But increasingly a victim of its own image and hidebound ways, golf has lost five million players in the last decade, according to the National Golf Foundation, with 20 percent of the existing 25 million golfers apt to quit in the next few years.
People under 35 have especially spurned the game, saying it takes too long to play, is too difficult to learn and has too many tiresome rules.
Many of golf’s leaders are so convinced the sport is in danger of following the baby boomer generation into the grave that an internal rebellion has led to alternative forms of golf with new equipment, new rules and radical changes to courses. The goal is to alter the game’s reputation in order to recruit lapsed golfers and a younger demographic.
Keep reading. I’m serious. It gets worse.
If the golf industry is really serious about attracting new players, I have a hard time believing that the real issue is the difficulty of the game. That sounds like an unproven “millennial”-patronizing “millenial”-patronizing theory by grumpy old white men. (Surprise.)
If I had to guess, golf’s biggest problems are both from its tight relationship with country clubs and other expensive private courses:
Fewer people are able to afford country-club membership. Sorry, rich old white people: you, your corporations, and your politicians mostly did this to yourselves by your policies and practices over the last few decades.
The few younger people who might be able to afford to play golf and/or join country clubs are choosing not to, probably because of the culture of racism, sexism, artificial elitism, exclusion, and pretension pretention that have dominated the golf world for decades. That entire world is out of style, and good riddance to it.1 I can’t think of a worse way to spend money than a country-club membership that might, someday, grant me the “privilege” of playing golf on their course. Oh, and you better be wearing a suit jacket in the clubhouse so you look proper for the guy at the next table who’s talking about how Obama is taking all of his money and giving it to lazy poor people. Sounds like a great place to spend all of my time and money!
Huge holes and free mulligans won’t fix either.
I’m trying to picture a bunch of programmers going to WWDC a day early so they could play golf together at a posh private course. I can’t even imagine that, nor can I imagine the response anyone would get, and how they would look, if they tried to arrange such a gathering.↩
This is the kind of story that I keep marking as unread, that way I can return and see what NewsBlur is thinking. I know this, Marco's decline into a grumpy curmudgeon can be best described with a quote from Ron Burgundy: "That escalated quickly."
@Samuel- my thoughts exactly! I've never requested a feature before but this is a regular behavior for me when using newsblur. It would be fun to have some sort of "follow this conversation" function... I tried out the Unread app which supports NewsBlur but there isn't much stickiness to keep me using it. Unread looks lovely, to be sure, and seemed to perform well enough. There is always a but, and this one is HUGE. None of the social features are implemented apart from a sharing panel (yawn) populated with the usual suspects. The app feels more at home if your reading habits tendency towards long-form, otherwise the navigation feels a bit like manual labor as you browse stories. The NewBlur secret sauce was noticeably missing.
There was a greader feature where you could see the comment activity of your friends, even if you didn't comment in the thread, and I've long missed it.
Courtney, don't think I've forgotten about you. The feature you describe is different enough that I haven't come across the need personally. Also, since I never used Reader I haven't used the feature. But in this case I just want to see what my friends (and the public) are commenting on after i've read a story. Not just stories in feeds I subscribe to, but stories I've read, so they'll be a quick scan when returning to them. Thinking a bit more about this I realize there are tons of potential iterations.
University research is a key component of the US economic ecosystem, returning the investment through enormous public value and impact on employment, business, and manufacturing nationwide.
My spouse, significant other, social requirements, demand my attention.
Or add your own.
Excuses. Every one of them. They may be true. They may the precise description of your current situation. And yet, if you feel the calling, the urge to write, you must find a way to do it, despite these reasons.
Time permitting.
Screw that. Write or don’t write. But please, please, stop complaining about it. I don’t care. Almost no one else does, either.
Writers do not find time to write. We make time. Why? Because the drive to write, the need, is greater than the excuses. Something, somewhere, can be changed, must be changed, to allow yourself enough time to write. Even just a few minutes everyday can make a difference.
Writers write. It’s that simple. You might find, as I have myself, that at certain times of life it is more important for me to be something other than a writer. A husband, a father, a friend, a good employee. At those times you can choose and tell yourself, “for now, I am not a writer.”
