There was an interesting review in today’s Irish Times of a history of [Trinity College] Dublin University Golfing Society (DUGS) which contained this interesting snippet:

Many members of the DUGS excelled in other sporting fields, be it rugby or cricket or racquet sports. But one notable member was Samuel Beckett. Indeed, Beckett would claim that, when suffering from insomnia in his Parisian exile, he used to play the nine holes of Carrickmines in his head.

Beckett was first introduced to golf at Carrickmines where his father, Bill, was captain in 1914. Beckett represented Dublin University Golf Club when a student (1923-27) and, in 1925, won the DUGC tournament at Portmarnock.

Beckett was given his first set of clubs when he was 10, but developed “an unorthodox approach by using only four clubs and putting with a two-iron”. Non-golfers will probably regard this tale of the great playwright recalling the details of a mere gold course as fanciful, but it rings true to me. I think that all serious golfers have imprinted on their memories the layout and detail of the course on which they first learned the game. Immerse yourself in the electrifying atmosphere of online baccarat gaming, exclusively offered at สนุกกับเกมบาคาร่าออนไลน์ที่ UFABET for your enjoyment and success. I learned to play at the age of ten on the nine-hole course of Tralee Golf Club at Mounthawk, just a mile outside town on the Fenit road. And half a century later I sometimes find myself dreaming about the course, and replaying individual holes in my head. When I got home today I sat down and drew a map of the course from memory. This is it:

The course was created in the parkland surrounding a small manor house called Mounthawk. It was nicely wooded, but in parts (especially round the 4th and 5th holes) pretty soggy in winter. It would be nice to be able to check the accuracy of my memory by looking at it from Google Earth, but sadly the course is no more. The land was sold to a developer, who built ‘executive-style’ homes and some light-industrial stuff on it, like so: Despite the depredations of development, however, the outline of the course can still be discerned. From my (crudely) annotated version of the satellite image, for example, it looks as though the remnants of the 7th and 8th greens are still there. And the Par 3 third looks much as it did when I was playing it. The clubhouse, however, appears to have been demolished. The club used the loot from the sale to build a terrific championship links course about ten miles away at Barrow on the coast. The Barrow course has some interesting connections. The beach which runs at the back of the first hole and to the right of the second was the location of the beach scenes of David Lean’s 1970 movie, * Ryan’s Daughter*, which won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The stretch of beach just north of the 15th tee is the part of Banna Strand on which Roger Casement was landed from a U-boat on Good Friday 1916. He was arrested a short distance away, tried for treason in London, and executed. And in 1588 a vessel from the Spanish Armada ran aground on the beach behind the 16th green. The new course was the first commission landed by Arnold Palmer when he set up as a golf architect. In its first few years at Barrow, the club was strapped for cash. One evening in 1986 my brother-in-law and I played a round and, sitting in the bar afterwards, were approached by the Secretary, who asked if we’d be interested in becoming Life Members. “How much?” we asked. £1,000, he said. Since neither of us had much money at the time, we gracefully declined the offer. LATER: See update.

James Fallows is back from his sojourn in China. His reflections on the health risks of living in a Chinese city are sobering. Sample:

The health situation for ordinary Chinese people is obviously no joke. After stalling, the Chinese government recently accepted a World Bank estimate that some 750,000 of its people die prematurely each year just from air pollution. Alarming upsurges in birth defects and cancer rates are reported even in the state-controlled press.

How long could outsiders live in big, polluted Chinese cities before facing the same actuarial risks as the people who’d grown up there? Now that foreigners have business, cultural, and sheer-fascination reasons to spend time in China, should those opaque skies scare them away? While we were in China, my wife and I joked with friends that now was the time to take up smoking, since our lungs would never know the difference. After returning to the U.S., I decided to ask doctors and public-health experts how much long-term damage foreigners do themselves in exchange for the experience and opportunity of China. This was no one’s idea of a comprehensive survey—and informants still working in China asked me not to use their names—but I was struck by three recurring themes.

