AdamSmith

So a little research indicates that Lucy has indeed been competing as an amateur to date. But the U.S. Open, being as it says "open," simply makes no such distinction. You qualify, you play. P.P.S. One more note on her coolness. One reason she specifically wanted to be in this Open was because of its being played on this absurdly difficult Ross course, whose designs she came to love from playing one of his courses out West where she lives. In one of the press sessions, remarking on what makes for a good game, she observed, "You've got to like the course, man."

Ah. Well, just that the various golf tournaments have long accepted underage players into their pro tournaments on equal footing with other players. They would seem to be the defining bodies, if they are willing to award their prizes to whomever wins.

Delightful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=WsL7AHCM7PU

P.S. On reflection I believe what Truman actually wrote was "Like every small-town Southern lawyer..."

Seriouser observations by one of my profs at Jale ... BOOKEND / By J. D. MCCLATCHY Return to Gitche Gumee hen Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was in England in 1868 to receive an honorary degree from Cambridge University, Queen Victoria invited him to tea. She was a great admirer of his work and found his company delightful. When she accompanied the poet to the door and watched him walk down the long palace corridor, she saw something slightly disconcerting. ''I noticed,'' she confided to her diary that night, ''an unusual interest among the attendants and servants. I could scarcely credit that they so generally understood who he was. When he took leave, they concealed themselves in places from which they could get a good look at him as he passed. I have since inquired among them, and am surprised and pleased to find that many of his poems are familiar to them. No other distinguished person has come here that has excited so peculiar an interest.'' Monarch and manservant, curate and carpetbagger, the whole world read Longfellow. He outsold Browning and Tennyson. In the White House, Lincoln asked to have Longfellow's poems recited to him, and wept. When the emperor of Brazil made a state visit to the United States, his only request was to have dinner with Longfellow. The poet's 70th birthday, in 1877, was a day of national celebration, commemorated by parading schoolchildren around the country. It was proclaimed on that day that ''there is no man living for whom there is so universal a feeling of love and gratitude, and no man who ever wore so great a fame so gently and simply.'' His popularity marked a literary milestone. It could be said that Longfellow was our first professional poet. Not only was he able to make a living from his writing but he worked carefully to establish for American poetry a cultural eminence. He was both professor and balladeer; that is to say, he had literary qualities that rarely coincide and from either sideline are usually sneered at. He had an authority based on learning and allusion, gaining for his work an intellectual respect. And he had a narrative gift both sweeping and canny, along with a near perfect ear, that made his work memorable and gave it an enormous popular appeal. Longfellow had earned his considerable prestige. From the start, he held himself to the highest literary standards, and was deeply admired by Hawthorne and Emerson, by Dickens and Ruskin. For many years, he taught comparative literature at Harvard, where he introduced Dante, Goethe and Moliere into the curriculum. He had as well the fabled energies of the Victorian man of letters. Early in his career he traveled widely, mastered 11 languages and had the entire European literary tradition in his head. He was an indefatigable anthologist (one alone ran to 31 volumes), compiler, textbook author, diarist and correspondent (so besieged was he by admirers that he eventually wrote about 1,500 letters a year), and he composed in every genre: novel, romance, short story, travel sketch, essay, table talk, verse play, translation, epic, sonnet, ballad, elegy and lyric. Even as a young man, Longfellow aspired to literary eminence. Had he been merely brilliant, all his learning would not have helped him fulfill that ambition. But he cared too for his readers, for the language of their hearts and memories, and they responded. When ''The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems'' was published in 1858, it sold 25,000 copies in the first two months and 10,000 copies in London the first day. There was hardly a home in the United States without its hearthside copy of ''Evangeline.'' And in the wake of ''The Song of Hiawatha,'' in 1855 -- well, the nation is still cluttered with motels and steamboats, summer camps and high schools that bear the name. It was a poem imitated in French by Baudelaire and translated into Latin by Cardinal Newman's brother. As ''Hiawatha's Photographing,'' it was even quickly parodied by Edward Lear. Parody is the last form praise takes; Lear thought Longfellow ''the greatest living master of language,'' but his contemporary sendup (''From his shoulder Hiawatha / Took the camera of rosewood, / Made of sliding, folding rosewood; / Neatly put it all together'') takes primitivism into the drawing room with hilarious consequences. Longfellow himself was no mandarin. He carefully monitored his sales figures and made