Farewell, Dai-chan: Daisuke Takahashi Retires from Competitive Figure Skating

The Constructivist household is in mourning for the retirement of Daisuke Takahashi from competitive figure skating.  Ever since we found out, I've been asking the Full Metal Archivist to write something celebrating his career, but she's still dealing with the shock of the news and is just too sad to put her feelings into words.  What she has told me has been poetic:  "he flirted with the music, seduced audiences, and challenged judges...he was a shaman on the ice."  So I'll just point you too her April 2010 "Luv Letter" for now.  More on his legacy later!

What a Week!

Anyone following me on twitter knows that I happened to be at my favorite Korean restaurant in Western New York last night when the repeat winner of the Wegmans LPGA Championship happened to drop by.  Smooth as always in the presence of greatness, I stammered out a quiet "Congratulations, Inbee," as she walked by.  She took the time to thank me.  And that was that.

It's sad to think that nobody knows when the LPGA will return to Rochester.  I was so busy chasing golfers yesterday that the only player I got to interview was Mina Harigae, and then only for a couple of minutes after her most frustrating round of the week.  So to all the players I've followed, or interviewed, and sometimes even gotten to know a bit over the last several years in Pittsford--particularly Ai Miyazato, Mika Miyazato, Moira Dunn, Paula Creamer, Morgan Pressel, Tiffany Joh, Danielle Kang, Lizette Salas, Jane Park, Jennifer Song, Na Yeon Choi, In-Kyung Kim, Amy Yang, Momoko Ueda, Chie Arimura, Ayako Uehara, and Harukyo Nomura--thanks for everything you do!  And hope to see you competing in Rochester again soon!

Wegmans LPGA Championship Sunday: Inbee Park Defeats Brittany Lincicome with Clutch Up-and-Down on 1st Playoff Hole

The narrative all week here at the Wegmans LPGA Championship has been that Monroe Golf Club is a bombers' paradise, but in the end the final edition of the tournament in Rochester became a pitch-and-putt contest between defending champion Inbee Park, who made 2 clutch 10 footers in her last 2 holes to get to -11, and Brittany Lincicome, who 3-putted from about 25 feet on the 72nd hole to fall back to that same number and open the door to the former world #1.

They played the 18th again on the first playoff hole, and even though Lincicome outdrove Park by over 50 yards, both players went over the green with their approaches.  Lincicome ended up not far from where she left her 25-footer 6 feet short, while Park had gunned for the pin and rolled to the back-right rough right behind it.  Lincicome hit a good chip, but it released to about 9 feet, while Park cozied hers up within 3 feet.  The previous night, Lincicome had admitted that the key place her nerves show up is on the greens, while Park has been talking down her putting this year but even before she switched putters last week was still among the top 3 in the world on the greens this year on the LPGA.  Long story short:  Lincicome missed.  Park made.  Park defended her title.

More to come!

[Update 1 (7:52 pm):  I spent most of the day following Mina Harigae (16th-18th holes), Jennifer Song (6th-12th), Danielle Kang (10th-18th), and Tiffany Joh and Jane Park (12th-end, back and forth between their 2 groups).  But I did get back to the 17th green in time to see Lydia Ko fail to get up-and-down from the neck on the 17th and watch Inbee pour in her birdie attempt.  I was just to Inbee's right for her drive on 18 and the intensity on her face as she transitioned to her downswing was something to behold.  I couldn't get close to the green, but I saw her par save disappear and heard the crowd's roar an instant later.  I tried to get back to the 18th tee in time to see the 2 players tee off right from near the tee area, but was blocked by the ropes for the short way and had to go the long way around.  Made it within 100 yards of the tee on the right side of the fairway, but by that time Lincicome was ready to drive.]

[Update 2 (7:58 pm):  Brittany came into the interview room while I was typing update #1.  I got to ask her about her thought process after her bogey on the par-5 12th and she gave a fantastic answer.  I hope she continues to play well because she's one of the best interviews on the LPGA.  Totally honest and very thoughtful.]

