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For hitting a hole-in-one on the third hole at a Spanish golf tournament, 235-pound Scottish golfer Elliot Saltman walked away with his body weight in ham:
Saltman made the shot from the par-3 third hole at El Encin Golf Hotel. Heavily cured and salted ham is a Spanish delicacy.
“I’ve been trying to lose weight, but now I’m thinking I should have just kept it,” Saltman said.
Ham was the prize offered for a hole-in-one at the third — prizes on other holes included a car and a watch.
Ah, pork. Now there‘s an incentive (hint, hint, Alex)!
Link -via Geekosystem | Photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images
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Hey caddy, my ball went into the water. Be a good sport and go in and get it, would you?
Well, maybe not at the Carbrook Golf Club in Brisbane, Australia, where half a dozen bullsharks live in the lake. They took up residence a few years ago when a nearby river flooded, and have been breeding since then. Some of the sharks are up to ten feet long. They’ve become quite an attraction, so groundskeepers feed them to encourage them to come near the shore. Watch a video of the sharks at the link.
Link -via Dave Barry
Italian journalist Luigi Barzini once said that imperturbability was the quintessential British quality. They certainly wouldn’t let German air raids disrupt a good round of golf. Just make a few changes to the rules, keep calm, and carry on.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
The boss sent an email at 11:30 “reminding” everyone that he’s working from home today. He sent it from his Blackberry.
This Twaggie, inspired by a Tweet from MeetingBoy, was selected for illustration by a contest at mental_floss. Link
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It’s time for another round of the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Have fun with this one!
Update: Congratulations to noah, who suggested Club-Foot “Combine with Racquet-Bangles and Mallet-Trousers to be the ultimate ‘One Man Country Club’” and to Caroline who called this Caddidas! Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop. Stay tuned for another contest coming soon!
A man at the Shady Canyon Golf Club in Irvine, California hit a rock with his club, sparking a fire that required the labors of 150 firefighters to extinguish. Orange County Fire Authority Captain Greg McKeown said:
“Usually, we’re able to close out the fire season in the winters here,” McKeown added, “but we haven’t been able to do that since 2006. That’s just how dry it is out there.”
McKeown said no charges have been filed against the golfer, whose name has been withheld. Apparently, he was trying to hit his ball out of the rough when he struck the rock, which sparked the blaze at 12:07 p.m. Saturday, officials said.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user chispita_666 used under Creative Commons license
Forget the greens! The action in this little friendly golfing competition is on the lake. Could David Howell, Paul McGinley, Marcel Siem and Rhys Davies skim a golf ball 200 yards across a lake and hit a 9-inch gong?
The most action you’ll see in golf that doesn’t involve the misadventures of Tiger Woods: Hit play or to go Link [YouTube] (Rhys Davies even missed the entire lake!)
In the movie Caddyshack, Bill Murray ruined a golf course trying to get rid of gophers. Landscapers at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania have a better idea. They’ve brought in bluebirds, swallows, and a border collie to manage the unwanted wildlife! The birds eat pesky insects, and the dog chases away a flock Canadian geese and any animals that would interfere with golf.
The low-tech, wholly organic approaches to pest control are likely to draw little notice from the up to 40,000 golf fans who show up to check out Tiger Woods and other PGA luminaries at the show, though a closer look will reveal the birdhouses sited amid the fescue of the roughs.
Course regulars fondly swap stories about Charlie, the black-and-white canine called “part of the staff” by course superintendent John Gosselin for her help with geese and other critter interlopers – including foxes and, two summers ago, a coyote.
“She’s just prepared to chase anything that moves,” assistant superintendent Ben Little said. “Never actually caught anything, but she has fun with it.”
The birds were attracted by nest boxes that the staff installed. Golfers love seeing the birds at work, and they adore Charlie. Link
(Image credit: Michael Bryant)
Tom Houk of Steamboat Springs, Colorado built a putting green in his yard, and got into the habit of leaving his golf balls where they landed until he returned. A few months ago, he woke to find all his golf balls gone! Houk produced more balls, but the next day, they would be gone, too. This continued until Houk finally spotted the thief.
A hairless fox was standing there with one of his golf balls in his mouth.
“We just couldn’t believe it and we thought he just snatched one,” Houk said.
The fox had more than one golf ball in mind.
“He doesn’t just take one ball,” Sally Houk said. “He came back and forth and back and forth until he took all of them.”
Tom Houk thinks the fox has taken nearly 100 of his golf balls.
What does a fox do with a hundred golf balls? Jerry Neal of the Colorado Division of Wildlife thinks he probably plays with them. No word on what size clubs the fox uses. Link -via Arbroath
Sherwood Forest Golf Course in Transylvania County, North Carolina offers a memorable golf experience every Tuesday. You can rent a llama to be your caddy! A llama from Fairway Friends Llama Farm will carry two sets of clubs for $40. This is a sure way to get kids interested in playing golf. Link -via the Presurfer
[Skip the intro to mark 1:00 for the good stuff!]
Being paralyzed shouldn’t stop someone from engaging in a sport lovingly described by Mark Twain as "a good walk, ruined," thanks to the Paragolfer machine by Parabasetec.
Check out the paragolfer in action (yes, it’s a promo video, but it’s amazing nonetheless): Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]. If you want one, be prepared to shell out upwards of $26K.
I did a little digging around and created a list of facts that tell the history of the great sport of miniature golf.
The Ladies’ Putting Club in St. Andrews, Scotland is considered the very first miniature golf course. It was built in 1867 for practical purposes as it was considered unacceptable for women to take the club back past their shoulder during this time period.
There were stories of 12-year-old boys, during the Great Depression, that for an initial investment of 90 cents would set up a miniature golf course in a vacant lot and turn a 1000% profit over the weekend.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by stevesteve8383.
We’ve always known that golfers are particularly blind to fashion, but now, it turns out that the sport may also cause hearing loss:
Players who use a new generation of thin-faced titanium drivers to propel the ball further should consider wearing ear plugs, experts advise.
Ear specialists suspect the "sonic boom" the metal club head makes when it strikes the ball damaged the hearing of a 55-year-old golfer they treated. [...]
The doctors trawled the web for reviews of the King Cobra LD club and said they found some interesting comments.
One player reported: "Drives my mates crazy with that distinctive loud ‘BANG’ sound." Another said: "This is not so much a ting but a sonic boom which resonates across the course!"
The doctors decided to recruit a professional golfer to hit shots with six thin-faced titanium clubs from manufacturers such as King Cobra, Callaway, Nike and Mizuno.
All produced a louder noise than standard thicker stainless steel drivers. The worst offender was the Ping G10 at over 130 decibels.
As a response to a fan video regarding a bug in the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 game, EA Sports and Tiger Woods demonstrate that the “glitch” (where it’s possible for Woods to walk on water) Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all.
Link [YouTube] – via Micro Persuasion
