyone who understands google search algorithms better than me, please feel free to respond!

Recommended Reading: The Tale of T-Joh and the Unicorn Onesie

Teaser:  Vicky Hurst named Tiffany Joh's unicorn onesie "Sir Cherry Bon Bon" and T-Joh wore it everywhere in the Bahamas.

Read all about it and weep (from laughter).  Just don't pull out your eyebrow hairs.

So Who Won the Super Bowl?

So I'm here in Albany for my union's delegate assembly and had to go to bed early because I'm driving across the state this morning to make it back for my university's senate meeting.  Got up early to finish writing a letter of recommendation for an awesome student for a system-wide award and just realized I don't even know who won the Super Bowl.  How awful is that?

Merry QSMS from Mostly Harmless!

QSMS is of course how onechan first tried to spell Christmas.  Speaking of which, we don't celebrate it in this Jewish-Buddhist-not-very-religious Constructivist household--and imoto doesn't like it.  So she hung up one of her socks by the fireplace and tried to stay up for Santa as long as she could.  I was glad for the company while I was up grading (she was paging through some Simpsons comic books I took out from the local library until they put her right to sleep, but before that we had a fun discussion on whether Santa is real).

Ah, I should call it a night so I'm fresh for Mongolian buffet for dinner tonight!  Hope your Christmas is going to be as awesome as ours....

Will the U.S. Women's Open Jinx Cost Inbee Park Player of the Year?

That the U.S. Women's Open jinx exists--and that it's many orders of magnitude worse than the Mostly Harmless jinx--is beyond question.  Just ask Hilary Lunke or Birdie Kim.  Even better, ask Eun-Hee Ji and Paula Creamer.  Ji won in 2009 for her 2nd LPGA career victory--and is still waiting for #3.  Creamer won it the very next year at Oakmont very soon after returning to action after surgery--and hasn't won since on the LPGA.  Even So Yeon Ryu and Na Yeon Choi, USWO winners in the next 2 years, went through little dry spells before returning to the winner's circle (although Choi's was probably the shortest on record!).  Heck, even Annika took 10 years to win her third USWO after winning it twice in a row in the mid-'90s.

Inbee Park understands the USWO jinx very well, having fallen victim to it very early in her LPGA career.  She made the USWO her 1st LPGA victory in 2008, went through a drought that lasted until the Evian in 2012, and most recently won it again for her 9th career win on the LPGA, her 3rd major and 3rd win in a row, and her 6th in 2013.  And she's been stuck on those numbers ever since.  It's not just that she's been a little bit off.  Nor has she been uniformly terrible.  She's been all over the place.  But her only good finishes since then have been a top 10 on the KLPGA, a top 3 in China, and a runner-up finish last Sunday again on the KLPGA.  In other words, only 1 of her 3 good finishes since winning the 2013 USWO have netted her any serious points in the LPGA's Player of the Year race.  That's a 1 for 8 top-10 rate since the USWO win, as opposed to an 8 for 13 rate up to it in 2013 (12.5% vs. 61.5%).  In short, those 4 top 10s that Inbee didn't get since the USWO could have virtually locked up the POY race for her (depending on how high she would have finished).

But that's in the past.  The issue now is how to break the USWO jinx.  Given that NYC beat the jinx by winning the CME Titleholders in the same year she won the USWO, my advice for Inbee is to shadow her for a couple of weeks and really pick her brain.  Either that, or hang out with Eun-Hee Ji and Paula Creamer a lot and hope her jinx is swallowed up by theirs.  The good news is, Inbee has overcome the jinx before, so maybe she's developed a resistance to it.  All I know is, she doesn't have 4 years to get out from under it.  More like less than 4 weeks!

The Golf Gods, They Are Jealous Gods

I'm telling you, it seems like every time The Constructivist Family is about to take one of our patented road trips/pilgrimages to the site of a major international skating competition lately, my body betrays me.  This past spring, an awful stomach bug had me doubled over in pain and dazed for most of the World Figure Skating Championships.  And now this morning, I tweaked my back at the gym so bad that I had to shamble/shuffle/limp/grimace my way through the last day of work before the start of our fall break, which The Full Metal Archivist, onechan, imoto and I will be enjoying in scenic Detroit while we occupy Skate America.

All I can say is, thank you very much, golf gods.  It's not enough that you torment me on the course and deploy the Mostly Harmless jinx against my favorite golfers--no, now you also have to go and punish me for following Daisuke Takahashi and Mao Asada and the rest of the skaters there for a few days!  I get it:  the way the Skate America schedule works out, I'll probably be able to watch only the final round of this week's LPGA/KLPGA tournament, and probably only part of it at that--and that's only if the hotel we switch to on Sunday has Golf Channel.  So I guess I deserve this lower back pain and stiffness by some sick, twisted logic--you know, the kind you golf gods specialize in.