certain that in addition to the morocco-bound volumes printed for the carriage trade, there were broadsides and cheap pamphlets available for the common reader. As a result, he was more widely read, more widely appreciated than any American writer of his time. One ironic token of such appreciation is that more of us, even today, can still quote at least the opening of several Longfellow poems, from ''I shot an arrow into the air'' to ''Though the mills of God grind slowly.'' In fact, so well known have many of his phrases become they have achieved the dubious status of cliche -- the patter of little feet,'' for instance, or ''ships that pass in the night'' or ''into each life some rain must fall.'' Here is poem after poem that has sunk into the national consciousness, become an indelible part of the American imagination. How is that possible? Longfellow lived at a propitious time. He was born in the wake of the Revolutionary War; his grandfather was a colleague of Washington and his father a friend of Lafayette. The great events of the century -- the westward expansion, the debate over slavery, the Civil War -- he had as subjects. And he lived on into the modern extravagances of the Gilded Age; one of his last visitors was Oscar Wilde. His lifetime, in other words, spanned the era when the country sought to define itself, and what Longfellow gave his countrymen -- who spurned history -- was the mythology they needed. Evangeline in the forest primeval, Hiawatha by the shores of Gitche Gumee, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the wreck of the Hesperus, the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree, the strange courtship of Miles Standish, the maiden Priscilla and the hesitant John Alden, even the lonely striver's footprints on the sands of time -- together they form a nostalgic image of innocence, a people starting over, a muted but forceful heroism in touch with the rhythms and harmonies of the natural world. Both in his poems and in his undervalued novel ''Kavanagh,'' Longfellow creates his Great Good Place. Neither the city nor the wilderness attracts him. Neither the thronged metropolis of Whitman nor the solitary pond of Thoreau draws out his sympathies. Instead, Longfellow feels himself most at home in the village, its dimensions contained, its inhabitants known, its cozy routines established, its eccentric novelties cherished, a civilized community on the edge of the unfamiliar. At the same time, he boldly helped American poetry welcome European influences, from Germanic legends to Nordic meters, seeking in the term ''American'' not a thumping, homemade vigor but a cosmopolitan openness to foreign resources. In his appetite for the unusual, combined with his extraordinary prosodic virtuosity, he seems an unexpected precursor of W. H. Auden, another poet who sought not to defy tradition but to renovate and extend it. And then, less than half a century after Longfellow's death, the modernist braves circled and shot him down like a dazed buffalo. Ezra Pound (who, by the way, was Longfellow's grandnephew) and T. S. Eliot were determined to rid the poetic landscape of mawkishness. Narrative was out and the skewered, ego-bound lyric was in. Moralizing was out and psychologizing was in. The elegant and delicate were derided, the fragmented and confessional applauded. Meter and rhyme were considered fustian, and the broken line or free verse effusion was all the rage. Longfellow was officially declared kitsch. But among the many readers who privately maintained their devotion to the old poet was Robert Frost, in many ways Longfellow's true successor. The title of Frost's first book, ''A Boy's Will,'' is taken from a Longfellow poem, and in 1907, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Longfellow's birth, Frost wrote an affectionate poem, ''The Later Minstrel,'' in which he gratefully acknowledges that, while under Longfellow's spell, ''You wronged the wisdom that you had, / And sighed for vanished days.'' More astutely than most, Frost understood that ''Song's times and seasons are its own, / Its ways past finding out.'' Put aside for a moment your sleek preferences, your ironic prowess, and the minstrel days of old emerge with a remarkable majesty. Longfellow is not a poet of startling originality, not a Whitman or Dickinson. But he is a much better poet than is now supposed. Yes, he will seem sentimental at times, but from how many Victorian poems would we not nowadays want to snip off the last few, homilizing lines? Still, rereading his best lyrics, one is struck by the twilit, ghostly melancholy of his lost paradises. The moon glides along the damp mysterious chambers of the air, and somber houses are hearsed with plumes of smoke. And the grand narrative poems of his ''Tale of a Wayside Inn'' sequence have a dramatic thrust and vivid portraiture that can evoke one's first, enthralled experiences with stories, the high adventurous romance of those books that helped shape our desires and still abide in our memories. If Longfellow has long since been consigned to your dusty top shelf, it may be time to take him down. You won't just be opening a book, you'll encounter a world sometimes thought lost, but actually as near as a dream. J. D. McClatchy, a poet and critic, is the editor of Longfellow's ''Poems and Other Writings.'' http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/22/bookend/bookend.html