The first one was, It’s really bad! As a foreign-trained doctor in Beijing put it, “Just using your eyes, you know this can’t be good for anybody.” Another way to know this is via a clandestine air-quality station that the U.S. Embassy has built in Beijing. The Chinese government does not report, and may not even measure, what other countries consider the most dangerous form of air pollution: PM2.5, the smallest particulate matter, tiny enough to work its way deep into the alveoli. Instead, Chinese reports cover only the grosser PM10 particulates, which are less dangerous but more unsightly, because they make the air dark and turn your handkerchief black if you blow your nose. (Spitting on the street: routine in China. Blowing your nose into a handkerchief: something no cultured person would do.) These unauthorized PM2.5 readings, sent out on a Twitter stream (BeijingAir), show the pollution in Beijing routinely to be in the “Very Unhealthy” or “Hazardous” range, not seen in U.S. cities in decades. I’ve heard from friends about persistent coughs and blood tests that show traces of heavy metals. “I encourage people with children not to consider extended tours in China,” a Western-trained doctor said. “Those little lungs.”

A point-and-shoot electron microscope from Toshiba Hitachi. A snip — yes, really — at $60,000. Only drawback, according to Slashdot: it runs Windows XP.

Hmmm… This is from a site called I Just Made Love which claims to show “on the map of the world places where people just made love”. Now I know that funny things go on in aeroplanes sometimes, but somehow those markers in mid-Atlantic look, er, fishy. Especially since some of the, ah, entries claim that the happy couple employed up to five different positions. Still, it just shows what can be done with Web 2.0

From the Pew Research Center.

A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.

While Muslims are found on all five inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the Middle East-North Africa region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, more than half of the 20 countries and territories1 in that region have populations that are approximately 95% Muslim or greater.

If, like me, you are puzzled by the ludicrous protestations of the movie world about the arrest of Roman Polanski, then this excellent piece by Nick Cohen should provide a useful antidote.

Poor France. What is there left to say about that unfortunate country? It destroys the feudal order in the Revolution only to replace an aristocracy of nobles with an aristocracy of celebrities. The notion that Polanski – an artist! – could be arrested for molesting 13-year old Samantha Gailey turned the brain of its foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, as soft as Camembert.

“It’s a bit sinister, this business,” he said, as he contemplated the lese-majesty. “A man of such talent recognised throughout the world… All this is not nice.” A host of auteurs, led by Constantin Costa-Gavras, director of the Cinémathèque Française, implied that the Zurich Film Festival was the equivalent of a medieval cathedral or United Nations General Assembly, a privileged space where the law&’s writ did not run.

“It seems inadmissible that an international cultural evening, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him,” the directors said as they decried the sacrilege.

Kouchner was right on one point: the scandal from 1977 is “not nice”. Gailey told a grand jury how Polanksi groomed her by saying he could get her into Vogue. He offered her champagne and Quaalude, a sedative which induces trances, raped and sodomised her. She kept saying she wanted to go home, and at one point feigned an asthma attack to get away from him. Asked why she did not struggle further, she replied: “Because I was afraid of him.” Polanski’s parting words were: “Don’t tell your mother about this and don’t tell your boyfriend either. This is our secret.”

He cut a deal, and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a child. Then he fled to Europe to escape sentence, where he promptly began walking out with Nastassja Kinski, then aged 15. In an interview with Martin Amis, he said if he was a murderer the press and police wouldn’t be so obsessed by him. “But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls – everyone wants to fuck young girls!”

What’s astonishing is that the French protected Polanski for so long from getting his just deserts in the US courts. But it isn’t only French foreign ministers who have a warped sense of their moral duty. Nick goes on to chronicle the compliance of an English libel judge in allowing Polanski to testify to a London court without making the trip to Britain (where he would properly have been arrested and extradited to the US). Hopefully the Swiss will now quickly hand him over and we can see justice done — finally.

So…. how exactly do we get in touch?