But hear this, o ye golf gods:  we splurged for all-access tickets and, by gum, we shall use them!  We're cutting through Canada early tomorrow morning and plan to be in the Joe Louis Arena by noon!  It's not like I've broken my back like American skater Max Aaron did a few years ago....

Blazing Saddles and Transatlantic Postmodernism

[Note to my regular readers who come here for women's golf coverage:  I'm airing Mel Brooks's 1974 film Blazing Saddles tonight as part of SUNY Fredonia's American Studies film series "Myths of the American West," so decided to share a draft of my opening comments here at Mostly Harmless (which is, after all, "for fun").  I'm aware of the 5-car collision that has lead to my favorite golfer Ai Miyazato withdrawing from this week's LPGA event (and onechan's favorite Paula Creamer being a likely WD candidate) and obviously wish them and everyone else involved in it a full and speedy recovery.]

[Note to my non-regular readers who are coming here after watching Blazing Saddles (or missing it):  Hope you enjoy this post and are curious enough after reading it to browse around for other posts here that you may find interesting!]

I was four years old when Blazing Saddles was first released in American theaters and until Shannon McRae--the director of American Studies at SUNY Fredonia and organizer of the program's film series "Myths of the American West"--took seriously my half-joking suggestion to include it in the series and invited me to introduce it, I had never seen it in its entirety until this month.  In a semester when I'm teaching American Identities, Introduction to African American Literature and Culture, and Critical Reading, I'm particularly pleased to take Shannon up on her kind offer, and offer a few comments as a new viewer of a movie that's been well-known (even to me) for decades, comments that will hopefully be as useful to students in my classes this semester as everyone else who braved the rains to make it out here tonight.

Growing up, I put Blazing Saddles in the mental category of comedies too raw for me to watch, a remarkably capacious category that in the '70s and too far into the '80s included everything from Monty Python to Mad magazine to Saturday Night Live to just about every famous stand-up comedian of the time.  If this reference helps people place where I was at, probably Benny Hill was the rawest thing I got access to before graduate school.  Yes, I grew up in a small town in central NY and failed to take advantage of 2nd grade in Palo Alto and 7th grade in Chapel Hill.  Nevertheless, I was obsessed with everything comical and comics-al.  In high school I started a cartoon series called The Gray Area that, despite its being far too derivative of The Far Side, was seen, nay loved, by regular readers of the Pennysaver and other fine local publications for far too many weeks.  Me, I loved everything from Gilligan's Island to Scooby Doo, from Diff'rent Strokes to The Facts of Life, from Benson to Newhart, from Doctor Who to The Greatest American Hero, from Airplane! to Ghostbusters, from The Muppet Show to The Tracey Ullman Show, from Tom and Jerry to Rocky and Bullwinkle (in reruns, duh) to Calvin and Hobbes to Mork and Mindy, from any DC comic Ambush Bug appeared in (even though I was almost exclusively a Marvel fan) to the animated version of The Tick.  Sure, I hated the Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but otherwise I was pretty easy to please.  And I was a fan of The Simpsons before The Simpsons was The Simpsons, man!  (It goes without saying from the title of this blog what my favorite was, though!)

All of which is to say that when I go to grad school in the early 1990s I was perfectly primed to understand and appreciate what many still misunderstand and denigrate even today as a French theoretical import:  postmodernism.  As someone who saw The Simpsons parody of the end of The Graduate long before I ever saw The Graduate, who loved it when Beavis and Butt-head were watching a Johnny Cash video and decided it was gangsta rap, and who came of age in a hip hop culture rife with allusion and remixing and pastiche, I didn't have to think twice about Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of "incredulity toward metanarratives" as a core characteristic of postmodernism.

So it's all too easy and obvious now for me to look back at Blazing Saddles and see it as yet another exemplar of American postmodernism.  It's certainly not an original point to make, as a quick google search will show you (I recommend posts by Mark Bourne and Mike Sutton on this aspect of the movie).  But what is originality, anyway?  Just another stinkin' metanarrative--right, JFL?  Perhaps it's slightly more original to claim that Mel Brooks and Monty Python were engaged in a transatlantic comedic one-ups-man-ship that was perfectly postmodern.  In the same way that Brooks and his co-writers, including Richard Pryor, were playing with myths of the American west and poking fun at founding narratives of the modern United States, Monty Python was taking on English legends of the Holy Grail and western icons of Christianity--and at roughly the same time.  Check me on this.  And, as you watch Blazing Saddles tonight, consider some of the debates over postmodernism that occupied so many western intellectuals in the last third of the 20th century:  is postmodernism all sound and fury, signifying nothing?  is it, in the final analysis, the laugh track of late capitalism? are its politics of race and gender and sexuality and [fill in the blank] reactionary, liberatory, laughable, nostalgic, or what? is postmodernism a thing of the past, and if so, how do we react to it today (and what comes after that post-?) if not, if we are still living in and with postmodernism, what does Blazing Saddles compare to in contemporary and recent culture?