One more... At 11, Lucy Li's success is joyful and anything but elementary By Michael Bamberger, Senior Writer, Sports IllustratedPublished: Friday, June 20, 2014 | 09:16:38 PM | Comments (27) PINEHURST, N.C. – Before Lucy Li, 11-year-old golfing sweetheart, hit her first shot in the U.S. Open, Stacy Lewis took it upon herself to play the role of spoilsport. The No. 1 player in the women’s game said, “If it was my kid, I wouldn't let her play in the U.S. Open qualifier at 11, but that's just me." It seemed so needlessly negative. As for the 36-hole one-day qualifier Lewis referred to, Lucy was the medalist in it. She won by seven, in a field of 84 golfers, held at the Old Course at Half Moon Bay. She shot rounds of 74 and 68. Then Lucy came into the press tent for a group interview. She was so smart and charming and giggly and Lewis’s comments seemed even more unnecessary. In that Wednesday press conference, Lucy Li likely became the first golfer in the history of press-tent interviews to cite Sherlock Holmes as a favorite literary figure. Sherlock Holmes! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the summer reading list of an elite junior golfer! The hits just kept coming. When she was asked if her father, a Chinese-born financial analyst with a PhD in computer science, can beat her in golf, she paused, said, “No,” and convulsed into giggles. PHOTO GALLERY: Lucy Li at Pinehurst No. 2. Then on Thursday, in the first round of this 69th U.S. Women’s Open, Lucy Li went out and shot a credible round of 78, putting herself in position to maybe - maybe -make the 36-hole cut. She sat, yoga-style, cross-legged in the shade between shots. After the round, she earned praise from her playing partners for her poise, good cheer and solid play. When Lucy explained her three bad holes to reporters she sounded almost like a pro. But she licked a pink Strawberry Starburst Sorbet popsickle all the while, still in touch with her inner 11-year old. And by that point Lewis’s comments - even though they were nothing more than her honest response to a reporter’s question - started to seem almost mean. And then came Friday, and the second round. PHOTO GALLERY: The best photos from the 2014 U.S. Open Lucy looked to need a round of even par or one over to make the cut, a considerable task, but doable, based on what she had showed on Thursday. She practiced early, to avoid the heat, took off a few hours, hit some wedge shots and got herself to the first tee for her 12:52 p.m. tee time. All morning long, the heat and humidity had been rising. She had so much white sunblock on her face (as many players did) she looked almost like a Kabuki performer. She needed her big red umbrella for protection from the sun and, briefly, to keep her dry in a passing rain shower. A TV camera was often right in her face. After a double-bogey six on her first hole of the day, putting her at 10 over par through 19 holes, making the cut had become just about impossible. Pinehurst No. 2 is one of the most difficult courses in the world, and she was playing in the same field as the best players in the world. At age 11. Her front-nine score, 38, could not have been fun. Then a bogey on 10. Another on 11. The temperature getting well over 90. Problems in a fairway trap on 13 including one swing that