Our cable is out. With no moving images to stimulate my mind, I will resort to blogging.

The top 64 golfers in the world are competing in the Accenture Match Play Championship. They set up a bracket for the players like the NCAA college basketball tournament brackets. Being official espn.com bracketologists, Danny and I actually filled out the golf bracket, trying to predict who will win the 64 matches (there's one more because there is a third place match). After the first round today, I have already lost 2 of my final four and one of my final round guys. For me to have a chance to beat Danny, Scott Hoch has to beat Tiger in the quarterfinals and Mike Weir has to win the whole thing. Mike Weir is Canadian and he plays golf left-handed. Go Mike Weir. Did anyone else in the world even fill out a World Golf Championiship bracket? We figured it would be good practice for March Madness.

I spent Monday morning playing golf at Tilden Park. I celebrated my birthday by hitting golf balls at trees. I brought 8 Strata balls with me for the 18 holes, which should have more than enough. I lost 3 on the first 3 holes, and 6 in all. (Good thing Jason and Danny got me some Nike balls as a gift.) I would tell what my score on Monday was, but I haven't recieved the results back form IBM's chess playing Big Blue computers yet.

I'm playing golf at Buchanan Fields tomorrow, a little 9 hole out in Concord, and I am looking to set a 5824 record. (Those are records for our house or those competing with our household.) It's a par 31 and I hold the current record at an 8-over 39. These's an airporrt next door and my friend Andy said he talked to a pilot who heard of balls hitting the planes as they took off or landed. If the course record is beyond reach at any point in the match, I will shift my focus and my aim to the planes. It's the next level after hitting the golf cart on the driving range so many times.

Thanks also to Gina for The Worst Case Scenerio Survival Handbook Golf version. It tells you things like how to stop a runaway cart or how to deal with an alligator near your ball. Hopefully those things will never happen to me, but better to be prepared. The strangest thing that that took place while I was playing golf was that I vaporized my clubhead. (The book makes no mention of how to deal with a vaporized clubhead.) It was my first set of irons with some super lightweight shafts (I think Howie has what is left of them now) and I was teeing off with my 3-iron on the 12th hole at Harding Park in San Francisco. I swung the club and there was a big cracking sound, kind of like a sonic boom. The ball flies only about 30 yards straight ahead, and I was sure I had crushed it. That's when I looked at my club and realized the clubhead was missing. My partners and I looked around all over for it, but we never found it. I concluded that I had swung the club so hard, the clubhead had vaporized upon the force of impact.