[Update 3 (8:08 pm):  Last night here in the media room, Pettersen was totally confident and talking about trying to go low on Sunday, Lincicome was totally forthright about how she deals with her emotions and nerves, and Park seemed to be relishing the underdog role, feeding into the narrative that Monroe GC gives long hitters an advantage.  But Sundays in a major are different.  It's a lot harder to swing freely when the tournament is on the line and the further you hit it the further your misses go, too.  In addition, the pressure on and around the greens ratchets up, particularly on Donald Ross greens.  Cases in point:  Pettersen's 41 and Piller's 42 on the front.  It doesn't look from their scorecards that they missed a whole lot of fairways, but they made 7 bogeys and 2 doubles together in the 1st 8 holes.  (Congrats to Gerina, btw, on her husband's win!)  But let's face it, everybody struggled down the stretch.  Azahara Munoz, a straight shooter, got it to -9 and made a fantastic par save on 14 after having to take an unplayable, but finished double-par-bogey.  Lydia Ko, a precision player, got it to -10, but finished with 2 bogeys in a row.  In the end, the player who played the best all week and particularly down the stretch was your winner.]

[Update 4 (8:14 pm):  Shoutout to world #1 Stacy Lewis, who had the low round of the day, a 5-birdie 68, to vault into a tie for 6th with Pettersen, Shanshan Feng, Mirim Lee, and Julieta Granada.  Oh, and add Anna Nordqvist to the list of players who fought their way up the leaderboard only to falter down the stretch.  She was -8 with 4 to play and bogeyed 16 and 17.]

Recommended Reading: Happy Fan's Tribute to Grace Park

What with my lovely ladies heading out to Japan tomorrow morning, I haven't had much time for writing lately and I still haven't found the right words to capture my feelings about Grace Park's retirement announcement from the Wegmans LPGA Championship.  Fortunately, the top writer on the KLPGA and the founder of Seoul Sisters.com, Happy Fan, wrote a moving tribute to "Our Grace" over at his blog.  If you've been following the LPGA for less than a decade, his overview of Park's career is required reading.  Even if you were there while she was at her peak, it's still worth a read!

Daisuke Takahashi, Mao Asada Win Japanese Nationals

His free skate certainly wasn't pretty, but Daisuke Takahashi retained just enough of his 10-point lead from the short program to hold onto the gold medal at Japanese nationals and hold off Takahiko Kozuka and Sendai native Yuzuru Hanyu.



Instead of making the post-ISU Grand Prix statement I was hoping for, Dai-chan brought his D-game and was lucky that neither Kozuka nor Hanyu could put together a perfect performance.  Both of his challengers had great programs going, but couldn't nail a late jump, the 17-year-old Hanyu clearly because of asthma-induced exhaustion at the end of his program:



Clearly the future of Japanese figure skating is in good hands, as another 17-year-old, Kanako Murakami, had a chance to take the gold after a fantastic short program gave her a tiny lead over Mao Asada:



But the bubbly teenager was off in the free skate, falling to 3rd after Akiko Suzuki thanks to a flat-out trip late in her program:



The contrast in moods between Murakami and gold-medal winner Mao Asada couldn't have been more pronounced. Asada, who pulled out of the ISU Grand Prix Finals in Quebec the moment she found out her mother was terminally ill but who couldn't get back to Japan in time to see her before she died, was somber in interviews even after skating her best short program of the year:



But Mao-chan kept her composure the entire competition and skated a great-under-the-circumstances long program:



The changing looks on her face during the awards ceremony say it all:



You can see in the reactions of the crowd and hear in the voices of the announcers how deeply moved everyone was who watched Asada perform in Osaka the last few days.  The Full Metal Archivist and I were holding back tears ourselves.  Gambatte, Mao-chan!

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.

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.

On Yuko Mitsuka and Angela Park

When reading about Yuko Mitsuka (三塚　優子)'s 2-stroke slow-play penalty during the 1st round of the Salonpas Cup last week, her tearful protest by walking off the course, the huge fine (2 million yen or around $20K), and her multiple apologies and self-imposed suspension for 11 events (including the U.S. Women's Open, Evian Masters, and British Open), I couldn't help but be reminded yesterday of Angela Park's own 2-stroke slow-play penalty while she was in contention in the 2008 SBS Open. Here's why.