It’s OK. I give you permission to not be a writer. But if you want to claim that you’re a writer, you must do the work. Write. Don’t make yourself a hypocrite. Some of the greatest works of literature have been written by authors struggling with the demands of life. Very few of us get to sit in a tower, secluded, isolated, and write. And I can tell you this from experience—even given time and isolation doesn’t mean you will get any writing done. Writing is an act of will and if you do not have the will to write and the habit of doing it, it doesn’t matter how much time you have.
I’ve launched a newsletter to help remind and motivate writers to write. It’s called The Writer’s Whip. If you want to be the writer you dream about being I hope you’ll subscribe today.
the action of delaying or postponing something:your first tip is to avoid procrastination.
Who would have thought that after decades of struggle with procrastination, the dictionary, of all places, would hold the solution.
Avoid procrastination. So elegant in its simplicity.
While we're here, let's make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should try to avoid being out of the ocean.
No, "avoid procrastination" is only good advice for fake procrastinators—those people that are like, "I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I'm such a procrastinator!" The same people that will say to a real procrastinator something like, "Just don't procrastinate and you'll be fine."
The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn't optional—it's something they don't know how to not do.
In college, the sudden unbridled personal freedom was a disaster for me—I did nothing, ever, for any reason. The one exception was that I had to hand in papers from time to time. I would do those the night before, until I realized I could just do them through the night, and I did that until I realized I could actually start them in the early morning on the day early the morning they were due. This behavior reached caricature levels when I was unable to start writing my 90-page senior thesis until 72 hours before it was due, an experience that ended with me in the campus doctor's office learning that lack of blood sugar was the reason my hands had gone numb and curled up against my will. (I did get the thesis in—no, it was not good.)
Even today, this post won't be up until late Tuesday night because I spent a bunch of hours doing things like seeing this picturesitting on my desktop from the last post, opening it, looking at it for a long time thinking about how easily he could beat me in a fight, then wondering if he could beat a tiger in a fight, then wondering who would win between a lion and a tiger, and then googling that and reading about it for a while awhile (the tiger would win). I have problems.
To understand why procrastinators procrastinate so much, let's start by understanding a non-procrastinator's brain:
Pretty normal, right? Now, let's look at a procrastinator's brain:
Notice anything different?
It seems the Rational Decision-Maker in the procrastinator's brain is coexisting with a pet—the Instant Gratification Monkey.
This would be fine—cute, even—if the Rational Decision-Maker knew the first thing about how to own a monkey. But unfortunately, it wasn't a part of his training and he's left completely helpless as the monkey makes it impossible for him to do his job.
The fact is, the Instant Gratification Monkey is the last creature who should be in charge of decisions—he thinks only about the present, ignoring lessons from the past and disregarding the future altogether, and he concerns himself entirely with maximizing the ease and pleasure of the current moment. He doesn't understand the Rational Decision-Maker any better than the Rational Decision-Maker understands him—why would we continue doing this jog, he thinks, when we could stop, which would feel better. Why would we practice that instrument when it's not fun? Why would we ever use a computer for work when the internet is sitting right there waiting to be played with? He thinks humans are insane.
In the monkey world, he's got it all figured out—if you eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, and don't do anything difficult, you're a pretty successful monkey. The problem for the procrastinator is that he happens to live in the human world, making the Instant Gratification Monkey a highly unqualified navigator. Meanwhile, the Rational Decision-Maker, who was trained to make rational decisions, not to deal with competition over the controls, doesn't know how to put up an a effective fight—he just feels worse and worse about himself the more he fails and the more the suffering procrastinator whose head he's in berates him.
It's a mess. And with the monkey in charge, the procrastinator finds himself spending a lot of time in a place called the Dark Playground.* Playground.
The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It's a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn't actually fun because it's completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread. Sometimes the Rational Decision-Maker puts his foot down and refuses to let you even do the unfun fun leisure play, and since the Instant Gratification Monkey sure as hell isn't gonna let you work, you find yourself in a bizarre purgatory of weird activities where everyone loses.**
(Most of you are probably reading this article in the Dark Playground right now.)
And the poor Rational Decision-Maker just mopes, trying to figure out how he let the human he's supposed to be in charge of end up here again.
Given this predicament, how does the procrastinator ever manage to accomplish anything? something?
As it turns out, there's one thing that scares the shit out of the Instant Gratification Monkey:
The Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up when a deadline gets too close or when there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster, or some other scary consequence.