There's so much more to be said--about what light Blazing Saddles may shed on black-Jewish relations in the late civil rights era, for instance--but I think it ought to wait until after the movie.  Don't you?

Editor's Note: A profile of Yani Tseng appears on pg. 74.

Man, those editors at Golf Magazine are quick with the comebacks!  After LPGA Commissioner Mike Whan politely but resolutely roasted their ridiculous decision to name Rory McIlroy their Player of the Year instead of everyone's obvious choice, Ya Ni Tseng, they responded with the bon mot that I took for my title.

I can come up with several ways of slicing the tone of that little note.  What do you got?

• Move-it-along-nothing-to-see-here just-the-facts blaseness:  "[Whistling casually] Thank you for your letter.  Can we interest you in our table of contents?" 
• Embarrassed defensiveness: "Hey, we screwed up, we know, but at least we mentioned her in this issue, right? Right? Come on, you guys, stop being so harsh on us!  ....Please?"
• Brazen arrogance: "Yeah, Ya Ni had a pretty good year.  Not a Player of the Year year.  A pg. 74 year.  Siddown and shaddup, Commish!"

I'm leaning toward the last reading, given that the one line from the letter they chose to blow up in a graphic--"Yani certainly doesn't need me--or anyone else--to validate her position"--seems to suggest that Whan didn't need to write the letter and they didn't need to award her the POY.

Nicely done, editors of Golf Magazine.  Well played!

[Update 1 (12/19/11, 4:30 pm):  Armchair Golf has picked up this story; instead of focusing on the editors' anemic response, Neil summarizes Whan's letter and adds in telling supporting evidence that Whan didn't cite (like the fact that 96% of those Golf Magazine polled on Facebook thought Ya Ni should be POY!).]

Not a Golf Ball

A Mostly Harmless Putting Tip for the 4th of July

Just got back from fireworks at Orchard Park Middle School--quite the scene!--and was tinkering around with my putting on the actually-pretty-fast carpet in our living room, and I may have figured out something cool. Here it is:

Problem: I tend to be a feel putter, who likes to set up correctly, pick as precise a target as possible, and just trust my body to get the ball to it. (That trust is partly the product of 1000s of putts on The Rail--a metal-yardstick-type training device--during winters in western NY from the late '90s to the early '00s, but that's another story.) Lately, however, I've been overthinking my putts. I'm getting too aware of what different body parts are doing during my stroke and trying to control the putter face too much in the midst of the stroke. I haven't trusted my lines and have started trying to steer the ball into the hole instead of just rolling it toward my target. In particular, I've been having a lot of trouble while getting ready to pull the trigger to begin my putting stroke with quieting my mind and trusting my body.

Solution: A new pre-putt routine and a new triggering image. Yes, "image"--not words. What I was doing tonight is looking very closely at my target and trying to identify a specific point on it that I'm aiming for. Once I've established that point, I try to keep a clear image of it in my head as I move my eyes from it back to the ball. Once my eyes get to the ball, I start my stroke. Look, visualize, putt. Very simple.

Results: The difference between last night and this one was amazing. I was missing all over the place yesterday, overcompensating like crazy from putt to putt. I was pushing, pulling, you name it, even when I tried the exact same putt over and over. Tonight, I was making everything I was looking at. And I was putting from a different length and angle each time. Even my misses were closer and the pace of my putts was better. I'd say I went from making less than 40% of the 8- to 10-footers I was practicing yesterday to over 80% tonight.

Caveats: Every putt I tried tonight was relatively straight. I haven't figured out the breaks in the new house to my satisfaction, but whichever way the ball was curving on a given putt, it wasn't more than an inch over those 10 feet. So this visualization trigger may just work on short and straight putts. I have to take it to a putting green to see how well it transfers to different kinds of putts, particularly those where the line is dependent on the speed.

Tentative Conclusions: That said, I have to say I'm really excited about this new pre-putt/trigger routine. I was big into The Inner Game of Golf as a teenager and I like to think what I've come up with is in tune with that book's advice. Maybe what the looking/targeting part of the routine does is force you to use the part of your brain that handles aiming without you actually having to do any calculus yourself. Maybe focusing on the visualization part--along with the standardized/automatic nature of the actual trigger itself--serve to keep your verbal/intellectual consciousness quiet and keep the right parts of the brain active in that crucial fraction of a second before you start your putting stroke.

OK, so this is starting to sound like Zen and the Art of Getting the Little White Ball in the Damn Hole even as I'm writing it, but I really do think if you have a putter you trust, if you know how to take a stance that's comfortable to you and helps you keeps your eyes over the ball and your head still during the stroke, and if you've practiced that stroke over and over and over with something like The Rail that gives exaggerated feedback on the effects of even very tiny mistakes, then you really can be very zen. As some band once said, "I don't think so!" And if this routine helps you not think but "use the force," I think it may help your putting. I'll let you know if it helps mine!