Park ran away with the LPGA's Rookie of the Year award in 2007, coming close to winning multiple times and repeatedly being praised by Johnny Miller as having the best swing on tour. And for awhile it looked like her breakthrough win would come during the kick-off event of her sophomore campaign. But after bogeying the 10th hole to drop 2 shots off the pace, she was hit with the slow-play penalty. Paul Arnett focused on her initial reaction, which included a bunch of birdies down the stretch and a lot of tears and criticism after the round. So far there are a lot of similarities with Mitsuka, who is also a 4th-year professional and has already found a lot of success on the JLPGA, having earned Rookie of the Year in 2008 (apparently her 1st full season on tour, even though she played 30 events in 2007), having never finished worse than 14th on the money list, having won once in each of her 1st 3 seasons, and having ended last season ranked 9th after having finished 5th on the money list. Sure, Mitsuka's penalty came on the 1st day of the event rather than the last, her initial reaction to it was more extreme than Park's, and the JLPGA took a much harder line on it than the LPGA did on Park's. But in both cases a rising young star reacted badly to a slow-play penalty and will have to live with the consequences for the rest of her career.

Whereas Park had a successful 2008--thanks in large part to a 7-event run in which she finished T3 at the U.S. Women's Open, T4 at the NW Arkansas event, T2 at the Evian Masters (where she was the 1st to drop out of a 3-way playoff), and T6 at the Safeway Classic--and had 3 top 10s in her 1st 4 events of 2009 (including another disappointing Sunday at the SBS Open when she was in contention), her game has since fallen off the cliff. As her swing and ball-striking deserted her (she went from averaging in the mid 240s off the tee with around 70% of her fairways hit over her 1st 2 seasons to under 230 and around 60% that season), she started skipping and withdrawing from events, prompting rumors late last season that she was going to quit the game. So far this season she hasn't yet been able to avoid the "1 awful round per week" syndrome and continues to struggle to find the fairways and get her length off the tee and swing back. Looking back on her career, the slow-play penalty controversy in early 2008 and her family's reported falling out with Inbee Park's family in mid-2008 were the 1st signs that all was not well in her world.

Mitsuka's struggles seem tame by comparison, amounting mainly to failure at LPGA Q-School at the end of last season and problems with her putter at the beginning of this season. Her birdie rate has dropped from a high of 3.49 last season to 2.63 this season, and her lack of confidence on the greens may have had something to do with the time she took on a difficult putt in the Salonpas Cup that led to the slow-play penalty. Given that her fine was worth about a quarter of her winnings this season, that she's effectively benched herself until mid-August, and that she's missing out on the chance to represent Japan in major international events, I'd say her putting woes are the least of her worries right now.

I'm rooting for comebacks from both Mitsuka and Park, starting for the latter with her 11:50 am appointment at the 10th tee in the Bell Micro LPGA Classic today!

[Update 1 (11:22 am): Head on over to Devil Ball Golf and help Jay Busbee reach the 1000-comment mark for his take on Mitsuka!]

Girls Playing Brass

There's a boy or two, but it's mostly girls. And they're fantastic!

Happy Thanksgiving; or, the Helen Oh Story

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Lisa Mickey has a great profile of Helen Oh up over at the Futures Tour site. Oh's a 21-year-old cancer survivor who's on the comeback trail from chemotherapy, radiation treatments, and surgery, looking to return to the form that made her one of Australia's top junior golfers just a few short years ago. During this year's FT Q-School, she just missed getting bounced from the tournament when she salvaged an 86 in her 2nd round, then came back to birdie her final hole and break 80 for the 1st time in the 4th. Of course she missed the 72-hole cut and has very limited status on tour for 2010, but don't count Oh out.

Condolences to the Dunn Family

Just heard from my folks that Moira Dunn's father, Richard F. Dunn, passed away June 19 at the age of 79. Mostly Harmless regulars know that Moira's an old friend of mine going back to our junior golf days in central NY. We were paired together in my 1st tournament (I believe we tied) and I had one of my best rounds of college golf at Cedar Lake, the course she grew up playing. Moira hasn't pulled out of the Wegmans this week, evidently deciding to honor her dad's memory by playing the game they both love, just as she has done since 1995 as a professional. Onechan and I will be going to Locust Hill for the 2nd year in a row (imoto-less, as our cute little 3-year-old is still convinced her rebelliousness is hilarious), so I hope to catch up with Moira on the weekend to pass along my condolences personally. If all goes well, we'll be back home late Thursday night (or early Friday morning) and driving to Pittsford Saturday morning. Here's hoping Moira plays great while grieving.