The Instant Gratification Monkey, normally unshakable, is terrified of the Panic Monster. How else could you explain the same person who can't write a paper's introductory sentence over a two-week span suddenly having the ability to stay up all night, fighting exhaustion, and write eight pages? Why else would an extraordinarily lazy person begin a rigorous workout routine other than a Panic Monster panic monster freakout about becoming less attractive?
And these are the lucky procrastinators—there are some who don't even respond
Thanks to the Panic Monster, and in the most desperate moments they end up running up the tree with the monkey, entering a state of self-annihilating shutdown.
Quite a crowd we are.
Of course, this is no way to live. Even for the procrastinator who does manage to eventually get things done and the procrastinator will usually end up getting things done when he needs to and will probably remain a competent member of society, something has to change. society. But this isn't a great way to live. Here are the main reasons why: issues:
1) It's unpleasant. Far too much of the procrastinator's precious time is spent toiling in the Dark Playground, time that could have been spent enjoying satisfying, well-earned leisure if things had been done on a more logical schedule. And panic isn't fun for anyone.
2) The procrastinator ultimately sells himself short.He ends up underachieving and fails to reach his potential, which eats away at the him over time and fills him with regret and self-loathing.
3) The Have-To-Dos may happen, but not the Want-To-Dos.Even if the procrastinator is in the type of career where the Panic Monster is regularly present and he's able to be fulfilled at work, the other things in life that are important to him—getting in shape, cooking elaborate meals, learning to play the guitar, writing a book, reading, or even making a bold career switch—never happen because the Panic Monster doesn't usually get involved with those things. Undertakings like those expand our experiences, make our lives richer, and bring us a lot of happiness—and for most procrastinators, they get left in the dust.
* A lot of you are probably reading this article while in the Dark Playground.
** I spent two hours in the Dark Playground right before I drew the Dark Playground drawing, because I was dreading having to draw the signpost, which I knew would be hard and take forever (which it did). We'll discuss in next week's post.
Cute. Oversimplifies though - the monkey is often invited willingly not just because of gratification but diversion... diversion from fear. Fear about the work - fear of mistakes, fear of not being good enough. Thats why it's displaced by a bigger fear
That’s good advice. You’ll find it in several articles right here on the Art of Manliness.
But if you’re really going to get any benefit out of having your suits adjusted, you need to know a little bit about tailors and the kinds of adjustments they can (and can’t) make.
You also need to know what a “good” fit actually looks like.
Tailors vary in skill and in how they communicate the work they’re doing, so getting a suit adjusted is only going to deliver a good return if you can make your exact needs clear.
Below, we give you an easy-to-follow rundown on how your suit should fit.
What a “Good Fit” Looks Like
Can you guess which man had his suit tailored to fit?
When you try on a suit, you’re looking for a good fit in what’s called your “natural stance.”
That means standing up straight, preferably in the kind of dress shoes you’ll be wearing with your suits, with your arms relaxed at your side.
It’s not actually a very natural posture for a lot of us, but it is the base from which most of our movement flows. If the suit doesn’t fit well in this stance, it’s not going to move comfortably with your body either.
Practice standing in that relaxed, upright pose, and then start trying on suits in that posture. Look for a good fit in the following areas when you’re in your natural stance:
The Shoulder
A well-fitted shoulder lies flat. The seam on top of the shoulder should be the same length as the bone under it, and should meet the sleeve of the suit right where your arm meets your shoulder.
If the seam that connects the sleeve to the jacket is hiked up along your shoulder bone, or dangling down on your upper bicep, the jacket is never going to sit properly. In these instances, you’ll see “ripple effects” that create lumps or wrinkles on the sleeve and the top of the jacket.
Shoulders are one of the hardest parts of a jacket to adjust after construction, so don’t buy a piece with an ill-fitted shoulder. Odds are you’ll never be able to get it quite right with post-purchase alterations.
The Seat
The back of your trousers should be a smooth drape over the shape of your rear end — whatever that happens to be.
A good fit in the seat will lie loosely against your underwear, without pulling tight against your butt or draping loosely down your thighs.
You can spot a bad fit in the seat when there are horizontal wrinkles just under the buttocks (caused by too tight of a fit), or by loose, U-shaped sags on the backs of the thighs (caused by too loose of a fit).
A tailor can “take in” a seat to make it tighter in the back without too much difficulty, but there’s a limit to how far he can go. If the seat was way too loose to begin with, it’s not possible to adjust it to fit without pulling the pockets out of place.