moved her ball maybe a yard followed by an unplayable lie. As she came off the green, she asked her caddie, Bryan Bush, a Pinehurst regular, “What’d I make there?” The answer was a seven, on a 340-yard par-4. And then it looked like the wheels could come off. Then it looked like she might go for a number. Worse than that, then it looked like the drain of playing world-class competition on a world-class course with cameras might suck the life right out of her. And you wondered right then and there: was Stacy Lewis right? She was not. Lucy Li played the last five holes in even par, for another 78. She walked across that 18th green with her shoulders forward, using her putter as a walking stick. She exuded joy. She answered post-round questions with her hands on her waist and her married parents, Warren Li and Amy Zeng, nowhere in sight. (Zeng, who has a masters in computer science, works for Hewlett Packard.) Lucy ended a lot of her sentences with that classic tweener sign-off of, “So, yeah.” She talked about how her friends at home had responded to the whole thing, raising her voice in imitation and saying, "'So you’re famous now.’” When she tried to search her memory for a shot-of-the-day, she flashed her eyeballs north in the direction of her considerable brain, came back empty and said, “I’m kind of tired now.” Tired, but happy. She was the youngest golfer to ever qualify for a U.S. Open. Her play brings to mind the astonishing thing Guan Tianlang of China did in the 2013 Masters, when he made the cut as a 14-year-old. Lucy’s swing is far more fundamentally sound, but Guan’s short game was world-class by any standard. Lucy’s is a work-in-progress. Her play at Pinehurst also brings to mind what Michelle Wie, the 36-hole leader at four under par, did in her first U.S. Open, in 2003, when she was 13. She finished in a tie for 39th. Also astonishing. She was better at 13 than she was at 20. Now she’s 24 and better than she’s ever been. Golf is hard to predict. Guan Tianling demonstrated tremendous maturity as a 14-year-old. Michelle Wie at 13 seemed like a golfing Mozart with a magical swing but what joy the game gave her was hard to detect. Lucy Li, at 11, is a poised prodigy and joyful one. Plus she’s so smart. Friday night, somebody gave Lucy’s parents an obscure novel written by a Canadian named Bob Jones, writing in the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, called "Sherlock Holmes Saved Golf." "Oh, she will love this,” Amy Zeng said. “She will read anything with Sherlock Holmes in it. She goes to the library and gets all the Sherlock Holmes books." “She loves American history,” Warren Li said. “World War I, World War II, all American history.” “And Egyptian history,” the mother said. They headed off. Bryan Bush, the caddie, was waiting to get paid. Lucy stayed behind, the cool comfort of the player hospitality tent, watching Lexi Thompson put the finishing touches on a round of 68. Lexi Thompson played in a U.S. Open when she was 12. But that was years ago. That was in 2007. Now she’s 19. Nineteen! Michelle Wie is 24. Juli Inkster is 53 and playing in her 35th and likely last U.S. Open. It’s a long road. Out of the gate, Lucy Li was nothing but great. Read more: http://www.golf.com/tour-and-news/lucy-li-us-open-pinehurst-no-2#ixzz35ICbZavZ