The Mostly Harmless Tiffany Joh Interview

Tiffany Joh's been on a roll lately, with a silver on the Futures Tour, a top 25 at the Wegmans LPGA Championship, and now a gold in her return to the FT this week. I've already written about Amy Yang, Joh's playing partner at Locust Hill last Sunday, so it's about time I put together my observations of the same 15 holes I followed T-Joh for--along with a transcript of our post-round interview. You know, before the U.S. Women's Open starts?

OK, just as Yang's final round was filled with mightabeens, T-Joh's Sunday was sabotaged by the same club that held back her playing partner: her putter. As you can see from her scorecard, she hit the most fairways and greens in her week that day, but also took by far the most putts (31 as opposed to 26 the previous 3 rounds). Even so, she would have had a solid 72 were it not for the par-5 17th that Yang eagled--and just missed double-eagling. Joh had put her drive in the right fairway bunker, hit her layup a hair too far and ended up in the thick rough 25 yards or so short of the green, and had time to get near it while Yang waited for the green to clear so she could go for it in 2. The upshot was that Joh had a perfect angle on Yang's approach, which looked from our angle (210 yards away and unable to see the front of the green) that it was drifting dangerously right of where she had aimed, but in actuality just carried the front-right trap, took a great kick, hit the stick, and almost ended up in the hole. As Yang and her caddie were walking up the fairway, T-Joh was holding her hands up in the air a few inches apart. Although I could tell that Yang was excited (for her), T-Joh was probably the most excited person of the hundreds who witnessed the shot. And she paid for it when she got around to playing her pitch. She caught it heavy, leaving it in the trap, then caught that shot heavy, leaving it in the rough short of the green, then put her chip 2 feet away and watched helplessly as her very-slightly push-firmed tap-in did a 270 and spun out, leaving her with her 1st over-par hole since the 3rd, a 4-shot-swing-with-Yang double bogey! (T-Joh had battled her way back to tied with Yang through 16, despite not being nearly as precise with her irons or as long off the tee all day....)

Talk about deflating: after missing a number of great birdie chances from the 4th through 14th holes (if I remember correctly, on the 4th, 5th, 8th, 10th, 11th, and 12th), she had finally gotten one to drop on the par-3 15th--a big breaker from the lower tier, 25 feet short of the pin--then made a great par save on the tricky par-4 16th from left trees off the tee and right trees short of the green, thanks to a tough 8-foot downhill slider after a miracle pitch from Deadsville. Even so, she bounced back with a par on the monster 18th and finished the week T25, 4 shots out of the top 10, 3 behind Yang, tied with fellow Futures Tour sensation Pornanong Phatlum, and 2 behind 2010 FT Player of the Year and money-list leader Cindy LaCrosse, who had an even tougher Sunday in the final pairing with Ya Ni Tseng. The gap between the freewheeling, go-for-broke T-Joh I followed on a Sunday last July and the tactical T-Joh I witnessed last Sunday could not have been starker (although her final round in Rochester was more like her moving day in Syracuse). But I have to say that her 74 at Locust Hill was light-years more impressive than her 70 and 72 at Drumlins East.

So even though T-Joh hasn't been lighting the LPGA on fire in her rookie season and she probably has a better chance to keep her card via the Futures Tour top 5 than the LPGA top 80, given that she didn't qualify for the U.S. Women's Open and is running out of full-field events to play in the rest of the season (she's currently #84 on the LPGA money list and #3 on the FT money list), she has been learning how to bring her Futures Tour game to the big leagues and making good progress in the process. And like Morgan Pressel and Mika Miyazato, she was in a very good mood when I interviewed her after her round Sunday. Here's the transcript, as best as I can reproduce the rhythm of the actual interchange:

THE CONSTRUCTIVIST: Was this your first LPGA major?

TIFFANY JOH: Um, Mostly Harmless Golf, huh? [half-chuckles.] Yeah, um, this is my third major, second as a pro, so...

TC [interrupting]: U.S. Opens?

T-JOH: Yeah, I played at Oakmont last year and I played in the Kraft as an amateur when I was, like, a senior, so....

TC: All right, well, how does this course compare to Oakmont? Let's start with that.

T-JOH: Um...well [weighing her words]...Oakmont's definitely...it was a little bit firmer, it was a little bit more intimidating and daunting. This course, I've heard stories about from last year, and supposedly the rough is not nearly as penalizing as it was last year--and I thought it was kinda penalizing. [laughs] Yeah, I mean, Oakmont was definitely...very--I think I shot, like, 84 one of the days [laughs at herself], and it felt like I shot 75. I was...