Venice Friday: This Is it!

We already have our 1st bubble girls at the Venice sectional Q-School qualifier. Jenna Pearson shot a 71 to get to T26 so far at +2. One stroke behind her but T33 right now are Tiffany Tavee (70), Jessica Carafiello (72), and Christi Cano (72). Get your Maalox ready, everyone. It's going to be a long day.

[Update 1 (1:50 pm): New bubble girl: Angela Oh (75, +5, 30th place).]

[Update 2 (4:14 pm): Hound Dog comments on the final results, helpfully highlighting who helped themselves out in a big way today. The cut ended up being about as high as I originally expected--+6 this time, compared to +5 at Mission Hills. Even though Beatriz Recari stayed under par every round, she got beat by 1 shot by Chella Choi, whose 69 brought her to -9 for the tournament, and caught by Nontaya Srisawang, who also shot a 69 today. Joining Recari, Choi, and Srisawang as the only golfers in the field not to go over par in a single round was amateur Jaclyn Sweeney (72, -7, 4th), although unlike them she only broke 70 once. So watch for these 4 to have a decent chance to hang with the top half of the Mission Hills field that they couldn't hang with then. The other 28 players have a lot of work to do to even get within the top 40, given the quality of competition about to face them in early December. Anything over 75 is going to be fatal then, at least without several sub-70 rounds to make up for it.]

[Update 3 (10/5/08, 1:37 am): Here's Brent Kelley's reaction to Friday's results.]

Babelfish Poetry: For Momo-chan

Just want to make a small point about the beauty that can come from non-standard English--in this case, the babelfish translation of a Japanese news report of Momoko Ueda's painful fingernail accident. I've just removed some words and punctuation marks, inserted some line and stanza breaks, changed some capitalizations, and voila: a pretty damn good imagist poem.

The seeing eye dog surprised
the flash of the cameraman of the multitude produced
to run, suddenly.

Being flurried, tries probably to grasp the lanyard
“the painful [tsu]!” with voice was increased
being caught to the cord which was pulled

It peeled the nail of the left hand middle finger
the nail which peels off even cruelly fell to the land
the blood dripped from the finger

For a while holding down the finger
at that place
which it cannot move

It is painful
the face was twisted with pain
the tear floated in the eye

J-Drama Update: Bara no nai Hanaya

As spring break ends, I thought I'd recommend another J-Drama that the Full Metal Archivist and I have gotten into on Veoh: Bara no nai Hanaya, or The Flower Shop Has No Roses. This one is not nearly as funny and self-consciously postmodern as Hottie Paradise (or rather, Hanazakari no Kimitachi e); no, it's much more Dickensian in the convolutions of its plot and Hawthornesque or even Morrisonesque in its exploration of the risks and costs of love and revenge. For a glimpse of the show's different strands, check out what its fans have been putting up on YouTube:





Trust me when I say go to Veoh as often as you can the next few nights and catch up on the first 10 episodes--the final episode's fansub should go up in the next few days. You can be the first kid on your block to experience in almost real-time what prime-time audiences in Japan did on Monday nights this season. And yes, there's a SMAP connection--how could there not be when it's a) super-popular in Japan, and b) something found by the Full Metal Archivist online?

Who to Root for This Week?

Well, first and always Moira Dunn and Ai Miyazato and Seon Hwa Lee. They're the ones who can make my week miserable or joyous (or both). Then the players I really like and respect the most: Annika Sorenstam, Se Ri Pak, Mi Hyun Kim (when she's in the field), Jeong Jang, Hee-Won Han, Lorena Ochoa, Stacy Prammanasudh, Paula Creamer, Jee Young Lee, Morgan Pressel, In-Kyung Kim, Angela Park, Jane Park, Momoko Ueda, Na-Yeon Choi, and Ya Ni Tseng (and Ji-Yai Shin once she comes over full-time from the KLPGA). Then New Yorkers like Laura Diaz, Meaghan Francella, and Danielle Downey.