http://holding-pattern.tumblr.com/ Tumblr of airport runways photographed from the air. Filched from this cnn.com article: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/19/travel/the-hidden-beauty-of/index.html

Lucy Li misses cut at US Women's Open but has amazing week By Kyle Porter | Golf Writer June 20, 2014 7:18 pm ET Lucy Li shot two 78s at wicked Pinehurst. (Getty Images) Lucy Li backed up her first-round 78 with another one of them on Friday to put her at 16 over for the US Women's Open, just seven strokes outside the cut line and just two worse than Tiger Woods' niece, Cheyenne. It's a figure she likely would have (or should) have taken when the week started, and Friday's round included a double bogey, a triple bogey, five bogeys and two birdies. "Yeah, it's been a great week," she said after her round. "I had a lot of fun. I learned a lot and, yeah, I guess it has exceeded my expectations." Li's caddie, Bryan Bush said she was pretty amazing, not for a 11-year-old, but just as a golfer. "She would hit -- we would have an uh-oh hole and next thing you know she would hit a hybrid or a fairway wood inside eight feet," he said. "You don't see many of the adult pros doing that. That's what really impressed me." "She's by far the headline, I'm just the guy carrying the bag." Li also said she never really thought about her score all week. "It's definitely helped because if you care about your score, then the numbers get bigger and bigger and if you don't care about it, it actually helps you play better." Bush concurred. "Never was. She was here for the experience and the opportunity to play with the best players in the world. She proved that she can. So it was never about score. The best part, she didn't even know what she made on 13 when we walked off the green." My favorite part of the entire week might have happened away from the course on Friday after she broke 80 for the second straight day. As Li made her way to her post-Friday press conference one reporter stated to here, "you broke 80 again." Her response? What any 11-year-old who just accomplished a feat of that magnitude would say. "Yeah." http://www.cbssports.com/golf/eye-on-golf/24593399/lucy-li-misses-cut-at-us-womens-open-but-has-amazing-week

I don't really understand the question. I don't know anything about how pro vs. amateur standing is determined in the U.S. Open, or what it means. More detail?

Meant to add: As I noted above, her self-presentation is of a piece with her style of play, something rather beyond the reach of media coaches.

I must say, you channel Jimmy Byrnes awful well. As Truman wrote of Byrnes in Truman's private dairy (quoting from memory): "Like all Southern lawyers, he sees duplicity and deceit in everyone and everything -- sometimes an accurate viewpoint."

P.S. The Internets suggest, maddengly vaguely, that the parody was in this issue: ...but I can't find any contents of it online.

I do believe I remember that Mad parody too. But likewise can't find it now. Another one I can't find now is a side-splittingly obscene one: "...Slid her lips along his tent pole, Slid them up and down his tent pole, Fell back splattered on the mud floor..." Etc. Saw that in some hardcopy anthology years ago, in a used book store in Harvard Square. One of those things I curse myself for not buying at the time, now lost to the ages.

She is way cool with saying in an interview (paraphrasing) that she has no idea right now if she wants to chase a career in pro golf, she's just playing and enjoying it now, and will see where golf takes her. I think that Zen attitude, and the extreme coolness and in-the-moment "mindfulness" she's shown in this tournament -- not getting rattled at all by really horrible holes but coming right back and just focusing on each shot -- augur a long and steady career, if she chooses to pursue it. Some commentators are already noting the contrast between her attitude and the agony-and-ecstasy, sturm-und-drang of so many players. And are saying, This is what golf should be about. So a little over-reaction to her, including on my part, sure. But what a delight nonetheless.

A review on the other site featured 2 guys from this agency in Japan: http://kids-jp.com/tokyo/ Lots of cute eye candy in the pics of their guys.

Browsing at random, just turned up this delightful survey of the many parodies across the years of Longfellow's 'Song of Hiawatha.' http://udspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/4663/article5.pdf?sequence=1

