Today is the opening round of the 2010 British Open. It’s being played at St Andrews, site of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, and tiresomely billed by the media with mock-reverence as “the home of golf”. Until this morning, their commentary was dominated by speculation about whether Tiger Woods’s swing has recovered from his various extra-marital flings. But now we have a new hero — Maurice Flitcroft, the worst golfer ever to compete in the championship.

I have to confess that I’d never heard of him until Radio 4’s Today programme had an item pegged to a newly-published biography with the lovely title The Phantom of the Open. Naturally, I went straight to Wikipedia, which has an interesting entry on him.

It describes him as a “chain-smoking crane driver” from Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire who also claimed to be a stunt diver. “I toured with a revue, and I used to jump into a tank on the stage, I was a stuntcomedy high diver. The revue used to tour all the country and I would dive into this tank. It wasn’t all glass, just the front so the spectators could see what was going on under the water.” His golfing fame stems from conning his way into the qualifying round for the 1976 Open by pretending to be a professional golfer. He wrote off to the R&A for an application form. This required the applicant to state whether he was an amateur or professional golfer. If the former, then he would be required to state his club handicap. But of course Flitcroft wasn’t a member of any club, and so he ticked the ‘Professional’ box and sent it off.

He went round in 121 — 49 over par and the worst score in the history of the tournament. One reporter memorably described it as “a blizzard of double and triple bogeys marred only by a solitary par”. He was christened “The Royal & Ancient Rabbit” (a ‘Rabbit’, in golfing parlance, is an incompetent player who hacks his way around the course, rarely if ever getting even close to a par).

Predictably, the R&A — as reactionary an assembly of Establishment boobies as ever wore blazers, and an institution that makes White’s look like the Bauhaus — was Not Amused, and so tried to ban him from further championships. But according to Wikipedia he entered several more times under pseudonyms: Gene Paceky (as in paycheque), Gerald Hoppy and James Beau Jolley.

Er, no. It’s the ‘Tyrannos’ from Logi Aerospace, which in conjunction with other companies and organisations including the South West Research Institute and Californian electric-vehicle firm ZAP has responded to a Pentagon call for a vehicle that would enable the US Marines to dodge IEDs without being as vulnerable as a helicopter. According to The Register, the vehicle offers full hover and is “fairly quiet”.

The Tyrannos is nominally intended to provide Marines with the ability to leapfrog over troublesome roadside bombs, mines, and ambushes while remaining able to drive on the ground as they normally might. However, it promises to be much quieter than ordinary helicopters in use and far easier to fly and maintain.

If the Tyrannos can do all its makers claim, it really does have the potential to become the flying car for everyman.

Lots of ducted-fan technology and a supercharged race engine. Does 240mph flat out. No word on emissions, though.

On balance, I think I’ll pass on this one. It’d never get me through Silver Street at rush hour.

One of the things I love about the Saturday edition of the Financial Times is that it often has the most unexpected obituaries. Here’s the latest — the life story of an Italian cavalry officer who is straight out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh. Sample:

Amedeo Guillet crammed rather a lot into his 101 years. He is best remembered for leading, on his white Arabian stallion, Sandor, a potentially suicidal cavalry charge against the tanks and 25-pounder artillery guns of Britain’s advancing “Gazelle Force” in the Horn of Africa in 1941. It was the last ever cavalry charge against British troops and earned the then Lieutenant Guillet the nickname Comandante Diavolo – the Devil Commander – from both his own men and an enemy that came to respect and even befriend him. Usually dressed like an Arab or Ethiopian tribesman, he became known in his native land as “Italy’s Lawrence of Arabia”.

On that misty January dawn in 1941 at Keru gorge, Eritrea, troops of Britain’s 4/11th Sikh regiment, the Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry and the 1st Bengal Cavalry were brewing tea before advancing against regular Italian forces. It was then that Guillet, wearing Arab clothes and screaming “Savoia!” – Savoy, his homeland – led 250 Ethiopian and Yemeni tribesmen in a galloping charge through the allied ranks, firing antique carbines, slashing with scimitars and tossing home-made grenades before retreating in a cloud of dust. The raiders’ loss was great – perhaps half their men – but the psychological damage they inflicted gave an important breather to retreating Italian regular troops…

Wow! He lived to be 102, and spent the last part of his life in Ireland chasing foxes — on horseback, naturally.

There’s an intriguing article in Newsweek about the decline in creativity in American schoolkids — as measured by the Torrance test.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”