TC: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

T-JOH: Um, it was, uh...I can't, you can't really compare two courses--it's like, you can't say which kid you love more, you know? [laughs]

TC [laughs geekily, then stops abruptly]: Well, then, I'm actually going to ask you to make another comparison, then, back to Drumlins...

T-JOH: Um-hmm?

TC: ...East....

T-JOH: Drum-lins East...

TC: Syracuse last year.

T-JOH: Ohhh, yeah.

TC [joking]: It's just like that week: you were chasing Cindy [LaCrosse], you were chasing Cindy today...

T-JOH: [laughs] ...Yeah! Except...

TC: ...Pornanong [Phatlum] was in the mix...

T-JOH: ...you know, except both times it was, like, a futile chase. [laughs]

TC: [laughs]

T-JOH: Really, but--um, no, I love seeing the girls from the Futures Tour out here. It's nice to see some friendly faces...

TC: Um-hmm.

T-JOH: ...especially when you can get so easily intimidated by all the big guns out here.

TC [incredulous]: Really...? You...?

T-JOH: [chuckles modestly]

TC: Really?

T-JOH: Believe me!

TC: Women's Amateur Public Links champion...

T-JOH: [laughs]

TC: ...twice...

T-JOH: Yeah! [laughs]

TC: OK.

T-JOH [drily]: I get intimidated by my shadow sometimes.

TC: [laughs] Did you become a little bit of a spectator on 17 after Amy's shot?

T-JOH: Yeah, I went crazy!

TC: [laughs]

T-JOH: [laughs] Meanwhile, I'm, like, doubling it. [laughs] Sitting there, and I saw her...because I was up on the hill, like, walking to my ball, and I saw it just ram the pin, and then just, like, sit right there--

TC: You saw it all?

T-JOH: Yeah, and I looked back there and I'm trying to tell her that it's, like, this close [holds up her hands a few inches apart]--I'm sure that looked really inappropriate! [laughs]

TC: No, it was hilarious.

T-JOH: [laughs]

TC: Her caddie had to talk her into that shot, by the way--

T-JOH: Yeah?

TC: She was trying to lay up with a 4-iron. And he was like...

T-JOH: Yeah?

TC: ..."Come on, just hit the hybrid, just hit the hybrid!"

T-JOH: Yeah? Well, I mean, good thing she did. I was looking there and I was like [in fangirl voice], "It's this close!!" and she was looking at me like, "What are you doing?" [Ed. note: From my vantage point, it seemed like Yang was thrilled by and curious at the crowd's reaction to her shot. She and her caddie gathered it was close, but since none of us could see the green from where we were, we had no idea just how close it was. So it was both exciting and informative when Joh reacted the way she did. Kind of reminded me of Fuzzy Zoeller waving the white towel--to Greg Norman, wasn't it?--an eon ago....]

TC: [laughs] Was this week like an emotional roller coaster--I mean, like, your save on 16...

T-JOH: Yeah...

TC: ...was amazing, and then you go and do what you did on 17...

T-JOH: Yeah, well...

TC: ...and to recover on 18....

T-JOH: Yeah, well, I mean, I was telling my caddie, my day yesterday was pretty much the same, like...

TC: Really?

T-JOH: Yeah, I had like ten putts through the front nine and was like three-under and then made three bogeys....

TC [commiserating]: Yeah, I saw that...

T-JOH: ...almost consecutively, they were just right there.

TC: [groans]

T-JOH: And after, like, the round yesterday, I was, like, "Man, I feel like Phil Mickelson [laughs] at the Masters."

TC: [laughs]

T-JOH: All over the place. But, honestly, with how, you know, badly I hit the ball at some points this week, I'm really happy with the finish I had.

TC: Yeah.

T-JOH: Plus, I'm going to take a lot of experience out of this, so....

TC: Definitely. You were in the mix!

T-JOH [somewhat wistfully/mostly disbelievingly]: [laughs] Yeah...

TC: For a second! [laughs] For a second!

T-JOH: [laughs]

TC: Yeah, well, what Ya Ni was doing, outdoing Rory....

T-JOH: Yeah, just running laps around the field. [laughs]

TC: I mean, it's crazy. When you see somebody doing that, I mean, I saw Cristie [Kerr] do it last year...

T-JOH: Yeah?

TC: It just seems...like they're on another planet, or something.

T-JOH: Yeah, you just kind of sit there and just...watch, take it in, try to learn a few things. [laughs]

TC: When you started the day, were you thinking of second, or were you just thinking, play your own game, do what you do best....?

T-JOH: Honestly, I was just sittin' there, thinking, "Keep it in play today."

TC: Uh-huh?

T-JOH: "Please keep it in play!" And I did sometimes; sometimes I didn't. [laughs self-deprecatingly]

TC: Well, you had it going in the middle of the round.

T-JOH: Um-hmm.

TC: It felt like you really loosened up and relaxed a little...