Yeah, that's a lot. And actually I wish almost everyone on tour well, even ones I'm not personally all that high on. One nice effect of golf blogging is it's exposed me to a much wider range of players than I would otherwise have paid attention to. Oh, and it's given me a much better sense of the ups and downs in even the most successful careers. Which is to say I even hold out hope for Grace Park, Jennifer Rosales, and Michelle Wie, would love to see a Candie Kung comeback, and am an automatic fan of every mom on tour....

But you know what? This week I'm rooting for Sakura Yokomine to win so she can join Ai-chan and Momo-chan full-time on the LPGA. Check out Amaebirah's 2/20/08 posting here for a couple of clues why. Maybe it's the effect of watching all 12 episodes of Hottie Paradise (ok, For You in Full Bloom, actually) with the Full Metal Archivist this past month, but it just makes me happy to see Ai-chan smiling. Yeesh, that's sappy, even for me--but it's true! Fandom is weird.

We Have the Bacteria on the Run

Both girls were feeling a lot better yesterday, which resulted in lots of "happy happy joy joy" time until the inevitable sisterly fight or parental misunderstanding of imoto's grunts and gestures arose--in which case full-blown tantrum time. Well, no tantrum could withstand this Enka performance (Japanese country music) that James at Japan Probe just shared. Take that, bacteria and bad moods! Away with ye!

[Update: Wil Wheaton rightly calls this list of 17 free downloadable graphic novels both awesome and sensational--and you know what? He's right.]

On Race, Gender, and Golf

It's kind of weird to see the crying question making national headlines. I'm used to the back-and-forth between Morgan Pressel and the golf press corps on her tearitudinality, not so much Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. Seriously, what's the big deal about a few tears?

I'm tempted to follow Tiger Woods's own lead and say a similar thing about Kelly Tilghman's banter-gone-bad with Nick Faldo last Friday on the Golf Channel (both Geoff Shackelford and the Golf for Women blog have posted an edited version of the clip in which she drops the "lynch him in a back alley" bomb). But then I noticed that not only is Tilghman getting criticized for the comment itself, for a wishy-washy apology, and for getting off easy with only a 2-week suspension, but also that Tiger himself is taking almost as much heat for (through his agent) accepting her apology, calling this a "non-issue," and declaring "case closed."

As if. People everywhere are trotting out the usual scripts and entering into the usual debates: intent vs. effect; context vs. symbolism; conscious vs. unconscious racism; identifying black vs. identifying multiracial vs. identifying postracial vs. identifying antiracist; insensitivity vs. hypersensitivity; "playing the race card" vs. "sanctioned ignorance"; blame vs. taking responsibility; and so on. It's like Ethnicity/Race Studies 101 out there in Blogoramaville these days, although of course many more instances of unconscious stereotyping and ignorance in the golfy media with respect to race and gender are not getting the CNN effect. Any ideas why this is so?

Given how oddly Tilghman's comment rings (most lynchings were very public spectacles) and Woods's response sounds, I'd love to see them announce when both return to the PGA at the Buick that they are embarking on a joint research project, studying works like W. Fitzhugh Brundage's Under Sentence of Death (North Carolina, 1997), Jacqueline Goldsby's A Spectacular Secret (Chicago, 2006), Sandra Gunning's Race, Rape, and Lynching (Oxford, 1996), Grace Hale's Making Whiteness (Pantheon, 1998), Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection (Oxford, 1997), Jonathan Markovitz's Legacies of Lynching (U of Minnesota, 2004), Anne Rice's edited collection, Witnessing Lynching (Rutgers, 2003), Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck's A Festival of Violence (Illinois, 1995), and Christopher Waldrep's Lynching in America (NYU, 2006), and collaborating on a Golf Channel/First Tee-produced documentary based on their research. If these products of Duke and Stanford put together and promoted something of use to the educational community, then the lessons learned can go beyond the media's rapid spin cycle.

[Update 1/13/08: Jennifer at Mixed Race America has a great, thoughtful post on the very issues I gesture toward--and bypass--in my 3rd paragraph.]