Friday was the highlight of any golf season, the 9th annual “Funnyman Open.” It’s a best-ball tournament started by Mr. George Prehatin. There’s a great deal of work that goes into organizing the event and George does it all simply to gather his friends and associates for a day of fun and bad golf. And fun it is. There’s really no feeling (well, maybe the feeling of being naked in a busy, public place comes close) like striding up the 18th fairway and being booed and cursed by the mob of early finishers perched on the bar porch overlooking the final green at the Windham CC. My team finshed -3, which was good enough to win in previous years, but out of the money in ‘05. Still, it was a fun round and it was great seeing all the hecklers afterwards. Best line I heard was about my light orange Polo shirt. “Hey Leo, does that shirt come in a man’s color?” Thanks for a great day, George.

So, golf bombs… Thursday night was another night of interrupted sleep that resulted in my watching “Secrets of the Dead” on PBS. The episode was called, “Bombing Nazi Dams” and was the story of the how the British devised a bomb to skip like a rock across a pond and then using golf ball-like backspin, crawl down the face of the dam until reaching a depth for maximum destruction. At one point, the British team devised a round bomb encasement with dimples because it would travel twice as far as a non dimpled case. It briefly touched upon the aerodynamics of the golf ball and the dimple effect. The Physics of Golf will help you get wicked smart about it. It does not, however, include a calculation adjustment to correct my slice.

Speaking of dams, yesterday there was a brief mention of 20 Taliban arrested for attempting to blow up a dam in Afghanistan on the eve on their nation elections. Reports indicate thousands could have been killed by floodwaters if the plot had been successful. I sure hope our Homeland Security department takes note of the attempt. The death toll in New Orleans would have been unimaginable if those levees were blown up with a fully-populated city instead of a largely evacuated one. In other areas across the country, cities, counties and states argue over who’s responsible to pay for strengthening the many dams and levees holding back disaster. Maybe it’s time to spend some of the Iraq hell-hole money on our own security infrastructure…