T-JOH: Yeah, um-hmm...

TC: ...and you started to stick some shots...

T-JOH: Yeah.

TC: I remember on the Futures Tour Sunday, you were just...going wild aiming at pins--

T-JOH: Yeah-- [laughs]

TC: --from wherever, and I was, like, "Wow, she's playing a very...tactical game today."

T-JOH: It's funny, though, because normally, like, when I don't have a caddie, and I'm just, kinda, either I have a friend on the bag that doesn't know anything about golf or I'm just looping my own bag, I mean, I just have no clue what I'm doing. I just, you know, just hit the ball and go for everything. And when you have a caddie on the bag and he's like [in soothing, calm voice], "OK, you kinda wanna, like, err on the left side here," and you're like [aghast], "What?! [laughs] What?! What are you talking about?!" [laughs]

TC: That's true! Like, I kept asking you the last two years if you'd let me caddie for you, and you were like, "No, no, no..."

T-JOH: [laughs]

TC: "...it's ok, it's ok." But do you like--

T-JOH: I mean, I see green grass and a hole!-- [laughs]

TC: --do you like carrying your own bag better? Would you do it? [laughs]

T-JOH: I think, if they let us, I might. At the same time, I think I'd shoot, like, 900...

TC: [laughs]

T-JOH: [laughs]...carrying my own bag. But, I mean, Wayne, my caddie, has been great on the bag, he's been kinda--especially this course, where you have to stay below a lot of the pins, and he's all, like--there's been a couple of times where he's made me, like, lay way back, and I just glare at him...

TC: [laughs]

T-JOH: ...and then I get up there and make an easy par and so I'm, like [grudgingly], "OK, bye. You were right."

TC: Were you hitting a lot of 3-woods on the front? Or were you hitting driver consistently?

T-JOH: Um, I--any chance that I got, I was hitting 3-wood. Because my driver is--

TC: Oh, I was like, "Why is Amy always outdriving her?"

T-JOH: Yeah, my driver is a little scary right now, so... [laughs] ...so there were a lot of holes--

TC: 10--10 was not scary. 10 was nice!

T-JOH: [laughs]

TC [not letting it go]: That was sweet!

T-JOH: But, I mean, like, this course, it's just, you know, you play safe, um, safe golf, and then, you just try to give yourself as many opportunities as you can for birdie, so...um, it worked well for 17 of the holes! [chuckles]

TC: So you were in the hunt at a Futures Tour major last week...

T-JOH: Yeah!

TC: ...and now you come here--what's next for you?

T-JOH: Um, Futures Tour tournament in Indiana. Actually, I'm actually hopping in a car with a friend and we're gonna drive to Akron, Ohio, and play in a pro-am, and then...

TC [admiringly]: Crazy!

T-JOH: ...I'm gonna catch a ride--hitchhike my way to Indiana for the Futures Tour event [laughs], so....

TC [internal censor malfunctioning]: Holy shit.

T-JOH: It'll be fun, though! [laughs]

TC: Wow. And, then, are you going to come to Syracuse again, or...?

T-JOH: Yeah, I'll be there.

TC: Excellent!

T-JOH: Actually, that lady [who had been talking with her before our interview began] was my housing for Syracuse.

TC: Whoa, seriously? She came out all this way? [Ed. note: It's not much more than an hour, if that. What was I thinking?]

T-JOH: Yeah, apparently she came out and watched. Apparently she comes out every year to this tournament.

TC: That's awesome!

T-JOH: Yeah, she followed me all day and she was like, "I'll see you in a month!" And I was like, "Yeah, I'll see ya!" [laughs]

TC: That's great. Well, I'll see you in a month, as well.

T-JOH: All right, you'll be out there?

TC: Absolutely.

T-JOH: Cool! Thanks a lot!

Yup, I still have a lot of work to do on my interviewing technique! By the way, in T-Joh's defense against any who might object to her repetition of those interjections that I tried to transcribe faithfully above, it's clear when you listen to the audio that she was often using them to keep the conversational ball in her court, so to speak. Got to remember to stop stepping all over my interviewees' answers to my questions!

Seriously, I really appreciated how open and relaxed T-Joh was during the interview, which took more than 5 and a half minutes. As you can see, she's a really fun interviewee and her personality really comes through clearly. Here's hoping she brings a big winning streak to Syracuse at the end of the month!

[Update 1 (7/15/11, 8:09 am): Check out this recent LPGA Futures Tour interview with Joh, complete with a few of her music videos!]