Unless the pants have an unusual amount of spare cloth on the inside, seats can’t be “let out” very far to make the fit looser. Err on the side of too loose rather than too tight when buying.
Trouser Break
The “break” is the small wrinkle caused when the top of your shoe stops your trouser cuff from falling to its full length.
This should be a small, subtle feature. One horizontal dimple or crease is usually ideal. The cuff should indeed rest on the top of your shoe — there needs to be contact — but it shouldn’t do much more than that. The trouser can fall a touch longer in the back than in front, so long as it’s still above the heel of the shoe (the actual heel, not just the back of the shoe).
This is one of the easiest adjustments to make, so you can rely on making some changes here if you need to. In fact, dress pants are often sold unhemmed, with the assumption that the purchaser will take the trousers to a tailor (or make use of the store’s tailor if there is one) to have the cuffs fitted.
This means that part of the trying-on process is checking how the front of the jacket closes over your body.
Close a single-breasted jacket with only one button when you’re testing the fit, even if it’s a three-button jacket. You’re looking to see if the two sides meet neatly without the lapels hanging forward off your body (too loose) or the lower edges of the jacket flaring out like a skirt (too tight).
The button should close without strain, and there should be no wrinkles radiating out from the closure. A little bit of an opening at the bottom of the suit is fine, but the two halves beneath the button shouldn’t pull apart so far that you can see a large triangle of shirt above your trousers. (Ideally, you shouldn’t see any, though a bit is socially acceptable, especially when you move.)
Taking in or letting out the waist to help the jacket close more comfortably is not a difficult adjustment, but it’s one with limits. Don’t expect a tailor to be able to make huge changes here. If the jacket closure looks really bad unaltered, it’s probably due to problems beyond the waist measurement, and you should be looking for a different jacket rather than planning on getting that one altered.
Jacket Sleeve Length
“A half-inch of linen” is a good, old-fashioned guideline for the relationship between a suit jacket and the shirt worn under it — about half an inch of the shirt cuff should be visible beyond the jacket cuff.
That said, it’s a general guideline, and you don’t need to get too obsessive. What you do need to be sure of is that the suit sleeve doesn’t rise above the cuff entirely — the seam where the shirt cuff joins the shirt sleeve should never be visible.
Similarly, the jacket sleeve should never hide the shirt sleeve entirely. At least a small band of shirt cuff should always be visible.
For most men, that ends up being a jacket sleeve that terminates just above the large bone in the wrist. But everyone’s arms are slightly different, and sleeve length is a very easy adjustment for a tailor to make, so get the best sleeve length you can (erring on the side of too long if possible) and then have it adjusted to fit.
Jacket Length
Not enough time or writing gets devoted to the overall length of men’s jackets. It’s more important than most people think!
A good suit or sports jacket should fall past the waist and drape over the top of the curve formed by the buttocks. An ideal fit will cover a man down to the point where his butt starts to curve back inward, and stop there (but anywhere in that general region is okay).
The hands are also a good marker here, and this is why it’s important to have your arms relaxed in your natural stance. The hem of the jacket should hit right around the middle of your hand — at or just past where the fingers meet the palm.
If the hem of the jacket is sitting on top of the butt, with a small little flare in the back, it’s too short. If it falls past the bottom entirely, longer than the arms, it’s too long. The hem can be adjusted upward without too much trouble, but if you go too far the front pockets start to look out of proportion, so don’t count on more than an inch or two of adjustment here.
Jacket Collar
It’s easy to tell a well-fitted collar from a poorly-fitted one, although identifying the cause of the bad fit can be challenging.
Your jacket collar should rest against your shirt collar, which in turn should rest against the back of your neck. All of these should touch lightly, without significant gaps in between.
If the collar is too loose, it’s very easy to spot — there will be a gap where it’s flopping back off your neck.
A tight collar is a little harder to spot on a jacket, since (unlike a shirt collar) it’s almost all in the back. Turn from side to side as needed and check it out in a mirror. A tight collar will create bunching and folds just beneath it, and often wrinkles the shirt collar underneath it as well.
Bad collar fit could just mean the neck size is wrong for you, but it’s often caused by a larger fit issue: bad shoulder sizing, a back panel that’s too small for you, or even a jacket that’s constructed with more of a forward or backward tilt than your neutral stance.
