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Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Sport Pundit Wins Men's Golf Club Championship at the Mosel Golf Club in Cochem, Germany : At Age 61 The Secret is Custom Made Cubs

Just for the record, we post here somewhat later than the actual season, the fact that the SportPundit won the 2008 men's golf club championship at the Mosel Golf Club in Cochem, Germany, which was quite an event for this writer given the Sport Pundit's age at the time of winning - 61. (Update: Below is the later-posted official photograph of the Cochem 2008 club champions - from the left - women's, senior men's, youth, senior women's, and, at the far right, the Sport Pundit, the men's club champion - Andis Kaulins).


The Sports Pundit, a long hitter, was aided by the terrible weather on the weekend, with high winds and prolonged rain, which made the course very difficult to play for nearly everyone, especially the shorter hitters. The photo below shows the 575-yard par 5 signature 17th hole at the GolfClub Cochem par 72 championship golf course:


A long and accurate tee shot has to carry a biotope ravine so deep that the fairway can only be reached by going around the biotope on a horseshoe path through woods to the left (that path is not visible in this photograph as taken from the GolfCochem.de website). There is an out-of-bounds to the left about 10 meters from the edge of the fairway, all the way down the fairway to the green, and deep impenetrable rough to the right. A gigantic fairway sand trap (bunker) to the right catches long drives that try to cut the corner too sharply. The fairway slopes uphill all the way to a large elevated green fronted by a sand trap and there is almost always a strong prevailing wind in the player's face, making this hole almost impossible to reach in two, even for the strongest players. The Sport Pundit birdied this hole during the tournament.

The rough can look like this (taken from the GolfCochem.de website):



The 27-hole Mosel Golf Club in Cochem opened nominally for play on October, 2006. This year, in 2008, the course is in good condition for championship play. Especially the greens are already in excellent shape, given their very young age.

The 18-hole par-72 championship Mosel Course as well as the 9-hole Eifel Course were designed by two of Germany's leading golf architects, Christoph Städler and Dirk Decker.


The photograph above is taken from the GolfCochem.de website and shows the green of the 166-yard par 3 11th hole, with the 160-yard par 3 9th hole in the background above it - both severely uphill.

That same hole 11 is shown in the photo below looking down from green to tee, but that is a different sand trap than the sand trap at the right front of the green in the first photo (one can, from the left, also see the 16th green, then part of the 10th green and then the 17th fairway):


Below, the Sport Pundit is shown in a photo (by Hoffman) hitting a sand shot:


The story was reported in the Rhein Zeitung (RZ-Online, 16 September, 2008) and the print version also carried a black-and-white photograph by Hoffman of all of the championship winners [update: that photo is now shown in full in the original color at the top of this page], of which we show only a large scan of yours truly (pardon the garb, which is a fleece jacket with a hood, but we had rain and wind, and we were pretty matted down at the end):



That's golf.

Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1 :
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2 :
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically
    in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."