Time to Check Your DVRs, Mostly Harmless Fans

Just finished watching the Golf Channel's coverage of the final round of the Wegmans LPGA Championship and as it was coming to a close I was joking with the Full Metal Archivist that I might show up soon. Well, if you're interested in the man behind the moniker, check out Rich Lerner's intro to the last profile of Ya Ni Tseng. That's me, The Constructivist, in the green shirt and black hat among the Japanese media in the background (they were interviewing Mika Miyazato and around that time I was wondering how low I could hold up my arm at audiotaping level). Oh, and if you have a big enough tv, you'll also be able to find me in the right fairway on 18 in the crowd shot after Ya Ni hit her approach shot and is walking toward the green. In fact, when they zoom in on her and she looks over to her right, nods, and raises her glove, she's acknowledging my cry of "-20, Ya Ni!" If that's my 3 seconds of fame, that's not too shabby!

[Update 1 (12:11 pm): I'm on youtube, too!



Don't blink!]

Pure Nonsense

As you might have read by now, the Constructivist has started a reoccurring feature reporting smaller golf stories that we may have missed. He has cleverly named this feature after the very popular soap opera As the World Turns.

Since weeks have passed without a single LPGA event to report on I thought I would take this time to have some fun with my fellow team member and give him a list of soap opera titles and relating stories that he should NEVER do a story on.

The Bold and the Beautiful – A fashion story focusing on stars like Paula Creamer and Natalie Gulbis, featuring what they are wearing on and off the golf course. (Anna Rawson, where are you when we need you most?)

The Young and the Restless - A report on the continued frustrations of players such as Kristy McPherson, Brittany Lang and Song Hee Kim who have yet to make it into the winner's circle.

Dallas – A report on the many places that the LPGA should be trying to get added to its schedule.

General Hospital – A weekly report detailing the status of swollen thumbs, bad backs, etc.

Dynasty – A report on the ongoing dominance of the LPGA in the Solheim Cup.

The Guiding Light – The story of what one PGA player needed as he quickly fell from grace.... Oops, wrong tour.

Days of Our Lives – Features different players as they tell their story of the grinding life of a LPGA player always on the road.

Desperate Housewives - An in-depth look at whatever happened to those players who have lost their tour cards.

Search for Tomorrow – The continuing saga of Commissioner Michael Whan’s trials and tribulations in lining up sponsors for the 2012 schedule.

Seven more days and counting to the Founders Cup and some real news to report on.

Golf Channel, Here I Come!

Today in history, the Constructivist family entered the 21st century. We've had high-speed internet since we got back from Japan but now we have it with Verizon, whose triple play deal means that we also have DirectTV (with a sweet HD DVR) and a home phone (VTec, of course!), plus we went in for a Sony Blu-Ray player (connected to our new 42" plasma Panasonic with the scariest of Monster HDMI cables) to supplement our old Sony DVD-VCR player. Golf Channel, here I come!

Now, some of you may be wondering, "Constructivist, how can you afford your rock and roll lifestyle?" Well, I'm happy to report that I'm starting a serious product placement initiative here at Mostly Harmless (see above). Other than that, I don't have a clue. Anyone out there in Blogaramaville got any ideas?

Japan 2011 Stylewatch: Soshoku Kei, Otomen, Gyaru-o, Chara-o, Sholita

Continuing a Mostly Harmless tradition of Japanese stylewatching for the New Year (Gackt, ikemen, and Jero in 2008, Hikaru Utada in 2009, Star Blazers in 2010), for 2011 I asked the Full Metal Archivist what Japanese trends might go viral this year. Her first idea was changing styles of masculinity, a kind of turn toward the feminine among younger Japanese men, which is interesting in itself but also in the reactions it has sparked at home and abroad. Not that this is all that new for 2011--from the moment I first set foot on a plane to Japan, I realized that my usual cues for reading male sexuality were not all that useful among Japanese men--but what is different is the media attention in the past couple of years devoted to tracking what is being framed as a generational shift in Japanese masculinity.

First, some quick definitions:

Soshoku Kei: This is the now-classic "herbivore/vegetarian" generational tag that started making the rounds in 2009. It resulted in a Japanese movie last year, which was part of a larger dialogue that even Newsweek picked up on, portraying soshoku-kei danshi (which they translated literally as "grass-eating men") as a symptom of Japan's economic malaise: "Toyota's fall from grace caps a 20-year economic malaise that is infecting the popular culture, manifesting itself in a preference for staying home, avoiding risk, and removing oneself from the hierarchical system." Heck, even a Carnegie Council writer put his 2 cents in!

To see for yourself what everyone's talking about, check out this clip from Cool Japan:



Compare CNN International's brief overview from mid-2009:



Otomen: OK, to understand what an otomen is, you 1st need to review the definition of an ikemen. So if an ikemen is a teen idol or male hottie, then an otomen is one with a hidden girlish side. For a drama that has about the same relationship to this social category as Douglas Coupland's Generation X has to the eponymous American generation, head on over to dramacrazy.net and watch the 12-episode J-drama Otomen. Me, I'm wondering if the 1st big musical number from Tangled (you know, the one set in the Snuggly Bunny), which imoto and onechan were brave enough to see in the theater last week (1st time evah in the U.S. for both!), is a parody of this Japanese phenomenon.