Since these adjustments cost time and money to fix, you want to get as good of a fit in the original jacket as possible at the collar.
Four Automatic “Bad Fit” Warnings
There are a couple of easy to spot problems that are major warning signs. A suit with these “bad fit” signs is one that you probably won’t ever be able to adjust to a really good fit.
Unfortunately, most of them are caused by the core structure of the suit — and that means that your body just isn’t a good match for the way that particular brand makes its pieces.
Be patient, try on lots of brands, and don’t compromise (unless you know it can be fixed!).
If you can’t afford bespoke (made to order), an adjusted off-the-rack suit can work — but you have to start with a pretty good fit in the first place, or it’s never going to get the results you want.
Unless you want to pay for alterations, be careful buying any jacket that’s showing these serious warning signs:
The Dreaded X-Shaped Button Strain
If you can see wrinkled lines radiating outward from your jacket button when you close the jacket, it’s too tight and will need adjustment.
The Dreaded X, as my friend Barron over at Effortless Gent likes to call it — is not a look you seek in a well-fitted jacket.
Front button strain is indicative of a bad fit in the torso, and it can go beyond just the waist size — you’re probably straining at the shoulders or in the back, too. On a more basic note, it also means the button is going to be prone to popping off.
Don’t buy a jacket that shows strain lines radiating outward from the button. If you’ve got an old jacket that used to fit but has started showing them, it’s possible that you’ve either gained weight or accidentally shrunk the jacket in a wash — in that case (assuming the fit was good before), you may be able to have the waist let out a little and keep the jacket in use.
Shoulder Divots & Upper Arm Wrinkles
If the sleeve of the jacket seems to dip in slightly just under the shoulder, and then flare back out again, the shoulders are too big. What you’re seeing is the shoulder padding protruding beyond your arm, and the cloth of the sleeve tucking back in underneath it.
You can also get those wrinkles if you’ve got a somewhat slouched stance and the jacket is stiffly-constructed for a more upright posture. In either case you’ll need to get a smaller size, so that the seam where the shoulder meets the sleeve matches up with your body’s shoulder, or give up and try a different brand.
Shoulder Wrinkles — Top Rumpling
If you’re getting noticeable bunching on top of your shoulder, rather than on the upper sleeve, the jacket is too large in the shoulders.
This could be a simple length problem, but more likely it’s that the interior space is simply too large — your shoulders aren’t broad enough, front to back, to fill out the jacket.
Try a slimmer fit, if the manufacturer offers multiple styles, or a smaller size. If you’re still seeing wrinkles on the tops of your shoulders, the brand probably isn’t going to work for you.
Twisted Sleeves — Bad Sleeve Pitch
Faint spiraling wrinkles on the outside of the sleeve occur when the angle of your arm in its natural stance doesn’t match the angle that the sleeve was constructed with. The result is a sleeve that looks slightly twisted even when your arms are hanging still at your sides.
A tailor can theoretically remove the sleeves and reattach them at a slightly different angle, but it’s not a simple or a cheap fix. Generally speaking, you can consider this one a deal-breaker. Keep trying until you find a jacket where the sleeves fall smooth and straight when your arms are resting in their natural stance.
Watch a Video Summary of This Post
_______________________________________
Written By: Antonio Centeno Founder of Real Men Real Style Creator of The Style System – a college-level course that teaches the foundations of professional dressing so you control the message your image sends.
On the one hand, I like to read things like this so I can imagine I can dress with a modicum of style. On the other, as a result of reading things like this, I usually feel bad about how I am dressed.
The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple's TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. [...]
"We hope that this finally puts to rest the illusions people have about fingerprint biometrics. It is plain stupid to use something that you can´t change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token", said Frank Rieger, spokesperson of the CCC. "The public should no longer be fooled by the biometrics industry with false security claims. Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access." Fingerprint biometrics in passports has been introduced in many countries despite the fact that by this global roll-out no security gain can be shown.
iPhone users should avoid protecting sensitive data with their precious biometric fingerprint not only because it can be easily faked, as demonstrated by the CCC team. Also, you can easily be forced to unlock your phone against your will when being arrested. Forcing you to give up your (hopefully long) passcode is much harder under most jurisdictions than just casually swiping your phone over your handcuffed hands.
Log in
Unsurprisingly, that didn't take long.