USA Today's coverage... Lucy Li shoots 78 in first round of U.S. Women's Open Steve DiMeglio, USA TODAY Sports 3:33 p.m. EDT June 19, 2014 (Photo: Rob Kinnan USA TODAY Sports) 911 CONNECT 85 TWEET 2 LINKEDIN 8 COMMENTEMAILMORE PINEHURST, N.C. – Decked out in red, white and blue, a smiling 11-year-old Lucy Li arrived at the 10th tee to begin her historic round Thursday in the 69th U.S. Women's Open at Pinehurst No. 2. With an opening drive that found the native area rimming the fairway, Li, all 5-1 of her, went on her merry way. The sixth grader, the youngest player to ever qualify for the U.S. Women's Open, turned in a respectable 8-over-par 78 that included birdies on No. 1 and No. 5. USATODAY Tiny pre-teen golfer big attraction at U.S. Women's Open The round was marred by double-bogeys on her opening hole and the 16th hole and a triple-bogey 7 on the third hole when she tangled and lost with the turtle back green. Then she ate a watermelon flavored ice cream bar at her post-round interview. "I'm happy with how I played," Li said. "I mean, it's 8 over, it's not bad. But I was 7 over in three holes, so that's 1 over in 15 holes. I just need to get rid of the big numbers. … I learned that you've got to be patient. One shot at a time. Try to get rid of the big numbers. And, yeah, I learned a lot." Her playing partners – Catherine O'Donnell and Jessica Wallace – learned Li can flat out play. And is a delightful girl. USATODAY Five things to know about Lucy Li before the U.S. Open "She's way better than I was expecting," O'Donnell said. "She's a great player. She hits it out there farther than I was expecting, too. She hit it by me twice, I wasn't really happy about that. But, no, she's a joy to play with. Couldn't have been nicer. Very intelligent girl. " … She was out there having a great time. She's sitting on the ground, having a snack or waiting. I struggled on the back nine because we waited 10 minutes on every shot. And she was like, all right, this is great, another stroll in the park kind of thing. And she just chitchatted with us all day." LUCY LI PHOTO GALLERY: FacebookTwitterGoogle+LinkedIn Lucy Li at the U.S. Women's Open Fullscreen Lucy Li tees off on the fifth hole during the first round of the U.S. Women's Open at the Pinehurst Resort and Country Club. Rob Kinnan USA TODAY Sports Added Wallace: "She is so mature for her age. There were times when I felt more immature than she is. She is mature beyond her years. I thought she handled herself really well out there. Her first U.S. Open, she's 11 years old. Who knows what people were expecting out of her this week? And I thought she played the course well. She's capable of playing well on this course. She hits the ball a good distance. So it was a pleasant surprise playing with her." Li hit all but one fairway, nine greens in regulation and had 32 putts. She had the longest drive on the second hole – with a big kick it went about 260 yards – and gave some fist pumps when she made key par putts and her birdies. She acknowledge the crowds with a quick wave of her right hand throughout the round. She also sat down on more than half the holes – a perfect way to deal with the delays on the course. "Yeah, I normally sit down even more than that," she said with a laugh. "I was just trying to have fun, go out and play my best," she added. "I'm happy I broke 80, because I got two doubles and a triple and that can really ruin a score. But I'm glad I got it back after that. " … I guess I am glad that I got it over with, but I'm also excited for tomorrow." As for the rest of her Thursday, Li had a quick response when asked what she would do. "Eat some more ice cream," she said.

I care about professional sports slightly less than I care about -- hard even to think of any comparison. But is anyone else here glancing at the headlines or TV coverage of the LPGA golf tournament taking place right now in Pinehurst, NC? The 11-year-old golf prodigy Lucy Li has charmed my heart away. Yesterday she shot an 8-over-par 78 on the fiendishly difficult Pinehurst No. 2 course, designed by legendary golf course architect Donald Ross. His putting greens are what the biz calls "turtle-back greens" -- they are hump-shaped, with only a few select spots where you can put the ball so that it will not roll right off the green. Li remarked to her caddy when he first met her, "Of course Ross's greens are designed to repel golf balls, not receive them." And the rest of the course is similar -- in each fairway shot for instance, as Li remarked in a press conference, if you land the ball just 3 feet to the left or right of the correct aim point, the next shot becomes all but impossible. Her post-game interview with the press yesterday... Some of the press coverage... http://deadspin.com/meet-lucy-li-the-11-year-old-golfer-playing-this-years-1593207439 http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/20/lucy-li-11-steals-the-show-at-womens-open/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/golf/2014/06/19/lucy-li-shoots-78-us-womens-open-pinehurst/10886707/

Altaira: "Robbie, where've you been? I've beamed and beamed." Robbie: "Sorry, Miss, I was giving myself an oil job. How may I be of service?"

That kind of talk gets me hard.