Gyaru-o, Chara-o, Sholita: I may be wrong, but I think of these as different styles of being an otomen, with the first being a kind of a male bimbo, the second more of a bad boy type, and the third projecting a kind of boyish "moe" vibe. Let's start with the last, for the super-cute character "Honey" from the anime Ouran High School Host Club is the perfect example. Skipping to the first, Patrick Macias provides two recent examples of how big an influence Ernest Hemingway's posthumous The Garden of Eden has had on female and male hostess/host culture in Japan. It's a little harder to find good examples of the sexier, wilder chara-o look, and Daisuke Takahashi doesn't usually sport it, but this image is what the Full Metal Archivist settled on after a while.

So there you have it. Maybe now you can understand what the Full Metal Archivist means when she sums me up as a "soshoku-kei shoujo manga otomen with no domestic skill." Yay! Happy New year, everyone!

When T-Joh Gets Bored, the World Is a Better Place

Tiffany Joh is making more music. Enjoy!



Glossary.

For an encore, here's the new version of her LPGA Christmas song.

[Update 1 (8:14 am): And for more on the Futures Tour grads, check out Happy Fan's overview.]

flora flora flora

Anyone Want to Give My Girls a Ride to Buffalo This Morning?

Anyone? See, they have Japanese school from 9-12 and then onechan has a violin lesson at 12:30. But the pairings for the 3rd round of the LPGA Championship have been moved up. And there are some players I'd love to follow, even though they're back in the pack.

Like, say,

Start Time: 7:20 AM
Mina Harigae
Christina Kim
Ai Miyazato

going off the 10th tee. OMG!

Or these folks going off the 1st:

Start Time: 7:00 AM
Brittany Lang
Ya Ni Tseng
Shanshan Feng

Start Time: 7:10 AM
Vicky Hurst
Mariajo Uribe
Paola Moreno

Not to mention the leaders:

Start Time: 8:20 AM
Seon Hwa Lee
Song-Hee Kim
Paula Creamer

Start Time: 8:30 AM
Ji-Yai Shin
In-Kyung Kim
Stacy Lewis

Start Time: 8:40 AM
Na On Min
Michele Redman
Azahara Munoz

Start Time: 8:50 AM
Amy Yang
Brittany Lincicome
Jimin Kang

Start Time: 9:00 AM
Cristie Kerr
Inbee Park
Mika Miyazato

If we're lucky, we might be able to make it to the 18th-hole grandstands to see a little bit of live action tomorrow. But more likely it'll be Sports Zone, driving range, hotel, pool. If I'm lucky, our hotel will get Golf Channel.... I'm assuming they'll show moving day tape-delayed from 4-7 pm as planned, but who knows?

A Slice of the Life of a Touring Pro at the Wegmans/LPGA Championship

Mika Miyazato interview 062210
Originally uploaded by the_constructivist18

Here's a picture I took right after my interview with Mika Miyazato came to a close yesterday morning at Locust Hill's media tent. The rain was drumming overhead, thunder was rumbling around us, and some of Japanese media waiting out the storm saw an opportunity to ask Mikan questions of their own. Or maybe her agent, Kie Ito, in the back right there had arranged for all her interviews to take place at the same time. All I know is that they came fashionably late, perhaps realizing that they had originally scheduled the interview at the exact same time Michelle Wie's press conference was to take place.

If I had been smart, I would've asked the journalists' permission to tape their interviews and find out from the Full Metal Archivist how the pros do it (I have a lot to learn!). In any case, I had a great time interviewing Mikan and had unexpected fun when the reporters noticed my hat (which reads "Island Person" in Japanese and is obviously from Okinawa) and found out that the FMA is from Chiba (I believe both guys in the foreground are also from there) and her sister and her family lives in Okinawa. If I can get an electronic copy of the photos they shot of us together, I'll either post them or destroy them. I had issues with my sunscreen that morning. 'Nuff said.

By the way, as an alternate in the Tuesday pro-am, Mikan had been on the course since at the latest 6:30 am and had been working on her putting, chipping, and ball-striking for most of the morning until the rains (and her scheduled interview[s]) drove her off the driving range. True, she hadn't been out on the course, so she probably wasn't as tired as fellow rookie Amanda Blumenherst, who played both pro-ams, but even Mikan's example shows that anyone who thinks the life of a pro golfer is only about the golf has another think coming. More on Mikan when I finish my profile of Mina Harigae and her.

[Update 1 (8:32 pm): Here are a couple of posts from Christina Kim that give you a pretty good sense of what her week's been like so far.]

Have a Very My Melo QSMS!

OK, OK, the girls would never forgive me if I only did a (belated) Hanukah post this year. So for QSMS 2009 we're going Onegai My Melody!